No post, or park visit, yesterday--I was "all wound up" (as my Uncle Don used to say) in the kick-off for my Next Amazing Adventure: I have committed to ride 100 miles (a "century" ride) to Montauk this coming May 18 to raise at least $3,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society through their "Team in Training" program. That is "ride" as, "on a bicycle." Most of my training will be in, yes, Prospect Park.
The Team in Training (TNT) gang are all fired up with assurances that they will whip even the sorriest butt into shape to cross that finish line. But as I looked and listened, I realized all the things I never thought about when I signed up for this:
- My $200 hybrid bike was a big splurge for me, but people who ride 100 miles tend to ride on fast-and-fancy racing-style bikes, because, as a coach said last night, "unless you're Lance Armstrong, you're not gonna ride 100 miles in 2 hours." Maybe two days? weeks? I honestly have no idea.
- I am still barely able to change a tire (or pump air into one). An incredibly fit and manic guy named Felix, who is a Racing Dude, insists that he will have me doing this like a pro. Heh heh.
- Fitness-wise, I was flat-lining after climbing four flights of stairs to the meeting room. Almost everybody else was younger than me. Absolutely nobody else was gasping and clutching at bannisters. Got a lot of work to do.
- Did you know there were bike shoes? Neither did I! Apparently I'd better get some.
- Finally, I realized that I have absolutely no idea how far 100 miles west from Montauk is, (there is nothing east of Montauk except, I think, Iceland), and I am afraid to look. Maybe I can just start from my front porch.
- Even more finally, I, like Sally O'Malley, am 50. Five-oh. And feeling every bit of it.
I'm doing it anyway. Last night we met some of our "honored teammates," people who have lived with blood cancers and, so far, are beating them. One adorable young woman with curly black hair had already endured chemo, radiation, one relapse, and a marrow transplant; the Society paid her cab fare to daily doctors' visits so that, exhausted, she wouldn't have to struggle on a train or bus. This struck me as the deepest sort of good, along with the life-saving research they do, of course.
But, like many on my new "team," I have a personal grudge against leukemia and its ilk. This is my dad, Richard Q. Becker, in 1945, a private with the 240th Military Police battalion stationed in Honshu, Japan with our Reconstruction troops. We'll never know if his presence in various post-Bomb sites around Japan qualified him as an "atomic vet," but we lost him to leukemia in 1985 at a young, joyful and vigorous age 69, in a family that routinely lives into its late 90s. Many of the patients on his unit were half his age, like our honored teammates. I can do this for him, and for them. You can help; donations fund treatments that are getting better and better, support for brave people who have endured what most of us can only imagine, and, most importantly, a search for the cure.
I have a fund-raising website; check it out here. It's called "Good Grief, It's Brenda on a Bicycle," and the pun is intentional, because with your help we can bring goodness out of grief. Go donate some money, honey, and I'll see you in the park; I'll be the gasping one with the cheap bicycle and the sore butt.
Image: New York Public Library Collection
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