End of a Very Big Year
Most of you will have already gotten this via the email I sent to all my contributors, but I thought I’d post it here as well, just so that I have a record of it in my blog.
Each year I send out a final debrief after the Pan-Mass Challenge presents the Jimmy Fund with the proceeds from the year’s ride. Here’s a description of what you and I and the thousands of other riders, sponsors, and volunteers achieved in 2006.
If there’s a theme for 2006, it’s breaking records. Having raised $23 million in 2005, the PMC began this year with a $24 million goal. That in itself would be a new record, but even before the ride began, the organizers openly increased their goal to $25 million. And at last Thursday night’s check presentation, PMC founder Bill Starr announced that we’d eclipsed even that, surpassing $26 million in 2006 alone. That’s the largest single gift ever made to the Jimmy Fund, and more than twice the amount ever raised by any other athletic fundraiser in the nation. For the complete story, I encourage you to read the PMC press release or view a two minute video story about the check presentation from NECN.
My personal experience also exceeded expectations and broke records. I started this year with a brand new road bike and a goal: raise more money for the Jimmy Fund than ever before. In 2005 I raised a surprising $3,850, but this year I hoped I could raise $4,000, which would bring my lifetime fundraising to $20,000. You came through with an astonishing $6,260, blowing away my most ambitious goals and beating my prior fundraising record by more than 62 percent!
And when your donations broke $6,000, I became what’s called an official PMC “Heavy Hitter”. I haven’t ever mentioned Heavy Hitters before, because I never dreamed I’d qualify for that elite status, which requires raising nearly twice the fundraising minimum! Heavy Hitters get commemorative biking shorts, are invited to a special celebratory dinner, and their names are listed in the PMC’s annual report.
So the first and most important thing I want to say in this email is: thank you. I am truly blessed to have so many incredibly generous friends, and you should take a great deal of pride in the life-saving research you have made possible.
You may get tired of hearing and reading my thanks, but I can’t say enough about everyone who sponsored my ride, and I want to thank certain people in particular. Profuse thanks go to Nicole, my friend who was undergoing chemo who let me tell her story in my fundraising letters. I also want to recognize David, who lost his mother to cancer earlier this year. I want to thank Randy, my employer, who encouraged my coworkers to sponsor me, then generously more than matched their donations. More thanks to my perpetual #1 sponsor, Liam, for breaking a record he already owned for the largest donation I’ve ever received. As always, I have to recognize Sheeri for driving me around and all the support she provided over the PMC weekend. And I want to express my sincere gratitude to all of my nineteen first-time sponsors, to the twelve people who have sponsored me in every one of my six PMC rides, and to the dozen other people who made a larger donation this year than they had before.
I’m incredibly proud that I can say that over the past six years I’ve raised $22,325 to improve the state of cancer research. treatment, and prevention through the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. However, that’s entirely due to your generosity; without your support, I wouldn’t have done anything.
Looking back on 2006, it was a record year in nearly every category. In past years I’ve had 35-40 sponsors, but this year I had a record 50 contributors. In addition, the average donation I received went up again this year; it has gone up every year like clockwork, from an average $63 per person back in 2001 to over $125 per person in 2006.
But in addition to fundraising, I managed to set a few records on the bike, as well. Over the past twelve months, I rode 4,600 miles, which exceeds my previous record by 800 miles (21 percent), and brought my total riding over the past six years to 20,000 miles! That’s an average of 65 miles per week, every week: summer and winter. It’s also a whopping 1.2 million kilocalories: the caloric equivalent of 341 pounds of body fat, 375 gallons of ice cream, 7,500 ears of corn on the cob, or over 16 thousand Lindt chocolate truffles!
Along the way, I set a new one-day record by riding 153 miles in a single day, after earning my first cycling medal by completing the Boston Brevet Series 200k in May, a ride I’d wanted to do for years. With the help of a 28 mile-per-day commute, I also set new monthly mileage records in eight of the past twelve months: November, December, March, April, May, August, September, and October.
After all that, I probably don’t need to tell you that the new bike I bought a year ago has been absolutely great. The poor thing’s already got 4,000 miles on it! But I anticipate a very restful off-season for us both.
I received a lot of positive feedback from the voice posts I left on my LiveJournal during this year’s ride, as well as the PMC route map I put up. Since you guys have been so good to me, I thought this might be a good time to ask if you had any ideas about other ways I could make the ride more interesting for you. More photos? More voice posts? More (or fewer) email updates? A map that shows my progress throughout the ride? More descriptions of events preceding and post-ride? Is there anything you’d be especially interested in hearing or seeing about the ride? Let me know, and I’ll see what we can do for next year.
And if you haven’t read it yet or seen the photos, feel free to peruse my description of this year’s ride, which you can find at: http://users.rcn.com/ornoth/bicycling/travelogue2k6.html
This end-of-year update ends on a bittersweet note. Nicole, the friend whom I rode for this year, finished her chemo last spring, has grown back her hair, and has already been to India twice since then, so she’s doing exceptionally well.
At the same time, I have a friend (and two-time PMC sponsor) named Christine whose fiance was treated last year for Hodgkin’s Disease. Ken became quite a cancer fundraiser himself, promoting Camp Ta-Kum-Ta, a free summer camp in northern Vermont for kids who have cancer. Although Ken was given a clean bill of health last summer, just hours before I left for the PMC check presentation last week, I learned that his cancer had recurred and metastasized.
It was a very, very unkind reminder that no matter how many hundreds of millions of dollars we’ve raised, cancer is still an elusive and prevalent threat. However much we can celebrate this year’s recordbreaking event, there are many more miles to be pedaled and dollars to be raised, and I hope I can count on your support again next year, as I ride for Ken and Nicole and David and all the people in my life whom cancer has touched.
Thank you again for your generosity.