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Bob Freed and Dave Pryor: The Last Waltz

Episode 30

“It’s not just get out on your bike and ride. It’s come together as a group.”

Do know someone who’s been affected by cancer? Join Joan this week as she sits down with Bob Freed and Dave Pryor (race director and long time committee member, respectively) as they discuss the Pennsylvania Perimeter Ride Against Cancer (PPRAC). Get the history behind how it all started in 1983, the organizations that the proceeds go to, and the plan for the ‘last waltz’ ride in Lewisburg next summer.

Bob Freed and Dave Prior - Pennsylvania Perimeter Ride Against Cancer
Bob Freed and Dave Pryor – Pennsylvania Perimeter Ride Against Cancer

Pennsylvania Perimeter Ride Against Cancer Website: PPRACRide.org

Thanks to B Braun Medical Inc. for sponsoring the Talk of the T-Town Podcast. BBraun is a global leader in infusion therapy and pain management, B Braun develops, manufactures and markets innovative medical products to the healthcare community. They are also strong believers in supporting the quality of life in the communities where their employees work and live.


Transcript

Joan Hanscom:

Welcome to the Talk of the T-Town podcast where we discuss all things track cycling. Broadcasting from the Valley Preferred Cycling Center, I’m your Host and Executive Director, Joan Hanscom. Along with my co-host, Athletic Director, Andy Lakatosh.

Joan Hanscom:

Welcome to the Talk of the T-Town podcast. I am your host, Joan Hanscom, the Executive Director here at the track, and today, we are going into the community a little bit more. We’re not talking about track cycling. We are talking about other really cool things that are going to be happening here at Valley Preferred. I’m excited to have our guests with us today, Robert Freed, who is the Race Director for the Pennsylvania Perimeter Ride Against Cancer, and Dave Prior, who, oh boy, who does a lot of things. He has this day job and then, he has his side gig, as we hashtag side gig, who does things like Monkey Knife Fight and PA Unpaved, so we wanted to talk to these guys and hear what they’re up to and let everybody know what they’re going to be doing here at the track this summer. Yeah, and how you, our listeners, can get involved.

Joan Hanscom:

With that, let’s start with you Robert Freed, Race Director. You’ve been doing this ride since 1983. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how this thing got started because, by the way, when I didn’t live here, I knew about this ride. I had heard about it. I heard new people… people I know from the industry were doing this ride, and I was always curious about it, but now I know the person behind it, which is cool. Tell us about it. Tell us about its genesis, tell us about you and why you do this big thing every year.

Bob Freed:

Okay. Well, I’m going to start back in 1981. I had a cousin who is a good friend of mine who had fought cancer for much of his life. At the age of 17, he thought he had it conquered. He had developed into a high school runner, and one of his goals was to run a marathon. In the fall of 1981, he and I ran Marine Corp Marathon together. Shortly after that point, his cancer symptoms came back, and he was diagnosed that he was no longer free of cancer. It only took a few months for it to ravage his body and he died in early 1982.

Bob Freed:

I was a young man at that time, and it really hit me. I wanted to do something, so the idea of riding around the perimeter of Pennsylvania to raise money to fight cancer popped into my brain. The event took place or got its origin… I went to my pastor at the time and approached him with the idea and he said he had done some previous cancer fundraisers and he said, “Yeah, I’m onboard with it.” We threw together this thousand-mile ride that roughly followed the perimeter of Pennsylvania. That took place in 1983.

Joan Hanscom:

The rest, they say, is history.

Bob Freed:

That was the origin.

Joan Hanscom:

Yeah, the origin story. That first year, you raised an insanely large amount of money for, A, that time of… like, back then, for a bike racing or a bike riding event, and tell us a little bit about where the funds go because I think what you do for a non-profit ride is very unique. Not all non-profits do what you do. Explain a little bit to folks where the money goes and how you disburse the funds.

Bob Freed:

Okay. Well, we’re a very grass roots organization. Our committee is basically people who have ridden, have been on this ride for years. The average length of time that our committee has been involved with this ride is 22 years.

Joan Hanscom:

That’s amazing.

Bob Freed:

We have a very dedicated committee and all volunteer. The idea was that we’re going to raise this money, we’re going to keep it grassroots, we’re going to keep our expenses at a minimum. When the ride originated, like I said, my pastor friend got involved, he organized churches around the state that would house us and feed us. That was how we started out. The first ride we had just over 20 riders, and very little support. Before the time of cell phone, no GPS, it was at times a little bit of a shit show just trying to find out where we were going, get addresses. Some of the cue sheets we had were handwritten by me. I had no experience in this, but we made it, we made it back to Allentown in our first year.

