Two sisters flew to Boston yesterday to go for a walk.

Every year, for the past five years, Deb Rogers-Early and Tammie Burns, two blond sisters who live in pretty houses right across North 79th Street from each other, have traveled to distant cities to walk 60 miles in three days.

They walk for their Aunt Diane, who died of breast cancer in 1990. And they walk for old friends and a former babysitter and a sister of a co-worker.

Every year it seems they walk for someone new, someone they know who has been diagnosed with the disease.

After last year's walk, Deb framed a photograph and gave it to her sister — the two of them waving to the camera standing in front of a big blue banner. She typed a message and pasted it to the picture.

Best 15 days of my life. Walking with my best friend … Love ya!!

"I was probably crying when I typed it," says Deb, a 43-year-old computer programmer with a husband, six stepchildren and two cats.

Tammie, a 42-year-old human resources manager with a husband, three stepdaughters and a cocker spaniel, just smiles.

"She's the weepy one."

Deb and Tammie were at the gym when Deb saw an ad in a fitness magazine — something called the Breast Cancer 3-Day, a way to raise money for cancer research and education.

We have to do this, she told her little sister.

All they had to do was pick a place to walk, find a way to get there and raise $1,900 apiece.

No way, Tammie told her. She couldn't raise that much money.

But she did.

Together they raised 8,000 bucks and drove to Colorado to walk from Fort Collins to Boulder.

Deb cried all the way up the big hill to the finish line, exhausted, blisters as big as silver dollars on her feet.

The next year they walked from Ann Arbor to Dearborn.

The next — 2003  — they made a giant loop in Chicago, starting at Grant Park and ending there, too.

Then came Scottsdale to Tempe in the dry Arizona heat and last year all around Kansas City and its suburbs.

And every year when they finish walking, sweaty and spent, they look at each other and ask: Where are we going to go next?

"You really feel part of something really big," says Deb.

The research is amazing, they say. Every year there is a new drug, some new way to treat tumors.

"They're on the verge," says Deb.

They feel like they are making a difference.

That's because they are doing something en masse, thousands of walkers raising millions of dollars for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and the National Philanthropic Trust Breast Cancer Fund.

The Komen Foundation was started more than 20 years when sisters Nancy Goodman Brinker and Susan Goodman Komen made a promise.

A promise to one day beat breast cancer.

Susan was 36 when she died of the disease.

Deb and Tammie’s Aunt Diane was 39.

In the United States, a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer every three minutes. Every 13 minutes, the disease claims another life.

It's not easy walking 20 miles a day.

The sisters train, starting before dawn to make an 11-mile loop on the weekends. They've learned how important it is to stretch and to drink lots of water and to wear good walking shoes.

The first day of the 3-Day they talk a lot, says Deb.

The second day, not so much.

The third day is spiritual, she says.

"God is walking with us that day."

And all along the way they see hope.

A little girl holding a bowl of blueberries for the walkers. A farmer misting the crowd in the heat. Bald women standing on the side of the road clapping.

Strangers setting up their tent. Boy Scouts carrying their gear. Men walking, wearing T-shirts with their mothers' pictures on the front.

When their aunt died, Deb and Tammie were just a few years out of college. Now they are older than she ever got to be.

"At that point in my life, I didn't really feel like I was there for her," Tammie says.

Now they are in Boston.

For Aunt Diane.

And all the others.

Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com