PMC 2011 Recap

Another PMC – my sixth, Matt’s third – in the books, and as always, we had a wonderful time. I’ll be adding more pictures over the course of this week as those that were better than I at taking them (hi Rachel!) get them posted. I’m still feeling a bit tired and out of it but wanted to write up a bit about how the weekend went.

We all met up at the Prudential Center on Friday afternoon to board the Team Ropes bus to Sturbridge. Traffic was lighter than usual and we made great time, and we had about an hour to register, get our sweet temporary tattoos, shop, and get the bikes put away before heading to the hotel in Southbridge.

Check out our sweet tattoos.

We parted ways with Rich and Wendy for the evening (who had lucked out and gotten a room at the very nearby Hampton Inn), got checked in, and headed out with Team Ropes for a surprisingly (no offense to Southbridge, but expectations were low after last year’s pizza place) tasty Thai food dinner.

Registered and ready to ride!

Usually I have a miserable time sleeping the night before the ride, but I had remembered to grab the bottle of melatonin that served us so well when we went to Turkey in June. Matt and I dosed ourselves and were asleep before 10pm. Of course, we had to be up by 3:45, but a bit over five and a half hours of sleep is about three more than I usually get before the ride. I put on my ribboned helmet and hustled out the door.

Why we ride

It was not actually pitch black in here.

So at the ride start, there are three lanes that you can line your bike up in – fast, steady, and casual. I’ve started in all three now! Usually I try to get to the front of steady, since that’s the most accurate, but this year, Rachel, Darren, Matt and I decided to go with the back end of fast. Totally the right call – the fast lane really fills up because everyone is itching to get out on the road, so even if you are in front of the steady line, you often automatically find yourself well in the second half of the big group. Unfortunately, Wendy discovered a flat as she was getting her bike lined up, so she and Rich got that fixed and started at the very back. We were able to use Facebook and email to keep tabs on each other all day though, which was great!

Rachel and Jen, ready to go!

No one should be this cheerful this early.

The day started out pretty cloudy and cool, but muggy. Matt and Darren pretty quickly outpaced Rachel and I, but we all had a great ride. Rachel and I hauled up through lunch. Despite the relative hilliness of the ride’s first half, the miles really fly by until about mile 60, which is usually where I start to feel really hungry (lunch is at mile 70, and the stretch between the second waterstop and lunch is 28 miles, which is the longest stretch without a break on the PMC). In fact, Rachel and I made some new friends when we called our own waterstop at a hair salon about 8 miles before lunch! We saw most of our familiar faces out there on the road, too, though the puffy ladies (ladies wearing inflatable costumes) were notably absent from the second waterstop. Fortunately, the bagpiper was in his usual place at the top of the surprisingly steep hill just before the lunch stop, playing music fit to accompany hill that reduces many riders to walkers. Poor Rachel almost got taken out by one wobbly and exhausted rider, but she avoided disaster and we pushed through to Dighton-Rehoboth High.

Meanwhile, Matt was really hauling, and got into lunch about 45 minutes before Rachel and I (he is a much faster rider, and he also doesn’t stop for as many fluffernutters at the waterstops as we do – his loss). He waited to see us and to chat with my awesome mom, her boyfriend Doug, and my Grandpa, who all came to see us. They brought us much-needed Gatorade (the good stuff), wipes, and sunscreen, which I needed since the sun had come out and it was getting really hot. Matt headed back out and Rachel and I hung out a little more and caught Rich and Wendy!

Wendy, Jen, and Rich at lunch!

Rachel, Jen, and Wendy, also at lunch!

After lunch, it was all of a suddenly brutally hot. Rachel and I struggled along for seven miles or so before reaching the sweet oasis of Jeff’s driveway, where Matt’s cousins Jen and Christine (Jeff is Christine’s boyfriend) and their friends offered us words of encouragement (gladly accepted) and shots (sadly declined). We caught our breath while they reminded us that there was one more bad hill to go, and we headed back out into the heat. Happily, at this point many of the roadside supporters were bringing out their hoses to spray us down as we went by (if you live on the PMC route, a sprinkler pointed at the road will earn you 5,300 friends for life).

After the last bad hill, it really is all downhill, and we got our speed back up. In fact, we went a little too fast, and beat mom and Doug to the Mass Maritime Academy finish. Happily, Matt had somehow teleported himself to the end with time to shower and get back out to the finish gate, so he was there to cheer us in! Having pushed it on the last leg, I was feeling a little too wiped out to go enjoy the beer tent at the MMA (but I can show you some people who enjoyed it for me!). Mom and Doug had arrived, so we elected to hang out at the finish line with them to watch Rich and Wendy come in.

Team Ropes, enjoying a well-earned adult beverage.

