SHELBURNE FALLS — Route 2 and the Shelburne Falls village were busy Sunday, busy enough that visitors might not have noticed the man in the reflective vest and baseball cap, who spent 10 hours that day trudging through town and alongside traffic.
In total, Daniel Zinn walked 50 kilometers Sunday — 50 because this July would have been his daughter Daniela’s 50th birthday. She died of breast cancer in November 2015.
“I’m tired, but not as tired as I thought I might be,” he said, taking a short break in Shelburne Falls at around 3:30 p.m. By then he had been walking 7½ hours, covering 40 kilometers. He guessed the last 10 kilometers would take about 2½ hours.
“My legs are a little rubbery,” he said. “So that’s going to be the challenge in this last 10K.”
Zinn had the idea this spring, when he realized his daughter’s death was continuing to affect him more strongly than he had previously understood, he said. He settled on using the number 50 to commemorate the year she would have turned 50. Originally he thought it would be a 50-mile walk, but quickly scaled his plans down to 50 kilometers (about 31 miles).
Zinn walks 5 kilometers every morning with his dog, and sometimes jogs, so, he said, he thought he could work up to 50 kilometers with some training. He practiced on weekends throughout the summer, first a 20 kilometer walk, then gradually 30, then 40.
On Sunday morning at 7 a.m., he left his home in central Colrain, took Greenfield Road and Colrain Shelburne Road down to Route 2, and walked along the highway into Shelburne Falls. Zinn then took Route 112 back to Colrain, where he rested for half an hour before setting off again on Route 112 to Shelburne Falls and back to Colrain.
The walk wasn’t a fundraiser, and the only people he told about it were some friends and family members — partly, he said, because he didn’t want to over publicize it, in case he found he couldn’t make the whole 50 kilometers. Maybe next year, he said, for Daniela’s 51st birthday, he may turn it into some sort of fundraiser.
“I guess it was partly a challenge to myself, to see if I could push myself to do something beyond …” he trailed off. “It’s in no way a comparison to what a person goes through with cancer or any serious chronic illness that is debilitating. But if they can push their bodies to do things that sometimes aren’t easy to do, maybe I could push myself to do something.”
Reach Max Marcus at mmarcus@recorder.com or 413-930-4231.