Lisa/Mom/LD’s 8th PMC is in the books and I have beat my OWN record at sending this email out later than ever before!

Yesterday, Lisa/Mom/LD set off from Bourne in the dark before sunrise without a working bike light to begin her 78 mile trek to Ptown. If you have been following her PMC journey for at least one year now, you know that this woman only gets on a bike *once a year* and it is to ride this most special of rides. It is somewhat of a baffling athletic feat that should likely be studied alongside the amazing cancer research that the money that Pan-Mass Challenge raises to study cancers that other researchers aren’t studying. It goes without saying that commitment to funding research right now is even more important than ever.

Lisa/Mom/LD rides specifically for the Lenny Zakim Center for Integrative Therapies for Healthy Living at Dana Farber. This center both provides integrative therapies like massage, acupuncture, and nutrition coaching to patients while also studying the impacts these approaches have on their experience of living with cancer and longterm outcomes. The work of the Zakim Center is invaluable for patients and their families both while undergoing treatment but also in navigating life afterward.

While we may never know empirically what makes it possible for someone who turned 78 this past week (HBD, MOM!) to get on her bike once a year alongside folks who train daily/weekly and report feeling “really good” afterward- I have to imagine the reason that she is able to do this, year after year, and seemingly with increasing ease, is *all of you.” Mom has always described thinking about different people as she rides- people who we have lost to cancer or who have undergone treatment. This year, the night before the ride I spotted a fluorescent pink piece of paper with a long list in my mom’s signature handwriting. I assumed it was a list of “to dos” she often has floating around with an almost endless list of tasks like “dropping off flowers,” for someone’s birthday or recycling something I didn’t know was recyclable. But when I glanced a little longer I realized it was an incredibly long list of names. It is quite possible that your name was on the list the carried with her on this year’s bike ride. Or someone you are related to, or someone you know and love. But even if not, this list was emblematic of how my mom lives her life, always riding forward, most often in the name of other people. What is so special about PMC is that it is one of the few times that it makes it so literal. Usually we see LD riding forward in on our behalf to an unfixed point in the future. But on the day of PMC, Mom, and 6,000 other people, are riding off into the distance to a clear end with all of us in mind.

For this literal ride, and for the riding she does for all of us everyday, I am so grateful!