On your bike

Life cycle: Jarrod Blaney and Gary Bertwistle in training.

“There’s a buzz that hits you at about the halfway point of a 10-hour ride,” says Jarrod Blamey, managing director of home builder G J Gardner Homes. “Everything hurts, every hill is painful to climb but for a moment you can see the light because you’re halfway.

“Then you realise you need to do it all again before you get to the end.”

For months Blamey got up at 4.45am to ride for two hours before breakfast in preparation for the Tour de Cure, a 10 day bike trek from Sydney to Melbourne via Thredbo and the Snowy Mountains that started on April 1. The brainchild of the managing director of ideas incubator The Ideas Vault, Gary Bertwistle, and marketing professional Geoff Coombes, the event was first run in 2007 from Sydney to Melbourne and involved 26 riders. It raised roughly half a million dollars for research.

“When we started, we were completely clueless,” Bertwistle says. “We had this idea of using a ride to raise money, so we started by talking to people we knew to get them involved.

“By the third year, we started to get some more media and it became more than just a logo on the side of a car, we introduced the guest riders and Lance Armstrong heard about us and became involved.”

The event is as much about raising the profile of cancer prevention and the Tour de Cure has funded a series of children’s books that are being distributed in primary schools around Australia, as well as funding research projects and facilities for those children going through treatment for cancer. The 60 participants in this year’s Tour are drawn from major corporations such as Optus and Lexus, as well as mid-sized companies and smaller organisations.

Many, like Blamey, have been inspired to participate because cancer has in some way touched their lives.

“Five years ago my dad was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” says Blaney. “He’s fine now, but it was quite shocking to watch him going from a strong fit guy to being a cancer patient with no hair and no strength.”

In the most painful moments of their training rides, Blamey, Bertwistle and the other participants in the tour take inspiration from the courage of their loved ones and others whose lives have been affected by the disease.

“Just at that halfway point, when everything hurts and you don’t know if you’ll make it to the end, one of guys yells out, ‘remember why we’re doing it’,” says Blaney. “That gives you the strength to keep going.”

BRW

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