Riding for Roses

Sometimes odd things come from blogging. Two serendipitous contacts due to my blog have somewhat snowballed. The first, which I have mentioned before, is the Tour Watch 2005 Tour de France viewing event at Central Market. It will include large screen viewing of the Tour, interviews with local cycling fans, interviews with people at the Tour, opportunities to create your own podcast, cancer surivor information, fundraising for Spencer’s Ride for the Roses, and other stuff to be announced. The second is stranger and yet related. The Discovery Channel is sending a filming crew to Austin and they want to follow me around for a couple of days and film “typical” activities and cover Tour Watch.

When Spencer was diagnosed with leukemia, I pretty much instantly converted my blog to being about his cancer, how we’re dealing with it, and our efforts to raise $25,000 for the Lance Armstrong Foundation as part of the Ride for the Roses Peloton Project. Previously, I had been writing about my bicycle training and my previous Ride for the Roses fundraising efforts. I have just enough incoming links that an appropriate Google search apparently brings up my blog.

The Discovery Channel is putting together a show about Lance’s fans and the producer ran just such a search and came across my site just as I had published an email address for contact information. Apparently my background makes a nice fit for the variety of people they are looking for. I’ve been interested in cycling, both as a participant and following professional cycling, since the mid-80s. I am not a hardcore fan, but know what is going on and have my favorites. I was a fan of Lance Armstrong before cancer changed his life completely. My family has a history that includes cancer; my Mom is a breast cancer survivor, her father died from colon cancer, my mother-in-law passed away last December from a metastasized breast cancer, and my Dad died as a result of multiple myeloma. For most of my time cycling, I have done fundraising bicycle rides, including MS150, the AIDS Ride, Tour de Cure, and the Ride for the Roses.

Then, last year literally during the Ride for the Roses, my son Spencer began showing symptoms that we were fortunate to have quickly diagnosed as leukemia. Since then, I’ve (temporarily or permanently, we have yet to see) adjusted my focus to turning this into as much of a positive experience as I can. Spencer helps a lot, since he has amazing spirit and vitality and is the driving motivation for raising all that money since I promised him in the hospital during his induction therapy that we would do our best to raise $25,000 so he could get a yellow jersey and ride with Lance. Rachel, my wife, is a critical component both for emotional support and being the breadwinner for our family yet again as I act as caregiver for Spencer, fool around figuring out what I can do to help other cancer survivors, and try to arrange insane fundraising events and mailings. Jacob, our 16 month old, rounds things out by reminding me the importance of pure play and that one must stop and eat the roses, not just ride a bike and collect them.

I must confess to multiple levels of ambivalence about all of this. I don’t really want to be a parent who uses my child to get media attention, but I do want to get whatever media attention I can pointed toward the issues of cancer survivorship. I don’t really want to be the focus of media attention, since this is about Spencer and other cancer survivors, but I do want the story out there. I don’t want to make plans to feed my ego, but I do want to get whatever publicity I can to help raise $25,000 for the LAF. It’s partly about getting Spencer that jersey and ride that he wants, but it’s mostly about getting funding to go not just to cancer prevention and drug research, but also to cancer survivorship issues. As long as that’s working, Spencer and I will be getting whatever media attention we can to focus on cancer survivors.

This week, I’ll write a little bit about Austin’s Wonders and Worries (which received seed funding and ongoing support from the LAF) as an example of the distinction between those kinds of issues and why I think survivorship issues merit attention and funding. I’m sure I’ll also write about the surreal experience of having a filming crew shadow me and how that changes my “typical” day. I hope to also tell the story about how asking for permission to do some filming may turn into a separate fund raising event at my favorite coffee shop near my house.