Saturday was full of inspiring and emotional moments. We had a great ride down Cherry Street, a street in Sheldonville that goes all out with banners, signs, balloons, water, and cheering. We passed dozens of tear-inducing and inspiring signs, including one (and I can’t recall exactly where) placed in a quiet and empty yard, thanking us for riding in memory of the family’s uncle, who had passed away just weeks before. I was hoping to have the energy to bike over the bridge this year but was just exhausted, so Matt, Rachel, and I loaded our bikes onto Doug’s car and gratefully accepted the lift to the hotel. After emergency chicken fingers were administered, I took a dip in the pool, and we all retired to the hotel restaurant deck for yet more food and a single well-earned beer. No trouble sleeping on Saturday night.

We had gone to bed worried about Sunday’s weather. The roads were wet when we woke up, and it was extra-dark as we headed out at 5:15 a.m. But for the most part, the rain held off. We had a few showers, and we were soaked just from the water coming off the road, but at least we didn’t have to deal with the torrential downpours that came through in the afternoon. Rachel and I made great time, while Matt managed to stay with the Team Ropes elite paceline for pretty much the whole day! (For reference, we were extremely pleased with our average speed of 16 mph, which was faster than last year and pretty impressive given the weather and the brutal headwind. Matt’s average speed was almost 20 mph.)

First water stop. Note the clouds.

Chilling at Wellfleet - the last waterstop before P-town

No, literally chilling. On this ice couch.

Doing Gatorade shots

The weather did cause a few problems though. First, there were fewer people out in support during the first leg of the ride (not that I can blame anyone for not wanting to stand in the rain at 5:30 in the morning!). Second, there were a ton of crashes. In the last mile before the “lunch” stop there were three ambulance-requiring crashes in the road. Road paint gets unbelievably slippery when it’s wet out, and it was pretty clear that in each crash, a rider had hit the paint and gone down, sometimes taking a few other folks with him or her. In fact, we lost a Team Ropes’ alumni to this kind of crash (he has stitches and a concussion but was released from the hospital). The Team Ropes paceline that Matt was in also had a bad accident when a car pulled out in front of them and the first three riders in the line hit the car hard (the driver stayed on the scene). One rider had to go to the hospital with some broken bones and a concussion, but the other two were able to get back on their bikes (a miracle, considering one of them ended up UNDER this woman’s car!). Third, it was WINDY. For most of the ride, this wasn’t a problem, but as we turned onto the National Seashore at the Provincetown headlands, it became an issue. Rachel and I could feel the headwind slowing us down even as we went downhill. We saw another crash that we think was caused by one rider being blown into two others. That last five miles took us twice as long as any other five miles on the ride, and was a pretty unpleasant way to end the ride, but it did make getting off the bike all the more satisfying. You can kind of see how windy and cloudy and weird it was in this picture I stole from Rich:

Welcome to windy Provincetown!

Rachel and I rolled into the finish at 11:15 a.m. and hustled to shower so we could get to the burgers and beer! My favorite moment was as I was combing my hair outside the showers, I heard a yell of joy, and turned around to see Wendy run up to our friend Jared (who actually does a Day 0 ride to Sturbridge from the Berkshires!) and give him a big hug.

Yay us!

As the wind continued to pick up and the skies continued to darken, Matt and I realized we should call his parents to come get us sooner rather than later. Though I was sad not to get to spend more time at the Inn after such a great ride, I was happy to get in the car as the skies opened up.

Leaving the Inn early also led to a fantastic coincidence! I saw into Sara G’s uncle, Manny, as we were driving down the street and hopped out of the car to say hi! He mentioned his friend Amy had done the PMC as a first time rider, and as he described her, I realized it was the same Amy that Rachel and I had ridden with for part of the day. In fact, she was with us as we rode through the three crashes before lunch and she had nervously asked if there were always this many crashes. I stuck around to say hi – gotta love PMC coincidences!

I don't know why my face is so red!

After all that excitement, it was back to the car. Matt’s parents were kind enough to pick us up and bring us to Harwich, where we were spending the night, even though it meant sitting in awful Cape traffic. Luckily for Matt, he can sleep anywhere:

He earned it

So in a pretty large nutshell, that’s the PMC weekend! I can’t believe it’s over already, and I can’t wait until next year. As always, I am so grateful to the other riders for their support on every hill, to the volunteers for making sure we have everything we need to have a successful and fun ride, to the people who stand on the side of the road and cheer and offer water and oranges, and to everyone who donated and offered words of support before the ride and throughout the day (especially to those who made Friday and weekend donations – those are so wonderful and motivating to get).

