Our CNN family was devastated in the past year when two of our colleagues lost their young children to cancer. Francesca Kaczynski was just nine-months-old and Blake Payne was two. Both of them passed away from brain cancer which is the deadliest form of childhood cancer, itself the number one disease-related killer of children under 15.

The deaths of Francesca Beans and Blake took me right back to the pain and sadness my family felt when I was 11 and we lost my almost three-year-old sister Rachel to another kind of cancer called a chordoma, which is rarely found in young children. She was the youngest of the four kids at the time, I was the eldest. She was the sweetest, happiest, bravest little girl.

I will be riding this year's PMC in memory of Rachel, Beans and Blake and in honor of the countless other brave souls fighting this horrible disease, including my friend Gabi Benjamin.

I plan to ride locally in the Washington area, covering around 150mi/240km over two days in late July with several colleagues and friends. Your support would mean so much to me, with 100% of the proceeds going directly to support the Jimmy Fund and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a world leader in adult and pediatric cancer treatment and research. The PMC is Dana-Farber’s single largest supporter and is 64 percent of the Jimmy Fund’s annual revenue. Since 1980, the PMC has raised $767 million for Dana-Farber.