"We work in marketing - we're not curing cancer" - My PMC 2017 Ride

“We work in marketing. We’re not curing cancer.” 

But what if we could? 

I’ve worked for 25+ years in branding, marketing and innovation with some of the world’s greatest companies. If a dollar had been contributed to cancer research every time someone used the phrase “We’re not curing cancer here…” at work, the disease would’ve been defeated a long time ago. 

I'm doing the next best thing that I can do to help cure cancer faster – riding this year’s Pan-Mass Challenge (PMC) on August 5-6. 180+ miles over 2 days from Sturbridge, MA to Provincetown (at the tip of Cape Cod). And our team at Breakaway has become a PMC sponsor and branding / marketing partner. I’m asking for your support in form of a small charitable donation - $25 – that will go directly to the team at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) to help them get closer to a cure faster. Here's the link to my donation page. 

Whether “The C-Word" has struck your parent, relative, sibling, child, spouse, colleague, friend, neighbor, grandparent, in-law, uncle, aunt, cousin, teammate, lover - or you're a survivor yourself, we all know that cancer sucks and needs to be beaten in our lifetime. The photo above is of my wife’s uncle, who was the picture of health until an extremely fast-working form of brain cancer quickly took his life a year ago. I’m riding in honor of him and my other friends and relatives who have battled cancer. 

The people who help patients live longer, with less pain and who are working to find a cure at the world's leading cancer institutes - like Dana-Farber – are the true heroes of the 21st century. The best way can help them compress time and space to reach a cure faster is with money that funds their work. What the PMC team has done over the past 30+ years to help fund Dana-Farber is equally awe-inspiring. The PMC has raised over half a BILLION (with a B) dollars for Dana-Farber over the past 30+ years. Every PMC - the world’s largest annual charity sports event - raises at over $45 million that goes directly to DFCI and funds half of their annual budget.  

Our team at Breakaway is helping PMC reinvent and expand The Resolution by PMC – the annual January event that kicks off the PMC year for many riders, supporters, volunteers and donors – starting with next year’s event. Stay tuned for details. (And if you’ve participated in The Resolution, I’d love to hear your thoughts.)

You can follow our Team Breakaway PMC ride on the weekend of August 5-6 along with my training rides on my Strava, some of the highlights on my Instagram and Twitter, and on our blog at Breakaway. For those in the Boston area, the PMC will also be televised on WBZ TV. If you watch very closely, you may even see the interview about #WhyIRide being shot in this photo...

Thanks in advance for your contribution! 

#WhyIRIde #PanMass2017