Joan Hanscom:

It’s amazing, we forget that now. Right? We’re super spoiled. We have Strava files, we have Map My Ride, Ride with GPS, we have all the technology. We forget that remember like cue sheets. I remember the first, like the first big, organized fun ride thing that I did, I had the cue sheet. There was an art to folding it. You had to have binder clips attached to the cables on your bike that held it in place. Then, you’d flip it over to figure out the next turn and heaven help you if the road wasn’t actually like… there wasn’t a sign on the road where the turn was supposed to be. It used to be really hard.

Bob Freed:

Right

Joan Hanscom:

I forgot about cue sheets until you just said that. Yeah, we used to have… there was a real art to how you folded the paper, and you just have to flip it over, but yeah, that’s crazy because now we just are so spoiled. Like, hey, send me the link to your Garmin file.

Bob Freed:

Yeah.

Joan Hanscom:

Dave, if everybody… average life a committee member is 22 years, how long have you been involved and tell us a little bit about how you got on the team?

Dave Prior:

I’m a youngster on this. I’ve been only involved 18 years.

Joan Hanscom:

Slacker.

Dave Prior:

This will be my… I know… this will be my 10th ride coming up. I started 2000… numbers and math are hard, so 2003. It was the Oswego ride. Selene and I, Selene Yeager, who more of you know her than me, we’re married, and we like doing big rides like this. Same thing like you, Joan, we he had heard about it for years. Pat Corpora was a rider. He was president of the book division at Rodale, at the time we both worked at Rodale. He would take his out for his training rides and say, “I’m doing this six-day ride from this and that to raise money. Let’s go out and ride some hills together because it’s always a really hilly ride.” He would tear our legs off of us just… he’s a machine.

Dave Prior:

We got the seed in our head, like, “Oh, wow. Maybe we could do this someday.” That’s [inaudible 00:07:42] big and adventurous and hard and kind of the things we do. We fell into it as a thing we do in our bike rides more so than our fighting cancer advocacy life. We weren’t there yet. We weren’t hit as much by cancer then, but the one hook to us was, at that point, by the time we got involved, Pastor Paul, Bob’s pastor, had moved up to Palmerton and was working at a Holy Trinity Church up there. That’s where the ride then finished every time. That happens to be Selene’s hometown, we had just had our daughter, she was one years old. It’s like, “Well, this is a way we could go back and do a vacation together. Let’s ride every day for our first vacation after having a newborn,” because we can leave our daughter at her parents for the week, and we’ll be back in town right where she is. How perfect is this?

Dave Prior:

It worked out and it was wonderful and amazing, and sitting on Selene’s wheel, granted, I try and do that now still, but on that last day it was that like baby draw like tractor beam trying to see her baby again was what pulled us all the way back. That was amazing. We got to Palmerton and the ride changed our lives. We’ll get into more of the emotional thing, but it is… when you say grassroots and it’s a really tight group sleeping on church and gym floors every night and you really get to know each other, good, bad, and the ugly, but it’s almost all good. It’s all really good people doing amazing cause who have been really touched by this.

Dave Prior:

At that point in our lives, early 30s, [inaudible 00:09:18] shape of our lives. We could do this all day. We could ride this. There was a lot of people on this ride we saw on the start and like, “There’s no way they’re going to finish day one. How is this going to be possible? This is hard. Don’t they know this is hard? They’re in trouble”, but they did it. They rode every day, and it was exhausting and brutal and they were empty at the end of it. They refueled at night on the church dinner, and then they got up the next day and did it again. Then, at some point then during the week, they’d tell us why they were going through all this because this ride is so much easier than the cancer that their spouse or parent or family member or [inaudible 00:09:51] friend was dealing with. They were just motivated to do something and raise this money and just fight back in some way. Then, we were hooked. Now, this is the only event that we just do every time that [inaudible 00:10:02].

Joan Hanscom:

Yeah. I think that is something that you can’t underestimate the power of. People, sometimes in the light of something like cancer or another horrible disease, you feel powerless. You are at the mercy of medical science, you are at the mercy of what somebody’s body is doing at the cellular level, but if you can go out and do something that you feel is moving the ball forward in some way, shape or form, it’s incredibly powerfully motivating. For me, I’ve had that same feeling about doing the MS ride. My mother had MS, so when I would go out and ride, there was this special extra motivation for me because I was like, “There’s nothing I can do for my mother, but I can pedal for this cause and hope that we help somebody else.”

Joan Hanscom:

Yeah, it’s a powerful motivator and you start to see what the impacts on real lives that that has. Racing is cool, let’s not kid ourselves. Bike racing is cool, it’s fun, but it’s sort of… it’s driven through achieving something. Right? Whether the process or going faster, and something like this for something bigger than your self-achievement. It’s for something bigger and I think that’s what drives an event that started in 1983 to still be going on now in 2021.

Dave Prior:

Right. It’s raised over two million dollars to fight cancer.

