Thank You!!
Many, many thanks to all 525 riders who participated in the first annual Ride For A Reason. We were just overwhelmed and humbled by the outpouring of love and support for our first event. We are still counting, and donations are still coming in, but as of this writing we have raised just slightly under $70,000!! Awesome! Thanks to everyone who has called and e-mailed with encouragement and stories that inspire us to keep moving forward.
Things were not perfect, but for a first year event that took on the majority of its riders in the last week, we feel pretty good about the fact that everything went off relatively smoothly. We’ve heard the cries for additional water at the stops, better sports drink, more fruit up at Beal’s Point and the suggestion to have people put their names on their raffle tickets. We’re on it!
We’ve also heard from many of you who want to make sure that you are contacted about our future rides and who have businesses who would like to be involved as sponsors next year. Please e-mail your information to RideforaReason@aol.com if you are someone who falls into this category but did not register via Active.com, or were not a sponsor this year. We will add you to our contact list as we ramp up for 2007. Also, please take the time to answer our rider survey and let us know your thoughts.
Finally, we’d like to share a message we received from Davis Phinney himself after we informed his Foundation of our preliminary results:
"Congratulations on the tremendous success of your 'Ride for a Reason" weekend! I'm so happy to hear that everything went so well. In a small irony, consider that your event was a co-LAF/DPF fundraiser, I was also speaking at a big LAF ride here in Denver this past weekend. While primarily focused on the DPF, Lance's foundation will always be near and dear to my heart as my father has started a group (Cyclists Combatting Cancer <ridetolive.org>) that is linked with them.
Primarily though, I want to say; thanks so much for your support of the Davis Phinney Foundation, it means a lot to me.”
Until there is a cure,