The Pan-Mass Challenge — The Ride That Won’t Stop There are people who possess a gift they don’t really know they have, until something unexpected happens, and their life takes a turn, and then their gift becomes the life itself. For instance, Billy Starr. When his mother died from melanoma, he asked himself, “How can […]
By Mel Allen
Oct 30 2015
The Pan-Mass
Challenge.
The Pan-Mass Challenge — The Ride That Won’t Stop
There are people who possess a gift they don’t really know they have, until something unexpected happens, and their life takes a turn, and then their gift becomes the life itself. For instance, Billy Starr.When his mother died from melanoma, he asked himself, “How can I turn my interest in sports, my sweat, into something meaningful?” What if he could get people to donate money toward cancer research for each mile he pedaled from Williamstown to Province-town, Massachusetts, some 300 miles by bike? This was in 1980, long before athletic fundraising became popular.
What began with a single gift of $10,200 to the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute has grown today to more than $450 million. There’s nothing quite like it in the world. “When they write the history of how cancer was conquered,” notes Dana–Farber president Dr. Edward J. Benz Jr., “the PMC will be in chapter one.”
This August, some 5,500 riders will start out, each one riding for someone they love, someone they lost, or someone fighting the disease now. Hundreds of riders themselves have or have had the disease. “We are not just cancer survivors,” one says. “We are cancer warriors.”
There are now eight routes, with different mileages, starting points, and endings. The longest ride starts at Sturbridge on Saturday and ends 190 miles later on Sunday morning in Provincetown, the riders sweeping past the dunes in a sea of color, jerseys and helmets flashing by in the morning light, as the crowd cheers. “You pedal 200 miles for that last 50 yards,” Starr says.
They keep pumping, going from water stop to water stop, not questioning whether it matters, because they know it does. Because this is what is possible: to fight back. They know why they do this: because we’re all on this one ride.
—“Billy Starr’s Long Ride,” by Mel Allen, July/August 2009