Joan Hanscom:

Which is an incredible number, especially given the number of people that do the ride every year. You’ve kept it small. This is not something like going way back to the Ride for the Roses that Lance Armstrong used to do where there was like a gazillion people that came out and did the ride to raise money. This is a small group. This is a small… you deliberately keep it to a small number of riders. I mean, not small. It’s not five, but it’s a small group of riders, so the fact that you’re raising so much money is really quite incredible, I think. That speaks to your dedication. Where did you get your riders is the question? How do you get to the group that you have roll out on the road every year?

Bob Freed:

Well, I’ll address that a little bit. Back when we started, it was actually difficult to get riders. The first few rides we had to advertise, we were in Bicycling, we were in bike shops all around, and gradually, as kind of word of mouth, a lot of local people got involved with the event.

Bob Freed:

Just let me go back and go back to the original ride, which was a thousand miles, two weeks. That was going to be the end of it for me. It was just planned as a one-year ride. That’s all that I had in mind. During the planning phases, my father was diagnosed with cancer, and he passed away the day we returned on the first ride. We decided, hey, we better keep this going, and that’s how it evolved. We decided let’s go 500 miles rather than a thousand. That would be an easier way to recruit riders, I think. It’s hard for anyone to take two weeks off consecutively in their life.

Bob Freed:

We went to a 500-mile ride, and we also went to a point-to-point ride. We started locations outside of Lehigh Valley. Any place 500 miles north, south, east or west basically we started, Ottawa, Montreal, West Virginia, Ohio, all over the place, Vermont, so this grassroots thing it became very personal to a lot of people. As word of mouth and people became involved, it became very easy to fill our spots. One of the things that we wanted to do was to keep this an intimate experience where we all got to know each other throughout the week. Every night we have a meal provided for us and following the meal, we have a program where riders talk about their experiences with cancer. It really drew our group together and when people join our group, it takes them a couple days to figure out that this is something special that is going on within this community. Now we fill up very easily.

Joan Hanscom:

Yes, I can imagine. I can imagine. Like I said, I mean, I had heard about it when I was living very far away from Pennsylvania, so it is definitely something that folks recognize. One of the beneficiaries of your ride is Dreams Come True. Can you talk to us about that, what they do?

Bob Freed:

Go ahead, Dave.

Dave Prior:

They are a local organization, also very, very grassroots. A couple of them running the show. It’s one of those places where they help terminally ill children fulfill a dream. It’s go to Hawaii, it’s go to Disney, go to a sport event and meet a third baseman of the Phillies that’s their hero, a variety of things like that. Children who are in it in very difficult, hard ways need something, a bright star to look forward to, and this is the group that pulls that together. We help raise money for them to help make those dream possible. 15% of all the money we raise goes to that organization, and Bob, how much does that tend to add up to? A lot.

Bob Freed:

I was just trying to run some of those numbers through my head. I think it’s over $400,000 that we’ve donated to Dream Come True.

Joan Hanscom:

Which is astonishing. Then, the bulk, the 85% of that fundraising goes to American Cancer Society, so I think that we’re trying to hammer home here is that a hundred percent of the monies raised goes to the cancer charities of your choice, which was where I was going way back when we first started talking about it. There’s been so much controversy about some of these fundraising rides where like suddenly a lot of this money is routed to administrative expense or it’s routed to overhead, and I think that this is… it’s incredible testament to the work you guys do, the work that the committee does to pull this off, and like you said, sleeping on church floors.

Joan Hanscom:

I’m an even director and I have been for 20 years, so I have a full appreciation of what it takes to organize something like that, but I think a lot of people don’t know what goes into route design, what goes into finding places to sleep, finding people to feed you, so that meals are taken care of, like you said. Then, I think that that’s something that I love to peel the curtain back on that and let people appreciate what goes into this. I mean, you both do a big, heavy lift on this thing. Talk a little bit about what that is. Talk about what… yes, you’re not using paper maps anymore. You’re probably using some more sophisticated equipment to make your route.

Dave Prior:

We still give out cue sheets. We still do the cue sheets.

Joan Hanscom:

There you go. For all you listeners who want to throwback to binder clips on your… people don’t even have cables on the front of their bike anymore.

Bob Freed:

Wow. Weird. I don’t know how they do it.

Joan Hanscom:

Where do you clip it now? Handlebar bag with the thing? Yeah. Talk about the work that goes into this and I think this is interesting to know because your ride is not annual, it’s biannual, and I believe that the biannual thing is because it is so hard to organize something like this. Talk about the work that goes into making this thing.

Bob Freed:

Well, if we go back to the beginning again. We decided after the initial ride to do it again, and we thought, “Man, this was really hard putting this together.” I had never been on an organized event before. I’d never run an organized event before, but I learned quickly that recruiting committee members and dividing up responsibilities is how this thing would be done. Every other year, to help out the people who planned, so they wouldn’t get burnt out, plus we had a child every other year for the first couple years, so that helped balance it out a little bit, but what has developed is a committee where people just dive in, everyone has their kind of niche in the planning.