Thanks to my Mom, Doug, and Grandpa for the lunch stop pick-me up and to Mom and Doug for the MMA road support and ride to the hotel (and especially for being so patient while we figured out what we were doing)! Thanks to Team Ropes and Rachel for letting us tag along and for handling the logistics and photos. Thanks to Jen and Christine and Jeff for the driveway party. Thanks to my Dad for reminding me through his own efforts on the bike that two days is totally doable, even when it seems impossible. Thanks to Matt’s parents, Bev and David, for the surprise Wellfleet cheering section, the ride from Provincetown, the use of the car, and dinner! Thanks to Matt’s brother Ben for getting the car down to the Cape in the first place, and for helping Matt return the car yesterday when I was too wiped to do it. Thanks to Rich, Wendy, and Matt for being awesome teammates and motivating me through every mile. Thanks to Rachel for being a great riding buddy. And finally, thanks to Sara G and her family for all of their amazing support and good thoughts.

I linked to them above, too, but for data geeks, the data from day 1 is here (http://connect.garmin.com/activity/105052520) and from day 2, it’s here (http://connect.garmin.com/activity/105052362).

Why We Ride: A Happy Update

As most of you probably know, six years ago, I was working at Ropes & Gray when a friend and co-worker’s college-aged brother was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was being treated at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; that co-worker (let’s call her Z for literally no reason) would visit him there and came back with stories about the wonderful staff.

My friend Candace, who also worked at Ropes, found out that Ropes had a team in this PMC thing and she really wanted to try riding in it as a way to help give something back to Dana-Farber and do something for the people who were doing so much to help our friend’s brother. I’m nothing if not easily convinced to do things, especially things that sound awesome, so I signed up to do the Saturday-only ride from Sturbridge to Bourne. Once the weather thawed a bit, I went to a bike shop with Candace and a road bike-savvy friend. I bought a bike, a helmet, shoes, gloves, shorts, a shirt, a pump, tubes, tools, and a map. I went back to pick my bike up the following week and promptly fell over in the parking lot while trying to unclip. A friend drove me home.

That summer was full of falls, as I re-learned how to ride a bike with very skinny tires that I was physically attached to by the feet. (The following year I was still feeling wobbly and a fitting at a different shop – Wheelworks! Thank you! - revealed that the bike I had bought was a little too big for me. I sold it and replaced it with a smaller bike and have ridden much more confidently ever since.)

For Z and her brother and their family, that summer was full of much scarier moments. He needed a stem cell transplant (Z was a match!), and as is often the case with cancer treatments, the treatment can be just as tough and dangerous as the disease and requires careful monitoring. Ultimately, the transplant was a success! I even have a great update from the man himself:

More than five years have passed since I underwent treatment for T-cell Lymphoblastic Lymphoma including an Allogeneic stem-cell transplant at Dana-Farber. I attribute my current health and happiness to the support of my family and friends and the works of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Today, I am working on my PhD at Purdue University and most importantly, on the second day of the Pan-Mass Challenge, I am getting married to my high school sweetheart and best friend. I would like to thank the riders, volunteers, and everyone who donates to such an unbelievable cause for helping people like myself continue on living life.

So that’s why I started riding. Today, that’s just one of the many reasons I continue to ride.

We’re only $5000 from our minimum fundraising goal, and we have a little over one week to go. I suppose $5000 seems like a lot, but it’s not. Between all of us on the team we know a lot of people. Certainly, we know at least 500 people. So if everyone we know donated just $10, we would hit our goal! If you’re able to donate, we, and the people we ride for, would really appreciate it.

PMC 2011: Just about time to start obsessively checking the weather

Two weeks from now, the PMC will be over and we’ll be hobbling back into work and hopefully wrapping up our fundraising!

This past Sunday, we headed out with the whole team, plus riding buddies Darren and Rachel, for a quick 54-miles around Cape Ann. Sunday dawned rainy but we decided to risk and we were rewarded with a rain-free ride. And I believe the temperature even stayed below 90 degrees! The lack of rain did mean that it was exceptionally humid, at least until the end of the ride when the sun came out and burned it all off.

Our ridemates we plagued with troubles, however. Darren, who rode out to meet us in Beverly from his home a few towns over, was struck down by some awful foot cramps and had to peel off. And Team Sara G member Wendy has been battling a severe and painful carpal tunnel flareup for weeks now. She decided to ride anyhow, and finished the ride despite pain. She still plans to ride in the PMC (against her doctor’s advice) because that’s how important this cause is to her. I remember the first year I rode in the PMC, I threw my back out the week before the ride. I was determined to ride anyhow (hey, it was only the one-day route, after all!), and managed to finish the most agonizing 111 miles I have ever endured. I couldn’t bend or straighten my back without pain – so I sort of ok as long as I sat on the bike, but any time I had to hop off or back on at a stop sign, pain would shoot up my back. And Wendy has it worse, given that her hands need to constantly be on her handlebars.

