You might think it's really hard to cycle over 500 miles from New York City to Niagara Falls, but it's actually not.
Really hard is finding out that you or someone you care about has cancer. Really hard is making decisions about treatment. Really hard is dealing with the side effects of chemo, radiation, infusions, and surgery. Really hard is seeing the physical and emotional toll cancer takes on both the patient and their loved ones. Impossibly hard is saying good-bye to someone taken too soon by cancer.
But through all that pain hope can be found. Hope comes from revolutionary new treatments that improve quality of life and outcomes for cancer patients. Hope comes from medications that maybe can even prevent or cure cancer. But those kinds of revolutions can only happen through high-level research, and that research is in constant need of funding.
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Overdue update
I've been slacking this time around.
Two years ago, I posted a new blog nearly every Sunday, but it's been hard to find the time and, I'll be honest here, the motivation. Don't get me wrong. I am motivated to ride, motivated to train, and motivated to raise as much as I can for cancer research. It's just that I like to post original content, rather than recycle material from the past. I've written it, you've read it (hopefully), so unless I've got something new to say, I've been keeping fairly quiet.
My weight loss has been going overall pretty well. As of two weeks ago, I was down 15lbs since last summer, leaving me just a few pounds shy of my riding weight. However, an extended weekend vacation with my wife, plus a little tweak to my back undid a few of those pounds. I didn't get on the bike for over a week, but I've been back working out daily since Thursday. Now I have to remember how to stop eating as though I'm still on vacation. I'm good at being disciplined until I'm not. Then I have a very hard time getting back on the horse. Plus, I'm a stress eater par excellence, and there's a lot of stress in our lives right now.
I've been meeting weekly with fellow ESR riders to do online training rides. It's been a great motivator. Everyone is so friendly and supportive, just as I remember them being in person throughout the week. Although Sunday is the one day of the week in which I don't have outside obligations to get me up early, it's worth sacrificing the little bit of extra sleep to get up and ride with them. We see each other's avatars on the screen, and we voice chat live over Discord. We each have our personal reasons for riding from New York to Niagara Falls, yet we are united in our efforts. Having someone to talk to during long and challenging training sessions definitely makes the time go by.
I don't want to leave you only with stories about me and cycling, though. We have to remember what this is about. My old college buddy and his family have been going through an extraordinarily tough time. His wife was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer with lung metastasis last summer. It's a dire diagnosis, to say the least. She has undergone a brutal regimen of aggressive chemotherapy, which has shrunk her pancreatic tumor significantly, and prevented her lung tumor from progressing further. This is very encouraging for them, but they live with the reality that progression of the disease could recommence any time. As I wrote in my last post, pancreatic cancer is one of those hard to detect diseases until it's at a highly progressed stage. This means it's hard to treat and nearly impossible to cure right now. It's only a matter of time, given enough funding and the right research breakthroughs, before there are more means of early detection and even more treatment options.
To fund those, my friend is raising funds for the PanCan Purple Stride. I encourage you to help.
In the meantime, I will add Debbie Lifton to list of those I honor on my ride to Niagara Falls come July.
- Peace -
by Harry Marenstein on Sun, Mar 03, 2024 @ 10:53 PM
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