Bob Freed:

Dave, I’m just going to say, Dave does a lot of committee work. He has hands in a bunch of things with it, but for instance, Dave would do mapping. We have another committee who would work on the lodging in city A, another person who would work on food in city B, another person who would work on the social media side of it. As it’s evolved, I’ve just more or less have become an overseer, I think, and the committee is really who gets the work done.

Joan Hanscom:

I think you mentioned an interesting thing that folks should appreciate, too. You know what makes things… when you’re an event organizer and you run your event in the same place every year, it gets real easy. Right? You have the same existing relationship with the sports marketing group, you have the same relationship with the hotels, the tourism board, whatever, you have a relationship established in the place because you go there every year. You guys don’t do that. You make it extra hard on yourself because you do a different route every year, which means every year you’re seeing new roads, doing something new and cool, so it’s interesting because you’re doing a different route, but it’s also a much bigger lift because you’ve got to find new supporters along each route, which has got to make life a little bit harder.

Joan Hanscom:

Dave, you’re always exploring new roads then. Tell us about that. Tell us why that decision to go somewhere new every year and help people understand what goes into that every year.

Bob Freed:

I’ll start, Dave, then you can finish. One of the ideas for starting at a different place every year was we wanted to keep riders returning. It’s kind of like this family, and we didn’t want to ride from Vermont to the Lehigh Valley every year for five consecutive years. We just thought we would lose those riders, so we decided a different point of start every other year and new scenery every other year. That was a way of enticing riders to come back again. Dave, why don’t you tell them a little bit about how you find [crosstalk 00:21:42]

Dave Prior:

Usually, we have a wrap up after a ride in September, talk about how it went, things we would alter and change, things we might help with all of it, but then really start thinking about, all right, where next. Where should we start? Often, the people who have been there 20 or more years will say, “You know, we haven’t been to this part of Vermont in forever. We haven’t started in the south in a long time, in West Virginia or things like that,” but we kind of have the radius of where we could start a ride from.

Dave Prior:

In previous ones, we would try and get in as many states as possible because we thought that would help tell the story to when we’re doing fundraising because every rider has to raise thousands of dollars by themselves and tell the story about [inaudible 00:22:25] ride they’re going to do and why people should support them. We found over the years that really the story is we’re doing something remarkable to fight cancer and there’s enough people now who are in the fight to go, “I will support this.” You could start in Allentown and do a six-day ride and come back to Allentown and I think we’d get the same amount of donations and financial support we need to go from here to here to here, but it does kind of help with that. It helps recruit riders that say, “Wow, I’m riding from Maine down to Pennsylvania.” It’s looking at those sort of things.

Dave Prior:

Then, the hardest part is finding places that we could stay every night. Finding a place that has a large enough school with a gym floor where we can set up all of our air mattresses or a church that would have that sort of space, that would have showers. They could also have… usually, we kind of draw from churches, social organizations like VFWs and Lions Clubs for meals, and some sort of place that has… a high school and a middle school, so they would have enough space. Usually, those schools have enough gym space and adults sized showers. We have… I think we stayed in an elementary school once and [inaudible 00:23:31] showers.

Joan Hanscom:

The toilets are like four inches off the floor.

Dave Prior:

The toilets are [crosstalk 00:23:34] yeah. Beggars can’t be choosers, but-

Joan Hanscom:

Quads get a good workout.

Dave Prior:

… [crosstalk 00:23:40] shower. Those schools don’t have showers, so we didn’t have a shower there. Then, getting super creative, like, but there’s a YMCA a half mile down there, so we can walk down there and get to use their showers. It’s that sort of scrambling. There’s a group of six that do the housing lodging committee and then, while they’re doing that, then there’s also trying to find meals along the way that we can get at. That’s the hard part.

Dave Prior:

Finding roads in between, I [crosstalk 00:24:06] it, is not easy, but it’s a lot easier than finding the actual places who will put a group of 85 to a hundred people up for free or minimal cost, so that we can keep that hundred percent fundraising level.

Joan Hanscom:

Yeah. I think that-

Dave Prior:

That’s the hard work.

Joan Hanscom:

… that actually goes to where we are right now, right, and what the challenges the ride is facing in the COVID times when you couldn’t put 80 people in a gym to rest for the night because we couldn’t be indoors. Talk a little bit about how COVID impacted the event and what the impacts of that are.

Bob Freed:

Well, as we work through this whole process, and we had originally planned our next ride for 2021, we were just kind of on the edge of our seats as to whether we could have this in July of 2021. In January, when things were still closed up, vaccines weren’t accessible yet, we made the decision to push off our 2021 ride to 2022, so that… looking back at it now, maybe we could have done it this summer, but I feel very relieved that by 2022, everything is… not everything, but it’s going to be much more normalized.

Joan Hanscom:

Yeah.