We’re doing great with the fundraising, but we have a couple thousand more left to raise, and I know a big jump in the total would really boost everyone’s spirits! We’re all looking forward to being part of this great event, but I think we’re all also a little nervous. We’ve had some training hiccups this season, and some brutally hot weather the last few weeks.

What if it’s that hot for the PMC? What if we’re not trained enough? It doesn’t matter. We’ll just do it anyway. That’s what signing up for the PMC means – we’re committed to fighting cancer. That means committing to spending our weekends riding, bugging everyone we know to donate, risking injury and enduring a little pain in the hopes that the money we raise saves even one cancer patient, or helps one family with the financial burden of treatment.

We just need a little more help. Every donation makes a huge difference, so if you can, please donate here: http://www.pmc.org/profile/TS0187.

We have one more weekend of riding to go and then we’re there!

PMC 2011: Sweaty Sunday

Yesterday, Matt and I successfully completed our annual Climb to the Clouds training ride! Over the course of the week, we watched with dismay as the forecast for Sunday got increasingly hot. By Saturday, temperatures were forecast to be in the 90s, and that turned out to be spot on.

Because we knew it would be hot, and because we had not done any 80+ mile rides yet this summer, we decided to prepare well. We carb-loaded and hydrated the day before and went to bed as early as we were able. We met up with our friend Rachel in Concord at 7:45 am (in retrospect we maybe should have tried for an earlier start but it’s almost a 40 minute drive for us to get there, so). Unfortunately, some of our team was unable to join us due to injuries, but we ran into some other riders we know, so that was great.

Rachel and I decided to take it pretty easy to start (or I decided to, and Rachel was kind enough to stick with me). I had big problems on this ride last year, when it was even hotter, with leg cramping, and I was determined to avoid those and finish the ride this year. Basically, I needed a success more than I need to have an especially fast ride. Thankfully, the electrolyte pills I’ve been taking on rides this year continued to work their magic, and I didn’t have a single muscle cramp up!

That said, the ride was definitely tough. The ride splits about 30 miles into the route, at which point the riders can choose to do the 80, or to do the 90/100. Matt couldn’t help himself and decided to try for at least the 90. And when the 90 split from the 100, he again could not resist the siren call of Mt. Wachusett and Mile Hill Road, and went for the 100.* Rachel and I decided at the split to just do the 80. Had the day been less oppressively hot, I think my body could have handled the 90, but like I said, I really needed a successful ride to regain my confidence.

And despite the heat, and the hills it was a great ride. Rachel and I did almost get taken out by a large squirrel, but otherwise we keep a steady and strong pace throughout, drank boatloads of water, and actually finished an hour ahead of Matt (he is much faster than us and we thought he would catch us, which meant we were actually going at a good clip!). The hills were grueling in the heat, but we had good company throughout to keep us motivated.

We have two more weekends before the PMC! Time to kick the fundraising into high gear. We’re about halfway to the minimum we need to raise as a team: $16,800. You can donate here, or you can mail a check (just ask us how). Very single donation helps – most of our donor give less than $50 and that gets us to the $4200 each minimum very quickly! To steal an idea from our friend Jared, here are some suggested donations based on our Climb to the Clouds ride:

$14.00 – 14 miles per hour, Jen’s average ride speed (donate $15.60 for Matt’s 15.6)
$23.50 – Matt rode 23.5 miles more than Jen!
$35.40 – Jen’s max speed (or donate $46 for Matt’s max speed of 46 mph!)
$53.70 – Five hours, 37 minutes Jen’s butt was on the bike
$78.84 – 78.84 miles that Jen rode!
$100.55 – 100.55 miles that Matt rode!
$3,107 – 3,107 miles of climbing (worth a shot!)

In all seriousness, the money we raise for the PMC goes directly to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Jimmy Fund in the form of unrestricted funds. That means those organizations can spend it where they need it most – on researching new treatments, on helping families get through a difficult time, and on curing kids. Each year, nearly 1.4 million new cases of cancer are diagnosed in the United States, a figure that does not include the 900,000 cases of skin cancer diagnosed annually. That is a crazy and awful number. That means over 2 million individuals, along with their families and friends, receive incredibly scary news every year. Dana-Farber is doing research that might help make those diagnoses a little less terrifying, and is ultimately working to eradicate cancer in all of its forms. Please help us if you can!

