First of all, huge thanks to everybody who sponsored me! I raised nearly $2,200 for the Multiple Sclerosis Chapter of Illinois, blowing the $300 minimum out of the water, and exceeding my own goal of $2,000. Thank you! I will recap the ride here in a couple parts; please check back again early next week for the rest of the story!

Friday afternoon, my friend Harriett and I started to get ready: I picked up the rental car, and she picked up a borrowed bike rack. Neither of us having any experience with strapping things onto cars, this turned out to be a comedy of errors. Does this bar maybe go here? No? What about here? Finally—about 45 seconds before it started to rain—we had the bike rack firmly attached to the car, and both bikes firmly bungeed in.

Exhibit A:

There were at least a dozen bungee cords involved. Those bikes weren’t going anywhere.

The ride provided a secure area for us to leave our bikes at overnight. We found our deluxe accommodations (the Northern Illinois University dorms) and set our alarms for an obscenely early hour.

You learn a lot about your friends when you share a hotel (or dorm room) with them. Turns out that Harriett is a chipper morning person. Our alarms went off at 4:30 the next morning, and she jumped out of bed and began chatting. Anybody who has the pleasure of dealing with me first thing in the morning knows that I am surly and grumpy at best. Harriett mercilessly turned on the overhead lights, and so I stumbled and grumbled out of bed and into my biking clothes.

It was about 6:30 by the time we’d gotten ready, eaten breakfast, and taken advantage of photo ops while we were still fresh.

Little did we know what was ahead of us.

The ride started off really well. It was a little overcast, and we hit a smattering of rain, but the rolling hills felt good, especially when we got up speed on the downhills. The bucolic landscape was all cornfields and farm houses, and red-winged blackbirds chirped and squawked all around us (I found out letter that red-winged blackbirds in the city often attack cyclists. I think I’m glad I didn’t know this at the time).

Other than the brief storm (which was more bark than bite), the weather was perfect: sunny and clear and hardly any humidity. And then we got to the halfway point, where the winds started. I found out that afternoon that the winds were 15mph with 25mph gusts. No longer did those hills feel good, and no longer could we get any speed on the downhills. For 40 miles, we fought either directly into the wind or a crosswind, with only two very short spurts with the wind at our backs. My knees were screaming, and I was pretty disheartened by how slow we were going—at one point I was fighting for 4mph. But then, near the end, when we found our way back to the residential area surrounding the NIU Campus (and our start/finish point), a woman outside her house held up a sign: “Thank you for riding!” That gave me a little push to crawl those last couple miles across the finish line. 77 miles—40 of those battling the wind—completed!

I promptly went to the medical tent and iced my poor knees, which felt like I had left my kneecaps in a cornfield somewhere. We ate dinner (we actually ate two dinners—you burn a lot of calories when you spend all day on the bike!) and slept very, very soundly.

Next week: Day Two.

Last year, my friend Carol bought herself a new commuter bike and VERY graciously gave me (!!) her old hybrid, a purple Trek 720. My bike—an ancient, ill-fitting mountain bike that weighed half a ton—had been stolen not long before, and, just out of grad school, I wasn’t really in a position to go bike shopping. I named my new bike Gertrude, and she’s been a fantastic companion. She got a tune-up and new Bontrager tires a few weeks ago, and today was our first venture outdoors.

Spring finally hit Chicago this weekend (although I’m not making any bets on how long it will last), and happy Chicagoans packed the lakepath today. I did an easy 10 miles with a couple stops to take pictures. (My legs have painful memories from yesterday’s 12-mile run, so taking it easy seemed like a smart idea). The new tires are fantastic, and I also owe a huge thank you to everybody who convinced me to buy the super-expensive, ultra-padded bike shorts. Who knew that something that feels like a diaper could be so wonderful?

Here’s a couple pictures from today’s ride. It was 63 degrees with a cool breeze and a sunny, clear blue sky. Perfect.

Gertrude, parked near Lake Michigan. She and I are working up to a two-day, 150-mile bike ride.

Lake Michigan from Foster Avenue Beach:

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Fundraising update: I’ve raised $1,000 to support the Multiple Sclerosis Society, bringing me halfway to my goal of $2,000! Thank you to everybody who has donated—your generosity is tremendous.

If you haven’t yet donated, please go to my Tour de Farms page and click “Make a Gift!” Every dollar helps me get closer to my goal, and every dollar helps a person with multiple sclerosis.

When one of my best friends was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis eight years ago, I knew almost nothing about it—it was simply a name to a vague disease, probably something pretty serious. The name itself doesn’t even mean much. Not like muscular dystrophy, say, which you could probably guess has something to do with muscles degenerating and getting weaker. But MS?

A few weeks after my friend’s diagnosis, I sat down to watch Hilary and Jackie on DVD. I was taking cello lessons at the time, and all I knew about Jacqueline du Pré was that she was a cellist. I didn’t know that she was diagnosed with MS in the last 15 years of her life. I didn’t know that it paralyzed her, or that it stole her hearing, her sight, and finally her life.

This was not a good way to learn about multiple sclerosis. I went through a lot of Kleenex that night.