Bob Freed:

Our ride, it’s so social. It’s not just get out on your bike and ride. It’s come together as a group. Go out after you get riding and we can sit and have a beer in a local tavern, meet together at night and share. I didn’t feel that this year we would be able to do that, so we just pushed it off.

Joan Hanscom:

Well, there’s a financial impact, too, though. Right? Finding people to… Everybody’s been impacted by this, so I’m sure the non-profits that have supported you along the route, or types of non-profits that have supported you along the route, they’re supporting other things right now because people were hurt by this. Getting folks to pony up food for 80 people had to be challenging. Right? It’s an allocation of resources question, I’m sure. Like, it can’t be easy when people are supporting folks who maybe have lost their jobs or local restaurants who’ve closed or… I think there’s probably a balance to sometimes would probably be psyched to have 80 folks roll in because there’s going to be a positive effect of a economic impact for the community, but others are going to be like, “We’re not resourced to put you up right now,” I’m sure.

Dave Prior:

It was already being challenging before COVID. We had already been looking at ways we were going to alter and change things up because it was getting really, really hard to find that throughout the state. Trying to keep on quiet, safe roads means you’re going through quiet, safe towns. We’re not riding into Buffalo, New York. We’re trying to avoid a city like Buffalo. We don’t want to ride in and out of there, so trying to find towns on the outskirts and they’re having hard times, too. I mean, it’s… without delving into politics, it’s been-

Joan Hanscom:

Yes.

Dave Prior:

Obviously, if you watch anything, it’s rough out there for a lot of towns, so it’s been hard the last say three or four rides to really pull all that together. Sometimes, it’s like that week of we’ve actually found a meal.

Joan Hanscom:

Right, right.

Bob Freed:

It’s been, the last 20 years, it’s become progressively more difficult, and the people who are responsible for finding that lodging and food, especially the food I think, it’s become very, very difficult. We’re in our planning and we have town A is good, now we’re looking for a hundred miles away, 90 miles away for town B. They strike out at every place in town B, so now we’re looking at another town that’s a hundred, 90 miles away for day two, and it kind of burned out the committee a little bit.

Joan Hanscom:

I think the good takeaway is you found a way to pivot. Right? You’ve got a creative solution. Right? You’ve got something going for this summer as a precursor to… well, let’s break the news. Next year is the last one we think. Is the plan for the final hurrah for next year? But you’ve got stuff planned for this summer to kick off that and it’s got a… I think you’ve found a creative solution, so talk about this summer. Talk about what you’re doing. Let’s not be a downer and talk about how hard it is. Let’s talk about the cool stuff you’ve got coming.

Bob Freed:

All right. Well, let me give you a little backstory on the direction we’re going now. Last ride… well, I’m getting a little older and this is pretty time consuming in my life. My wife has been support from the first ride to the last ride. It’s getting more challenging for her, and I was kind of having some just thoughts about where are we going to go with this. Last ride, 2019, pretty much everyone on the committee came to me privately and said, “You know, Bob, I think this is the last ride for me.” At the end of that ride I’m thinking, “I guess this was it.” This was the grand hurrah, but we didn’t even really have a grand finale.

Bob Freed:

Dave and I brainstormed a little bit and we said, “Well, let’s see if I can get this committee back because I am not going to recruit 10 brand-new committee members and put them into place and try to do this ride as it was. Let’s do something for our last hurrah.” We decided to make it hopefully a little bit of a reunion ride where we can get a lot of past riders, maybe some people who are not into cycling quite as much anymore, but we decided to pick one location, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and do three days of riding with multiple routes every day for multiple ability riders.

Bob Freed:

In the past, this ride was city A to city B, and it’s 90 miles and it’s 8,000 feet of climbing. Some days are really a bitch, and that kind of kept some people from joining us, some of the past riders who are getting older and maybe not putting as many miles in. I got one comment last ride that said, “Please, can we do less miles and have more smiles?” That became our mantra for 2021. I am stepping down, our committee is stepping down, but it’s not necessarily the last perimeter ride. We’re handing it over to the American Cancer Society. We’re not sure which direction they’re going to go with it. Are they going to go back to a six day, 500-mile ride? Are they going to do… Like you said, finding new venues every year, maybe they’ll go to a ride across the state where you hit state colleges and you do that same ride every year, so you sort of have everything in place year to year, or maybe they’ll do it as a three day event as we’re going to do 2022.

Bob Freed:

Dave, do you want to talk about our kickoff ride that we are getting geared up for?

Dave Prior:

We realized that we were already missing each other through all this. We talk about how things happen in the pandemic. We were fortunate not to be planning a ride last year or this year really once we decided it wasn’t going to work, so we haven’t really had that kind of hardship, but we were really missing each other. We did miss sleeping on gym floors with each other and those connections at night and even the sound of someone deflating their air mattress at 4:30 in the morning because they need two hours to get ready for the ride apparently. I still don’t understand that, but I miss it now.

Joan Hanscom:

That’s hilarious. Less sleep is better.