*For the data nerds – Matt doesn’t have a data-tracking bike computer, but his ride looked like this: http://ridewithgps.com/routes/498927. The 80 looks like this: http://ridewithgps.com/routes/498925 and the actual ride data from my computer is linked above. But on these Ride With GPS links you can see the hill grades. In fact, for any cycling Tour nerds (all, like, 1 of you) the 80 mile ride has three Category 5 rated climbs, while the 100 has four of those and one Category 3 (Mile Hill Road up to the Mt. Wachusett visitors’ center).

PMC 2011: In Search of LIES (where lies = hills)

Training continues to be a bit of a struggle. I’ve come to the stunning conclusion that doing the PMC fir six years means I am six years older than when I first did this, and that means maybe I should be a little bit better about properly preparing for training rides by eating carbs and drinking tons of water instead of having a turkey burger and a glass of wine. SCIENCE.

Thursday morning I did a fun and fast (we were so fast!) ride with Wendy and Rachel before work. So I went into the weekend feeling pretty good about the state of training. That all fell apart Sunday. Matt and I got started late thanks to some last-minute bike computer issues. Then we realized we had chosen a ride, the CRW’s “In Search of Llamas,” that was purportedly arrowed but for which there was no cue sheet online. Usually we do rides that have both – following the arrows is easy and better than looking at the sheet, but the sheet gives you a sense of when you need to be looking for the next arrow. So if you know you don’t need to make a turn for 2 miles, you can zip along and get your speed up. If you don’t know when your next turn is, you have to constantly scan the ground for arrows. And if an arrow is faded and you miss it, and you don’t have a cue sheet to let you know where you are, you get lost.

And get lost we did, Matt spectacularly so. I had left him behind at a facilities stop, since he can usually catch me easily. I should have realized after a few miles that something was wrong, but I was also out of water and wanted to find a place to get some. I finally got to a Tedeschi’s in Millis (where? exactly) and we got in touch. After much back and forth, we figured out he was about EIGHT MILES off course. Whoops. I decided to keep going while he tried to rejoin the route. That meant it was my turn to get lost – luckily I only went about a mile and a half off course before I figured it out. Yay.

The faded arrows and lack of a cue sheet were the least of our problems, because this ride was also hilly. So hilly. No flats. The ride description says “[f]lat to medium rolling hills,” but that is just an outright lie. When Matt caught up with me, he assured me that I was not crazy, and that the ride was indeed very hilly. At this point we were about 40 miles in and I was cooked. My average speed had gone from 15.9 in the first 20 miles to 13.9 at 40. But hey, only 20 miles to go!

Not so – because 12 miles later, Matt realized that we were about a mile from the car, and that we could short-cut the route and finish our ride at 50+ miles instead of 60. I really, really did not want to do this. I hate, hate, hate quitting rides. There may have been definitely were some tears. But we were now hours behind schedule, it was incredibly hot, and both of us were exhausted.

We did see llamas, by the way, along with turkeys, horses, and ponies.

Quitting rides makes me feel like a jerk because the whole point of this is to help raise money to fight cancer, and people who actually have cancer go through so much worse than a hot and hilly bike ride. If I can’t even finish a ride for them, what business do I have doing this? If I can’t fight through the physical pain and exhaustion to so 10 more miles, when they have to fight through much worse just to survive, how can I ask people for money? I don’t know, actually. I think Matt would say that there is a point at which you are risking injury and making the next ride harder. But it feels so wrong to me to just give up on a training ride.

I still need to ask for money though, because we’re only three weeks away from the ride, and while we’re raised almost $6000 so far, we need to raise at least $10,000 more (and want to raise even more than that!). When we ride in the PMC and see the faces of cancer survivors and their families, hear them cheer, read their signs – knowing that we’ve got money in our fundraising account to send to the Jimmy Fund and Dana-Farber makes us feel like we’re actually doing something. Even if we couldn’t finish every training ride, even if we’re riding slowly, even if we’re hurting. We’re still doing something. And we definitely cannot do it without your help – so please, click the link on the right to donate today. Every donation counts.

PMC 2011: Getting caught up

This lovely long weekend was action-packed with a quick trip to the Cape, cookouts, and riding. Because we’re a little behind where we want to be in training (read: Jen is having anxiety attacks about not being ready for Climb to the Clouds in two (!!!!) weeks) we’re trying to do back-to-back rides as often as possible.

Most summers, including the last, we tended to do longer rides on one weekend day. Riding two days in a row is MUCH harder, it turns out, even though each individual ride is slightly shorter. (You would think, given that the PMC is a two day ride, that this would be obvious but I thought PMC Day 2 was hard only by virtue of Day 1 being so long – not so.) Last year on the Fourth of July weekend, we did a 38 mile and then a 50 mile, with a rest day in between. This year, we did 32 miles on Sunday and 47 miles on Monday. Ooof.