The good news is that MS is much better understood and more manageable than when du Pré first began losing sensitivity in her fingers in 1971. Today, people diagnosed with MS have normal or near-normal life expectancies, and there are many drugs to help people manage both the disease and its myriad symptoms. That doesn’t mean it’s pleasant to live with—but it does mean that it’s not a death sentence.

Multiple sclerosis is an auto-immune disease in which the body attacks myelin, a substance that covers and protects the nerve fibers in the brain. Myelin helps your brain send nerve impulses, so when the body starts attacking itself and destroying the myelin, it disrupts impulses to and from the brain. Damage to myelin causes scarring—sclerosis—and multiple scars in the brain, over time, cause greater nerve damage and greater disruption.*

In ordinary life, this translates to a large number of symptoms, some of which may be blown off or easily misdiagnosed. Things like poor coordination and balance, difficulty concentrating, or depression—all common MS symptoms—might make you think that you’re just slowly going crazy. Most people, including my friend, have a type of MS known as relapsing-remitting, which refers to constant cycle of flare-ups and recovery. There’s no predictability to these cycles, no way of knowing when the next attack will come, no way of knowing how long it will last. The longer recovery time (remission) between flare-ups (relapses), the better. If the cycles get shorter, the flare-ups more frequent, a person with MS could slip into a secondary-progressive stage, in which the symptoms become steadily, increasingly worse.

Multiple sclerosis is incurable. There are several drugs available that work to actually manage the disease, not just its various symptoms (those require a whole ‘nother medicine cabinet). Hopefully this kind of management will help keep exacerbations at bay for relapser-remitters like my friend, and slow the pace of this disease to prevent the kind of degeneration that Jacqueline du Pré suffered.

* I’ve learned a lot about MS these past eight years, but I’m no doctor. I checked my facts here, at the very place I’m asking you to make a donation to!

This is me at age 3, already starting to train for the MS 150.

As of this writing, I’ve raised $900 toward my goal of $2,000. Wow! Thank you so much for donating on my behalf. This cause is important to me, and I am humbled and honored to have your support!

Sadly, I still haven’t taken my bike out. I’m a fair-weather cyclist, and unlike many hardier stock in Chicago, I do not enjoy activities which increase the wind chill. But it’s getting warmer (“warmer”) and I think this weekend will be the first (short) bike ride! Gertrude just got new tires and a tune-up, so she’s ready to go. I’ve been running a lot and am feeling a little burned out, so I’m really looking forward to a new activity, and I’m ready to start turning the cranks.

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One thing I want use this blog for is to tell you about where your money goes besides simply “a good cause.” I knew almost nothing about the disease until my friend was diagnosed eight years ago, and I’m guessing that at least some of you are in the same boat. Why is this a good cause? Why do we need more research into this disease? What is MS, anyways? Stay tuned!  

My friend Harriett and I went to the MS 150’s Winter Bike Expo this afternoon. Strangely, the MS Society didn’t email us about it—I only found out about it because it happened to be on their website. We got there a little after noon and were literally the only two people in attendance. I can only hope that the actual event is more crowded.

The benefit of being the only people there was that we got a lot of personal attention. Nancy, a very nice staffer who has done 600-mile bike rides, sat down with us and talked us through the training process. It’s not so bad—the hardcore training doesn’t start until May (which is fortuitous, because I’m running another half-marathon on May 3), and as long as I get in the saddle a few hours a week once the weather gets, you know, somewhere above freezing, I should be in good shape.

We also spoke with Sammy of Sammy’s Bikes—a bike shop unfortunately located in the ‘burbs and therefore difficult to get to—who tried to convince us that fancy shmancy shoes and clipless pedals are the way to go. Apparently clipless pedals are more efficient, and I believe him, but it just seems like a lot of money to spend on yet another pair of specialty shoes (I already go through three pairs of running shoes a year). Anybody want to weigh in on clipless pedals? Worth the investment? Or will I just spend months battling the clips and falling off my bike?

Well, not yet. It’s pretty freakin’ cold outside.

But I hope you’ll check this blog as the weather gets warmer and I start spending more and more time with Gertrude, my trusty bike. She and I will be spending a lot of quality time together as we get ready for the MS 150, a two-day, 150-mile bike ride through the farmlands of Illinois.

Stay tuned!

One of my dearest friends was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis eight years ago. She has handled this disease with immense courage, a good deal of stubbornness, and a sense of humor about things that would make most people break down. She has been able to laugh at symptoms like double vision and poor balance, and she has fought against debilitating fatigue and the unpredictability of this disease. In eight years I have rarely heard her complain about the daily shots she gives herself or about the side effects from the many (many!) other drugs she takes each day. For eight years she has grappled with MS causing her body to fight against itself, and for eight years she has fought back.

That is why I have accepted a challenge on behalf of the 20,000 individuals in Illinois whose lives have been touched by multiple sclerosis. From Friday, June 20 through Sunday, June 22, 2008, I will be joining over 2,000 cyclists and hundreds of volunteers in the Bike MS: Tour de Farms.

My friend, and thousands of others who share her diagnosis, rely on the support and resources of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.
I have accepted the challenge to raise funds in the fight against MS and you can help me get there. Please consider pledging your support today!