Congratulations to everyone who participated in the ride, and very grateful thank you to those who came to support us. We cycled just under 250km in two days, through wind, rain, mud, and at the end a little sunshine. We had some blood, seat and tears, we earned every penny, yet still our achievement pales in comparison to the courage, and strength that is required by those caring for and suffering from the many forms of Cancer.
This was a very humbling experience, talking with Cancer Victors on the ride (one of the people I spoke with said he wasn’t a Cancer Survivor and was a Cancer Victor) makes you realise how strong they are, and if that wasn’t enough there were the riders on tricycles, and fixed speed bikes who always seemed to be ahead of us.
Our fundraising was exceptional, we ranked 8th out of 339 teams on a per rider donation, we outperformed the likes of Team CTV, ICBC, KPMG etc. This is a massive achievement and something that we should not be modest about. We have to give credit to the internal fundraising team for organising the 50/50’s, BBQ’s, Breakfasts, Auctions, Pub Nights, etc; our partners TriMetal, Seagull, Wespac, RedDOT, Frontier, and our other suppliers that helped us; last but not least our riders who did an excellent job fundraising on their own.
We are already planning what we should do next, so if anyone is interested in a ride please let me know (we might do a different ride or our own ride), I will be doing the RTCC again in 2013. The main thing we learned from the ride this year is that you do not have to be a hardened cyclist, nor do you really need to do 100km weekend day rides to be prepared. If you take it slow, you can stop many times have lot of fun, and enjoy the whole atmosphere. If you take it fast you can get a huge adrenaline rush and experience the Tour de France feeling.
Just to recap our 2012 Team WOW riders were:
Anne Belanger
Mark Silvester
Brian Donaghy
Norman Nelson
Brian Johnson
Sharon Kenny
Charlene Van Dyck
Sheila Patterson
Jim Allan
Stan Franssen
Karl Kenny
Tami MacKenzie
Kim Mech
Tara Forsyth
Konrad Mech
Tom Portfors
Kurtis Wadley
Trevor Bowkett