Sunday’s ride was lovely – we scheduled a late start with friends so that we could catch some extra sleep and so that our more ambitious and amazing teammates, Rich and Wendy, who are ahead of us in the training schedule, could get in a nice 50 or so before joining Matt, myself, and our friend Rachel for 32. We decided to ride the CRW’s Lexington Revolutions route because we knew it would be freshly arrowed. The ride was lovely – virtually no cars on the road, there were several newly-paved stretches and plenty of shade. I was able to ride a bit faster than I thought I would be able to, and Matt was downright speedy. I felt pretty good about our training progress, though we both felt much more tired than we should have later in the day – a sure sign that we aren’t quiet where we should be in our conditioning.

Monday’s ride was a bit rough, honestly. We had both gone to bed very early, as we were meeting friends Rachel and Darren at 8am in Reading for the CRW’s Quiet Roads North of Boston ride. The ride definitely lives up to its name; thanks to the back roads route and the holiday, we almost had the roads to ourselves. I felt good until we hit mile 20, at which point I wanted to fall off of my bike. I became really frustrated with myself for feeling slow and sluggish, and for feeling like I wasn’t where I wanted to be physically to really be prepared for the PMC. I pulled over, got a good pep talk from Matt, and hauled myself back onto the bike to finish the ride, though it was a struggle to push through the lack of leg energy. I wish I could say I got a second wind or perked up, but I didn’t – I struggled through every single pedal stroke. The route isn’t particularly hilly, but the last 10 miles or so is tough if you’re tired – there is one steep and long-ish climb, followed by a slow slight uphill to the finish. It wasn’t pretty, but I finished.

I do try to remember that even if I have a slow or low-energy ride that takes longer than I want it to, at least I am still conditioning my body to be on the bike for an even longer time period! That’s something, right? On those hard days, I try to remember why we ride, and remember that even if I don’t have a personally fast or easy PMC, that’s ok, because that’s not the point. The ride will happen, and I will do it, regardless of whether I’m as ready as I want to be, because raising this money for Dana-Farber and the Jimmy Fund is important. Another good friend of mine just lost someone to cancer, in a scenario that will repeat itself until we can eliminate cancer in all of its forms. While this might seem like an impossible goal, it really isn’t. For example, in the 1970s, five-year survival rate for acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), the most common type of leukemia in children, for children younger than 20 was only 61 percent. A parent whose child was diagnosed with ALL probably did not feel like their child was more likely to survive than not. Today that survival rate has climbed to 83 percent. That obviously isn’t good enough, but it shows that it’s not impossible to move toward better treatments, cures, and some day, prevention.

Your donations can help fund this fight against cancer. We’re just about a third of the way to our minimum fundraising amount, and a quarter of the way to our lofty $20,000 goal. Help us get there – every donation counts and it all adds up quickly. Donate here, or ask us how you can send a check!

PMC 2011: Neither rain, nor traffic, nor Red Sox games…

Last Wednesday, Team Sara G held our 3rd annual bowling fundraiser at Jillian’s in Boston. We were a little worried because the day turned out to be pretty stormy, which delayed the afternoon Red Sox game, which meant that the game was still going on when we and our guests were trying to get over to Jillian’s. But an hour after leaving work, I successfully covered the half mile to Fenway, just in time to get things set up (luckily, Matt and Wendy were there before me, and Rich arrived soon after).

Despite the weather and traffic, ”In Striking Distance: Help us Pin Down Cancer!” was a huge success! Around 30 people showed up to bowl and compete in our raffle for some great prizes, including Red Sox tickets, a reservation to Hell Night at East Coast Grill, and gift certificates to local businesses and restaurants. We raised almost $800 from raffle ticket sales and door donations, and we call that a huge success! Once everything clears, we should be at over $3500 raised! We still have a ways to go, so please consider making a donation if you can.

You can see all the photos from the event here; we even managed to a get a nice team photo:

Team Sara G!

A quick shout out to our raffle prize and door prize sponsors: The Fresh Cake, Boloco, Twinkle Star Baby Boutique, Amy Soisson (who donated the Red Sox tickets), Balanced Training with Meaghan Hackett, Ball Square Fine Wines, JP Comics & Games, and East Coast Grill.

PMC 2011: Back in the Saddle(sore)

The “spring,” such as it was, was not kind to New England. Matt and I allowed the weather to get the better of us, and we only did one short ride in May. We kept thinking it would get warmer, or less rainy, and before we knew it, it was Memorial Day weekend, and we were kicking off three weekends in a row out of town. Whoops. Luckily, our teammates were kicking it into gear without us.

