So many people over the past couple weeks have asked me if I’m riding the length of Africa for a cause, or raising donations, etc. Honestly, it feels disingenuous to say that I’m doing this for charity, because I’m not. It wasn’t something I thought of, I just really wanted to do an adventure like this! But, that said, it’s also a great opportunity to introduce people to a cause that’s close to my heart, and a disease that not many people are even aware exists.
My mom suffers from a rare and relatively untreatable (and uncureable) rheumatological disease called Scleroderma, which wikipedia defines as “a chronic systemic autoimmune disease (primarily of the skin -“derma”) characterized by fibrosis (or hardening -“sclero”), vascular alterations, and autoantibodies”… Basically it’s causing a hardening of tissues in her body (skin is the most obvious, but also heart, lung, intestinal tissues), causing other issues such as Pulmonary Hypertension, and other problems with drug interactions to treat that, etc etc.
Anyway, since people are asking, and this seems like a great medium to get more of a message out there about this disease, please feel free to make a donation to the Scleroderma Society of Canada if you’d like. 🙂
In other news, I’ve been training lots… 2-3 hours a day on the bike watching TV (getting boring though!)… and today I have an interview with CBC about my trip, hopefully to air this weekend. We’ll see! I have no idea what to expect here…
Been tough keeping weight on even with unlimited chips and ice cream and only 3 hours of biking a day… Going to be insane when that’s 5-12 hours and I don’t have ice cream, lol.
Thanks friends, more updates soon!
