FOR OVER TWO decades now I’ve been supporting the MACC Fund (Midwest Athletes Against Childhood Cancer) by doing something I love (riding my bike) to combat something I hate (cancer).
I got involved with the Trek 100 Ride for Hope long before my mother died of cancer in 2004, and I rode my first Trek 100 several years before my own son Graham was born (he’s now 21). Of course, as a father I certainly can relate to the heartbreak that childhood cancer can bring to a family, but even before I became a parent I was touched by the brave kids fighting this deadly disease and the courageous families that supported them.
The MACC Fund is a terrific organization that directs a very large percentage of their fundraising directly to medical research. And, the annual bike ride is their biggest fundraising activity of the year, with several thousand riders participating (in 2016, there were 2,000 riders and we raised $725,000, which brought the total for 27 years of rides to $14 million!). We’ll do it again this year on June 3 when we ride out into the rolling Wisconsin countryside from the Trek HQ in Waterloo.
I KNOW THERE are many other worthy causes out there, as well as victims of natural disasters that need our help. But, I’m asking you to support me anyway because EVERY kid deserves the chance to grow up healthy and reach his or her potential in life (when the MACC Fund was founded in 1975, the overall cure rate for childhood cancer was 20%; today, it is 80%!).
The size of your contribution doesn’t matter…just give me SOMETHING. Five bucks is better than none; $10 is better than $5; twenty bucks tops ten; and so forth. EVERY dollar helps, and in the past I’ve had single supporting pledges of everything from $2 up to $500.
The Big C took my mom, but my dad lived to the ripe old age of 93 and I want all kids to have a chance for the sort of long, rich life my father enjoyed. That’s why we ride, so please give me what you can.