That means, however, that not only are we behind overall in training, we’re behind all of our biking friends, and we need to get caught up if we want to join them on the road without slowing them down too much. We needed to ride 50 miles this weekend to get back on track, but we knew doing it one ride might be too much for our legs (and butts). So we did two 25-miles rides – around Needham, and around the South Shore. We were a little slow, and the first 5 miles on Sunday were intensely painful (I hovered over my seat for a good ten minutes), but we are back in it. We had great riding weather, saw tons of other PMCers on the road, and we feel good about our season!

We are also kicking off our fundraising drive in earnest this week with our Third Annual Bowling Fundraiser, at Jillian’s in Boston on Wednesday, June 22. If you live in or near Boston, come on by! The fun starts at 6pm but will go till at least 9pm. We have some amazing prizes for the raffle, including a pair of Red Sox tickets! More details here.

PMC 2011: Training and Teammates

May is here and it’s finally sort of nice enough to ride! We were away for about half of April’s weekends, and it’s been rainy and cold here in Boston. This past Saturday, the forecast again called for rain, so we went to bed Friday night thinking we would not be riding Saturday morning. But Saturday dawned sunny and warm, and Matt, who was infectiously relentlessly enthusiastic, forced me to get out of bed and go for a ride. Because we knew the rain was coming eventually, we opted for a fairly short and close-to-home ride in Needham: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/84453021. I wussed out and did the short version, while Matt did the medium. Since I got back to the car first, though, I tried to make up for that by doing two more two-mile laps in the immediate area.

In more exciting news, we have two new teammates! Rich, a veteran PMCer and for Team Ropes teammate, and his awesome wife Wendy, who will ride in her first PMC this year, are gracing us with their fun and speedy company this year! I’ll need to get us all in a photo or at least update our header here, but we’re all listed on the donation site (http://www.pmc.org/profile/TS0187). Rich and Wendy also have a website: http://ridingforthecure.wordpress.com/.

Check back for updates and for info about our annual bowling fundraiser!

PMC 2010: Recap and Thanks

This past weekend (August 7 and 8), Matt completed his second PMC and I completed my fifth. We had an amazing weekend, with nearly perfect weather, and we could not be more grateful for the support we got this training season. I decided this year to mostly try to show you what the ride is like, instead of just telling you. 99% of these photos were taken by Rachel, Candace, and my mom (and links to each of their photos can be found by clicking on their names!).

We also wanted to thank all of those who were able to donate this year and those who were not able to but who cheered us on! We met our fundraising minimum (we’ve raised over $14,000 – once everything clears – thanks to all of you!), but the PMC as a whole still needs to raise a lot of money to reach its goal of $31 million. If you were planning to donate, there is still time! Just head here and you can donate to the team: http://www.pmc.org/profile/TS0187/.

The course has changed over the years, such that we ride about 110 miles on day one and 74 on day 2, a little less than the original 192 (something we’ll be urging them to correct!). This year, I got to record my ride with the bike computer, which was kind of cool. Per usual, I forgot to turn it on for a little over a mile on Day 1 but the routes are posted here (Day 1) and here (Day 2). I rode most of each day with our Team Ropes friend Rachel (we trained with her, too). She and I were pleased to record our personal best average moving speed of 15.9 mph each day! After a season of plateauing around 15 mph, this was pretty exciting!

PMC weekend began on Friday afternoon. We all met up at Ropes and Gray to catch a ride on the Team Ropes party bus.

We got to Sturbridge around 5 p.m. and collected our shirts, browsed the merchandise, and grabbed some beers before heading to the temporary tattoo line!

After a Scott Brown sighting, we all piled back in the bus and headed to our hotel in Southbridge. We ate as much pizza and pasta as we could stand, and then attempted to get to sleep early. Sleeping before the PMC is always a challenge though, so the 9 p.m. bedtime turned into an actual sleep-time of 11 p.m. or so.

At 3:45 a.m., the three alarms and wake-up call that we had scheduled all went off. Matt and I threw on our clothes and ran downstairs to try and catch the first shuttle to the start. Because of some mechanical difficulties with our shuttle van, we instead got to ride in style.

The start was hectic and emotional as always. I was feeling especially emotional this weekend, having collected the names of over 30 people – friends, family, and friends and family of friends who had fought cancer. Some survived and some did not, and I added a ribbon to my helmet for each of them.

Candace did the same.

Anyway, so it’s really early on Saturday. We have to find our bikes, put them in the place we want to start from, get food, get coffee, get water, and get going! Amazingly, it was actually cold out. Imagine that.

