The Book of Life
So someone finally wrote a book about the Pan-Mass Challenge.
If you are one of my friends who care about (or are just curious about) the event, you might be interested in picking it up. It’s short-just 150 pages-with a handful of greyscale photos. It’s inexpensive too-just $9 at Amazon!-and the author is giving 75 percent of the profits back to the PMC.
The writing is first-person and informal. While that makes it readable, the author rambles around each chapter, covering diverse topics with no real focal point, yielding a book that also has no coherent theme other than the experience.
But to be fair, the PMC-the event-is all about that experience. The entire weekend is intensely emotionally charged, and that’s something that is nearly impossible to convey in words. This is astutely summarized in a quote from one teen rider, “When you explain it to a friend they sort of know what it is, but until they’re there, they don’t really know.”
Sure, there’s the obligatory nod to the event’s long history, including how the idea came to the founder during a ride in Boston’s Arnold Arboretum, how he ran the event for fifteen years from his father’s dining room, how everyone reacted to the first rider fatality, finally getting permission to use the campus of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy as an overnight stop, and the event’s phenomenal growth.
And there’s plenty of interesting factoids. On PMC weekend, riders will pedal a collective three-quarters of a million miles. 70 percent of riders return to the event each year, and scores of PMC kids rides serve as a farm club for the main event, iculcating future generations into a culture of philanthropy and caring about others.
Combine all the other single-event athletic fundraisers in the nation, then multiply that by 3.5-that’s what the PMC raises every year. Having passed 100 percent of rider-raised money through to the charity, the PMC constitutes 60 percent of the Jimmy Fund’s revenue and-at 20 percent of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s entire budget-is DFCI’s largest single source of funding.
All this enables Dana-Farber to conduct over 700 clinical trials and 350,000 outpatient visits per year. But more importantly, the PMC gives Dana-Farber the power and security to do the impossible. The PMC has directly underwritten research that led to treatments and cures for rare pediatric cancers that threaten the lives of a thousand kids per year, a hundred kids per year, even just 32 kids per year.
The book tells the stories of a number of these kids, including the PMC’s poster boy: Jack O’Riordan, who at one year of age was cured of Wilms Tumor, which only six children had at that time. And how, after cheering on PMC riders for 14 years, he finally was old enough to do the ride himself (despite a broken leg).
The book also includes stories from the more than a hundred Dana-Farber staffmembers who ride, and gives a pointedly realistic assessment of Lance Armstrong’s single visit to the event in 2011, shortly before his confession as a doper and resignation from his own cancer-related charity.
Many of the people in the book provide quotes that further illustrate the attitude and atmosphere the event creates.
“There are widows and there are orphans, but no word exists for a parent who loses a child.” -One 17-year rider’s fundaising email
“At first when I get the call my heart goes out for the family; it’s so hard. But then my heart soars because they’ve found the right place, the right team.” -A pediatric oncologist who rides
“To the world you may be just one person, but to one person you just may be the world.” -One of hundreds of signs lining the route
“You’re never done, you’re never done with the event.” -A 25-year volunteer
For me as a 13-year rider, the book left me with mixed feelings. I so want to be able to share with others what the PMC experience is like. Although the book relates a handful of very emotional narratives, it’s simply impossible to capture all the amazing and heart-wrenching and grace-laden stories in an event that spans hundreds of miles with 5,500 participants, 3,000 volunteers, countless roadside spectators, and a quarter million sponsors over 33 years.
One of the difficult things to capture about the PMC is the emotional impact. All weekend long, you’re primed, because you never know when you’ll see something that instantly moves you to tears, whether it be to the heights of inspiration or the depths of despair. Will it be the kid holding an “I’m alive thanks to you!” sign? Riding next to a Red Sox or Patriots player? Or exchanging greetings with an 80 year-old rider, or an amputee riding with only one leg?
Will it be hearing the story of someone who has raised a quarter million dollars, or a rider with a loved one’s photo or dozens of ribbons with names pinned to their jersey? The tandem bike with an empty seat, representing a lost loved one?
Will it be the sincerity and passion with which hundreds of people lining the route thank you for riding? Or watching the tens of thousands of people-riders, volunteers, sponsors, supporters, patients and their families, doctors, and nurses-who have come together to make a real, meaningful difference in each others’ lives this often impersonal and uncaring world?
As a longtime writer myself, I don’t envy anyone who tries to capture and communicate the PMC experience, in whatever medium. So I won’t criticize the author for falling short of 100 percent success. But I’m very glad he did it, and I think it’s well worth the $9 for anyone who has ever felt attachment to this singular and irreproduceable event.
And, of course, if you have yet to sponsor my upcoming 13th PMC ride, now’s the time!