Dave Prior:

Right, right. Sure. I love you. You know who you are, and I do love you. We decided that… and also when we had Monkey Knife Fight in the spring, we were able to put that event on for 300 people and a lot of the people who volunteer for that are perimeter riders and perimeter community members. It was our chance to finally see each other again and how great it was to be either riding or helping out people or just being involved with something. It’s like, everyone came back [inaudible 00:33:06] thank you for doing that [inaudible 00:33:07] through that, thank you for inviting me to help out, I had such a great day, it was so great to be back involved.

Dave Prior:

We had already been thinking about getting together this July for when we would have ridden, the start of the ride, just to do something, and then was like, “Well, let’s do something, something. Let’s build off of this momentum. Let’s be excited.” Momentum is moving forward by then, that was early April. You could already see momentum was going forward with vaccinations and with what’s capable to do outside still, what’s capable to do in settings that aren’t indoors. We can pull all this together and we have a great venue we can pull this together at, which is the velodrome with the food and the beverages and places to gather, the patio, parking, which is always hard for events. We can invite all of us back together and go for a ride.

Dave Prior:

We know all of these amazing routes that go out of Trexlertown and come back. With that kind of setup, we could then also invite all of our friends who’ve always said, “I’ve always wanted to do a perimeter ride, but I could never pull it off or I’m not sure. Maybe next time.” Let’s invite them out for a ride and let’s get them to see what this is a little bit like, talk to them about it during the day, gather around with some food and beer afterwards, and talk them into coming out in 2022 for something that is more doable for everyone and it’s not six days across the state or six days… I think one day [inaudible 00:34:28] six days, 600 miles and thousands and thousands [inaudible 00:34:32] of climbing. It won’t be quite like that, so I think we will be able to get more people to come out together and have a day back together again. We are moving in that direction. The state is opening up limitations at the end of this month, so by July 31st barring… things happen. We know how to change on the turn of a dime if we need to.

Joan Hanscom:

Yeah.

Dave Prior:

We’ve gotten very good at that, so let’s see if we can stay good at moving forward now.

Joan Hanscom:

Yeah. I think we just opened for business here this week. Actually, we had our first Tuesday night race-

Dave Prior:

Wow. Hey.

Joan Hanscom:

… this week and we had our first Saturday race last Saturday. What you were talking about is so real. There is just an appetite to be out seeing people and doing things safely. I think we are getting to the point where we are doing things safely, but we’ve never seen a turnout like we had on Tuesday night in years. People were out, they were buying food, they were having drinks, they were sitting… we had people lined around the rail. It was fantastic. There was such a good vibe on Tuesday night here and I think that’s what you’re touching on. You’re touching on this like, we need community.

Dave Prior:

Yes.

Joan Hanscom:

We’ve all been sort of in our weird, lonely little bubbles for a year, and man, there is an appetite to get out and just be with our people. I think you’re getting the band back together and that’s amazing. You’re inviting more people into the band.

Dave Prior:

Yes.

Joan Hanscom:

I think, Dave, you and I have had so many conversations about this now. We are at this incredible moment I think, it’s just this incredible period of opportunity where we can open the community up. We can invite people in, and we can use the thing we all love to grow our community. We all love bikes, so let’s use this thing to grow our community to do good things. You guys are doing good things. You’re doing really great work and we here at the track, are so excited to be part of it. Right? We’re excited to invite people who may never have seen velodrome racing but have done your ride every year or every other year, to come here and see what we do and be part of our community, and we get to join yours. What an incredible inflection point we’re at. Right? We are at a point where we can… because there’s so much excitement for getting community back together, because there’s so much excitement about being outdoors together, we’re at this great, incredibly powerful moment if we capitalize on it.

Joan Hanscom:

I know I’m really excited to have you guys come because we can be… it’s like the first day of kindergarten when you make new friends. That’s how I look at this. I’m like, we’re the first day of kindergarten. We’re going to make new friends. This is cool. I’m not going to be nervous like… I tell this story all the time. I was the most high-strung kindergartner ever. My mother was a grammar school teacher, and my brother was much older. He would come home and have homework, so my mother, to keep me entertained, would give me homework. Therefore, by the first… the night before kindergarten, I was a nervous wreck because I was worried about being able to count to a hundred forwards and backwards and say my ABCs front and back.

Dave Prior:

Wow. Still can’t do that.

Joan Hanscom:

My mother’s like… yeah, no. I can’t do it now either. My mother was like, “You’re an idiot.” She’s like, “The other kids are going to be eating glue. You shouldn’t worry about counting to a hundred.” There is that sort of anxiety, but there was also this thrill of, oh, I’m going to meet other people and it’s going to be so exciting.

Joan Hanscom:

I think that that’s where we are right now with bikes. There’s so many people with bikes and it’s like the first day of kindergarten.

Dave Prior:

That’s true.