Day 1 went pretty well. You can see on the Garmin report that it’s actually pretty hilly up through our lunch stop at mile 70. We start out riding into the sunrise along route 20, a nice wide highway that allows everyone to warm up and sort out. But upon taking our first right off of 20, we run smack into a pretty steep hill. I usually try to take it pretty easy through lunch so that the post-lunch 40 miles (and Sunday) is a little less uncomfortable. Matt knows not the meaning of reserve though, and he headed out in the fast line with the speedy Ropes paceline. I didn’t expect to see him until lunch and was riding along happily when I saw this:

Seriously, I was so zoned out it took me a second. I saw the sign, and had to register, “Wait, I’m on that team! Oh! It’s Sara!” I skidded to a stop and got off the bike to stretch and chat. I also decided to check my phone and was confused to see a message from Matt. He reported that he had had some mechanical difficulties; based on the call time and his reported mileage, he was now behind me. After a few minutes, I departed the Team Sara G rest stop and headed to the next waterstop to wait for Matt.

His mechanical difficulties turned out to be a crash that CAUSED some mechanical difficulties (a popped spoke, which got fixed, and a loose chain ring, which caused him trouble all the way to the MMA). The first 70 miles of the ride are, as I said, really hilly. That includes some pretty quick descents – I watched one ambitious rider take one corner too far to the outside left and offroad along the shoulder, narrowly missing a large utility pole. Yikes. Matt go stuck behind a slow-moving car on one of these downhills. He was braking the whole way, until that car finally turned left. At this point, hoping to get his speed back up before the next uphill, Matt shifted into a tougher gear and stood up to really push down the hill. Unfortunately, at that moment, he dropped his chain. That meant that when he pushed down with all his weight on the pedle, he met no resistance. All his weight was thrown forward, and the entire bike reared up onto its front wheel.

Fortunately, Matt managed to balance on just the front wheel for a few seconds while carefully braking, trying to get the back wheel back on the ground, and slowed down from 25 to about 15 mph. Unfortunately, when the rear wheel did come down, it did so perpendicular to the front wheel, and Matt went down hard. He landed on his right hip and elbow, and has a nasty huge bruise on each. I’ll spare you the photo (unless you are on Facebook, in which case, there it is). Thankfully, he was riding with a group from Ropes, and they were able to stand around him and give him a few seconds to catch his breath and to make sure he was ok before he tried to move. Also thankfully, I was NOT there, as I probably would have had a heart attack.

The PMC was otherwise uneventful for us, though we did see a lot of tip-overs (in the parking lots) and a lot of flats (especially on Day 2).

As always, my lovely mom and her boyfriend Doug met us at lunch (even though it was my mom’s birthday!) with wipes, painkiller, and the Gatorades of our choice.  Rachel and I regrouped with Matt, Candace found us, and we ate and rested up for the final 40 miles.

We all rolled into the MMA and got our various repairs taken care of (in addition to Matt’s bike repairs, I broke a cleat and needed new ones), grabbed some burgers and beers, and lounged in the sun until my mom and Doug came to take us across the bridge to the hotel (one of these years, maybe we’ll do the PMC dorm or tent experience, but as spoiled as it feels, sleeping in a real bed with A/C and having a real shower is a huge improvement over a dorm bunk or a sleeping bag).

On Day 2, we got to sleep in a little bit, all the way until 4:15 a.m.! The Cape day is full of fun highlights: sunrise on the canal (photo by Darren), riding the really fun rolling hills on the service road in Sandwich, seeing the summer camp kids cheer for us at Da Hedge, and chatting for a minute with Jack, who has been at the Nickerson Park water stop for 12 years and next year plans to ride!

From that stop, the four of us (that’s our friend Darren on the left) rode out to see Matt’s parents, who were camped out a few miles further along the route. After stopping to chat and take photos, Darren and Matt zoomed off and Rachel and I rolled out.

The hardest part of Day 2 is the final 20 miles, after the Wellfleet water stop. We head through some really hilly back roads in Truro, only to be deposited onto route 6 for the long slog into Provincetown. Route 6 is sun-baked, windy, and slightly (to not-so-slightly) uphill for miles. Though it does help when you see the flags that we all signed at the MMA.

Team Sara G all finished before noon, in plenty of time to shower before the beer tents opened up.

As fun as the ride is, the weekend is also a little overwhelming. Supporters line nearly the entire route on both days. They create heartwarming and heart-wrenching signs, they cheer, they offer water and oranges, and they get you to smile when you’re cranking up a tough hill.

Between the supporters and the cyclists wearing memorial jerseys, ribbons, pictures of loved ones, and lists of names, it’s impossible to miss the impact this ride has on people. And that’s why we do it – to raise money to help people, and to demonstrated to those fighting cancer, and their families, that a whole mess of people want to help, even if it’s only in this small way. The PMC is a reminder that we’ve all been affected by cancer, and that it can make people feel better to do something fun and challenging in the face of a really serious disease. That’s why we ride.