courage & determination

"Give me such courage and I can scale the hardest peaks alone, And transform every stumbling block into a stepping stone."
~Gail Brook Burket

This 45 mile Livestrong Challenge bike ride is one of the most wonderful decisions I have ever made. When I started this adventure to train and ultimately achieve a successful and complete a 45 mile bike ride, I had not riden much past 15 miles in my adult life. I was 244 pounds, 36 with moderate activity for excercise, but not a couch potato.

Though I had become a couch potato and movie potato when my Dad's diagnosis came down. I was almost crippled. I don't know if it was fear, sadness, grief or all the above, but I had no energy to do anything and didn't care if I did do anything. Now it is 3 months later, I have now riden 35 miles, planning on more long rides, climbing Mill Mtn (If you're not from Roanoke, it has a cool star on the top of it and a pretty good climb on a bike) and the sky is the limit.

Cancer has taken a lot from me, but I am stopping that. I'm not going to let it take anything else from me. How? Because I plan to continue to ride Livestrong Challenge rides and raise money so we can turn the negatives of cancer into positives.

Not everyone responds to the news of cancer favorably. Sometimes the family hearing the news is not able to process the news. I am lucky, I have a wonderful partner and friends that all fell into place and held me up til I could hold myself up. Now I see myself as being able to help hold someone else up. I am riding and raising money so that The Lance Armstrong Foundation can help people make informed decisions about their treatments, help them with living with cancer, learn how to live life after cancer and help with research funding.

Thanks for joining the village of healers against this dis-ease of cancer!
-Rhonda