Joan Hanscom:

Let’s meet them all and let’s do all the cool things together. That’s such a moment, so we’re excited you’re coming.

Dave Prior:

We’re excited that you’re having us.

Bob Freed:

Yeah. I go back to the very opening of the velodrome and racing there a little tiny bit, but also attending Friday night races. The velodrome has always been a hub of community of cyclists and runners in the valley. You’d go there on a Friday night, and you always run into people who you haven’t seen for a little while, a year, a month, but people who you see out on the road, people who you race against, people who are just bicycle enthusiasts, and the velodrome has always been that hub in that community. That’s one of the reasons why we are so happy to start our July 31st event at the velodrome and partner with you and help bring in some people who will be at the velodrome in the future, I’m sure.

Joan Hanscom:

Yeah. Tell folks what you’re going to be doing. You’re going to be setting up in the plaza though before that, before the 31st, so that people can learn about how to participate and what they can do. Talk a little bit about that. What’s the plan? We don’t need the exact specifics, but you’re going to come out, you’re going to share some information with folks on Friday, so if people are listening, the moral of the story is, if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, “Well, this sounds like a cool thing to get involved with.”

Joan Hanscom:

You’re going to be out or people from your committees are going to be out on a Friday night and you’re going to promote participation. They can meet you, they can talk to you, they can find out how to get involved, and then, on the 31st, you’re going to do a ride here, which is cool because that’s a weekend we have UCI racing, so you all are going to go out and ride bikes while we, Maura and I, are going to be working hard on producing track racing. When you finish, you’re going to come back and you’re going to have some great food from the Sticky Pig, you’re going to get some beers from the Shangy’s Craft Beer Handle Bar Café, which is awesome because, by the way, we’ve got a great assortment of beers. Putting in the plug right now for the bar.

Dave Prior:

Can’t wait.

Joan Hanscom:

You’re going to hang out and watch bike racing. Right? Who doesn’t want to do that? Listeners, who doesn’t want to do that? Who doesn’t want to ride bikes and then, watch bikes and eat great food and have some beer?

Dave Prior:

Hang out with good people.

Joan Hanscom:

Yeah. Hang out with good people.

Dave Prior:

What a perfect day. What a perfect day. We’re going to set up… we haven’t figure out, again, not finalizing plans, but having some Friday nights beforehand, having space there just to chat with people, though I know in just walking around with a Perimeter Ride shirt on, we’re going to meet other former PPRAC riders and people who, “Oh, yeah, this might be the year I do it now.” It’s going to be great to be able to just be at the track and talking to people, just walking around in turns and doing that. A little bit first there, but also, occasional nights we’ll do stuff there.

Dave Prior:

We do have the website set up on PPRACRide.org, that’s P-P-R-A-C Ride dot org, and there’s a button for register for the kickoff and that has information on how to get to the kickoff ride is what we’re calling this. We’ll be there and it’s going to be $30. We’re just covering some minor expenses to be out on course and that will get you a [inaudible 00:41:44]-

Joan Hanscom:

Woo hoo.

Dave Prior:

… an aid station, and insurance, that’s for us.

Joan Hanscom:

Always good.

Dave Prior:

[crosstalk 00:41:52]

Bob Freed:

If you want to register for the 2022 Perimeter Ride, we’ll waive the fee for the July 31st ride.

Dave Prior:

Yes, [crosstalk 00:42:02].

Joan Hanscom:

Oh, there’s the hook right there.

Dave Prior:

Commit to the big one. Those three day [crosstalk 00:42:07] and then we’ll come back and, yeah, like you said, the Sticky Pig will be open, the Shangy’s Beer thing will be open, so riders can buy some food and buy a beer. Then, we’ll come out to the patio and we’ll talk about the day, we’ll talk about next year, we’ll talk about anything in between.

Joan Hanscom:

Nice.

Dave Prior:

We’re just looking forward [inaudible 00:42:23] together again.

Joan Hanscom:

Then, let’s jump ahead to 2022 and just you’ve sort of teased it a little bit. It’s going to be based out of Lewisburg. Right?

Dave Prior:

Right.

Joan Hanscom:

Which is where Dave, you do a lot of rad things, and which I’m really looking forward to. Then-

Dave Prior:

Right. You’re signed up for our big event this year.

Joan Hanscom:

I’m so excited. It’s so exciting to be signed up for things and then they’re going to happen. Right? This is amazing. Yes, for our listeners, I’m signed up for Unpaved. All of my teammates are doing it with me, and we have not been able to do big events together, so we’re all super excited to come out for Unpaved. You’re doing the last ride or the last-

Dave Prior:

Right. The last waltz.

Bob Freed:

The last waltz.

