Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Chicks that ride Charity Rides


Many riders started riding seriously because they signed up for a distance charity event and needed to train to get ready (think Team in Training, MS etc).   Being able to support a cause that you believe in is  certainly a great way to start, but I find I don’t want to override my welcome on family and friends more than once every two years or so to do fund raising and get pledges.  Although, I do my share of donating to people I meet that are really pushing themselves to train for an event that is outside of their comfort zone.
However, there are many smaller charity rides that can be fun to do as a group.   Many of these are sponsored by a local bike shop.  During the summer many of us did the “Ride 2 Recovery” (ride2recover.com) that was put on by A Road Bike 4 You bike shop.  It was a great day and they are a great organization.

More recently a group of the chicks (and their supportive men) decided to have a fun Sunday ride and participated in Rock ‘n Road Cyclery’s “Poker Ride” benefitting Bikes for Boobs (Bikesforboobs.org).  They are a non-profit organization who provides funding to breast centers globally through their Mammograms in Action Grant Program as a "last resort" resource for thousands of people who do not qualify for government funding or other charitable resources in the detection of breast cancer.

The event fee was only $25 and the full registration went to Bikes for Boobs organization. Some of us (ok, four of us) had done the Hill Climbing ride the day before but we were up and ready to ride at 8 a.m. on Sunday.  (Some team members who will remain nameless decided to stay home in bed).  We decided to don our pink club jerseys which did get the attention of other riders getting ready.  Rock ‘n Road actually has a pretty active Women’s group (Rock ‘n Road Divas) and I heard one passing comment saying, “Hey, where are our Divas?”  I did notice there was a very few women that showed up to do the ride.

The goal of the Poker ride is to visit all four of the Rock ‘n Road Cyclery shops and draw a playing card at each stop.  The person with the best poker hand at the end of the ride is the winner.   We had called the shop prior to the ride to get important details (like, what are they serving for lunch? – Mexican) and were told that there would NOT be a route/cue sheet.  Julie Morey took that as a challenge to create our own route.  It turned out the day of the ride, the store did have some slips which were full 8 ½ x 11 size, a separate one for each shop to shop portion, but we were eager to try out our route.

The ride started at the Rock ‘n Road in Mission Viejo and our first trek was up through Santiago Canyon to the Anaheim Hills Store.  This was the hilliest and longest part of our ride and some riders, Kat Liem, Paul and Cyndi Nelson, decided to do Cannon (both ways) to cut out a little mileage and take on the challenge. 

Steve Nelson and I met up with Kurt Richardson and Chris Carrier at the Anaheim Hills store and decided to wait for the rest of the “Pinks” to finish our ride.   Lisa Fair, who had finished her very first century, Amtrak, a few weeks before, rode up passing the other girls even though she had started late at 8:30.  Since Sheryl Malkin along with Gordi and Julie Morey had stopped for a quick “comfort break”, Pat Herold was the next to arrive.  The comfort break must have been needed since Gordi decided to attack Modjeska Canyon grade, the back way, on his way through the canyon.  Pat was having shifter problems.  I think it was contagious from Terry Kessler’s bike the day before.  We warned them not to park their bikes so close to each other.

The bike shop put Pat’s bike on the work stand and adjusted her cables while we waited.   Then the rest of the group arrived in time to put Sheryl’s bike on the work stand to work on her bent back derailleur. All the employees were very welcoming and helpful.  They had water for refilling bottles and wonderful much needed restrooms, for the ones that hadn’t taken a comfort break along the road.  While waiting on the bike adjustments a lady had parked her car and came running over to us after noticing our Pink Jerseys very exciting asking, “Are you woman’s group who rides?”   I told her about our normal Saturday rides and provided her information on the “Ride Like a Pro” program when she seemed a little concerned about our average speed and ride distances.

After drawing the next cards for our hand, we took off together in search of the Irvine Rock ‘n Road Store.   This trek was a little shorter and only had the small grade along Irvine Blvd which seemed easy after Saturday’s hill climbing ride.  The Irvine store had more water, and frosted sugar cookies to enjoy before we were off to the next store – Laguna Niguel off of La Paz road.

We had some great down hills on this trek but I kept thinking we were going to have to climb back up all of that to get back to Mission Viejo.  After the Laguna Niguel store with 55 miles under our tires, we still had another 8 miles left to get back to the starting point (and our Mexican food lunch).  It turns our Kat had the best poker hand with a Flush and went home with the top prize of a brand new Garmin 810 bundle.
So for a small registration fee which went to the charity (they raised over $2000) we had good fellowship, promoted the club, got stronger riding and had lunch.  It made for a great day.

During the month of October many stores that carry Trek will be having fun family oriented charity rides for Breast Cancer Awareness.  Some of us will be attending Two Wheel One Planet’s ride on October 12th which has a 10 mile and 25 mile option.  Again the full registration fee goes toward Breast Cancer Awareness.  Jax’s in Long Beach is sponsoring a ride as well.  These are great events to introduce to new riders or friends who “think” they might want to start riding.
OCW also supports the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation as part of our annual Spring Metric.

Instead of just cranking out miles every week, why not give each crank a purpose by riding for charity. Maybe it’s time for you to think about finding and signing up for an event.  

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