Joan Hanscom:

The last waltz in Lewisburg. When? How? What do people need to know? They can go to the website, but give them the 20-

Dave Prior:

The website will be there, so just a quick backstory on that. As we were deciding what to do for our last hurrah, last waltz, and where to base it out of, clearly, I’ve got great relationships with the great people in the Susquehanna River Valley and tourism. That’s the first place I went once restrictions lifted last summer was up to that region. Joan, you and I have talked about what a great area this is to ride bikes in. That is also in a absolute beautiful great place to ride bikes in, so we just wanted some place a little… we thought about having it here, but we ride here a lot. Let’s do something different. Let’s have a weekend out there together and the town is opening their arms for us, so we’ll be staying at Bucknell University dorms if you choose to, or you can choose to stay in a hotel. There’s a lot of great hotels up around there.

Dave Prior:

We won’t have gym floors and air mattresses, so that one has been ruled out, unless you want to book your own church floor. Feel free. We’re not getting involved in that again this time. You can choose your own lodging, but it will be based all out of there and we’ll have a ride on… we’ll get together on Thursday night for our first rider meeting, and then we’ll have a ride on Friday. Should be all road and probably in the 80-ish mile with options lower than that. We’re still working on the routes for that, but I think 80 is kind of our long spot, long-distance rides for this. Then, on Saturday, same thing, but in a different area. Say this time we’ll go head to the west instead of the east, and also do an 80-ish mile road ride. We’ll also look to doing a gravel ride on that Saturday that could be an option for riders. I happen to know some great gravel roads in that area that we use for Unpaved at Susquehanna River Valley, so we might treat some riders to check that out if they’re so inclined.

Dave Prior:

Then, have a party Saturday night and it will be a party. We have a venue for that at Bucknell and we’ll have bands, and we’ll have food and drink, and we’ll have a lot of getting back together. Maybe we’ll play The Last Waltz songs or something. We’re still trying to get Robbie Robertson to come out for it. Then, Sunday, we’ll do a shorter ride, maybe to the north that time and maybe in the 60 mile-ish range and just hug each other at the end of it and see what we do after that.

Joan Hanscom:

That’s rad.

Dave Prior:

Did I cover everything, Bob?

Bob Freed:

That sounds pretty much what we’re doing, Dave.

Joan Hanscom:

That’s rad.

Dave Prior:

It’s in mid-July next year, 2022, July 14th to the 17th.

Bob Freed:

14th through the 17th. Yep.

Joan Hanscom:

Nice.

Dave Prior:

I’m looking for [inaudible 00:46:02]… we will have a one-day ride option as well, so a rider can just do the Saturday ride if they’re so inclined. Registration is $375 for the three day ride and that will get you the ride and the cue sheets and also, the devices, how to get [inaudible 00:46:19] the GPS. We’ll do that, too.

Joan Hanscom:

The concession to the modern era.

Dave Prior:

Yeah. An aid station, and then you can also choose how you want to do food and lodging in Lewisburg. It can be a food plan they can buy into. You can, again, do dorms if you want to buy into that or you can stay at whatever beautiful hotel if you’d rather do that. Those are options. Then, riders have to raise $1500, a minimum of $1500 to participate, so if you sign up, you’ve got a year from now to raise at least $1500. Most of our riders raise more than that and that’s always a challenge. We’ll have incentives for that. The more you raise, the more likely be to win great prizes from Giant Bikes and other great sponsors that we have. [crosstalk 00:47:06]

Bob Freed:

I [crosstalk 00:47:06] give a shout out to Giant Bikes. Last year we developed a relationship with them, and they’ve come across with lots of items to raffle away and we gave away one Giant, a very nice Giant bike last year. We kind of figured out a raffle system for our highest fundraisers and one person was drawn and received a nice Giant bike.

Joan Hanscom:

Nice. See, you do good things, and you get good things.

Dave Prior:

Just to finish that up, the one day ride is to be a hundred dollars-

Joan Hanscom:

Oh, okay.

Dave Prior:

… no matter what distance you choose. If you choose just to ride Saturday… but you also still have to raise money. That’s part of the PPRAC mindset, it’s part of who we are. Then, you have to raise at least $500 to participate.

Joan Hanscom:

Right on. Right on. I know speaking for the Velodrome, we are very excited to play our little part in all of this. We’re excited to see you and all of your riders here at the track and I want to thank you for giving us some of your time to talk about it. We are striving so hard to become a true cycling center here for all disciplines, and that includes rides like this one. We are very, very grateful to have you give us of your time today, but also, that you’re going to come here and do some cool stuff with us over the summer. Thank you very much both for joining us this morning and, yeah, this has been the Talk of the T-Town, and you all should go and sign up for this very, very cool event because it’s a good cause, it’s done right, and it’s done by super good people. Thanks so much for listening.

Joan Hanscom:

This has been the Talk of the T-Town podcast with host Joan Hanscom and Andy Lakatosh. Thanks for joining us for this week’s episode, brought to you by B. Braun Medical Inc. head on over to our website, TheVelodrome.com where you can check out the show notes and subscribe so you’ll never miss an episode.