Cherished Donors,                                                                                                 February 2012

On August 4^th I will celebrate my 26^th year of participating in the Pan Mass Challenge, the best annual 2-day bicycle fundraising event a rider could hope for.  I’ve watched this event grow from a small operation to the mega production it is today.  I’m proud, honored and fortunate to be a lifelong committed rider and fundraiser.  I can’t thank you enough for supporting me year after year.

This annual letter allows me to catch you up on the people that are near and dear to me and my miscellaneous “activities”.  Many of you know that Adam, now 23, fractured a vertebra in his lower spine from a ski fall back in January.  Thanks to excellent medical care and his diligent adherence to wearing his back brace for 3 full months, he has healed well and resumed normal activities.  Adam is living at home and is currently between jobs.  Ari, now 20, is half way through his studies at the University of Rochester majoring in Math and he is currently spending 8 weeks at Beijing University studying Chinese, his minor.  We’ve kept in touch through e-mail and Skype and look forward to his return on August 6^th.  Karen planned our family vacation to the Grand Canyon and Sedona which begins right after Ari returns from China and I finish the PMC.  She had our rear deck and front porch refurbished and has been gardening and beading when she isn’t tutoring, at the gym or in the garden!

I continue to donate platelets at Dana Farber http://tinyurl.com/3jsqdvm and reached a milestone when I gave my 300^th donation on November 18^th.  My next visit will be my 317^th.  If you think you might want to give it a try, call 617-632-3206 to see if you can be a donor.  As a volunteer courier for the National Marrow Donor Program (in my spare time) I continue to see the world.  In the past few months I’ve been to Germany, Portugal, Spain and South Korea.  I continue to volunteer at the DFCI one day each month and I’ve now been working for the Dept. of Mental for 30 years!

If you’ve been supporting me and reading my letters for 10 years or longer, you will remember that in 2001 I rode the PMC on a tandem alone in memory of Steven Teitelbaum, my then 15-year-old cousin who had recently lost his life to cancer.  I had hoped that Steven would be my tandem partner��"in good health he would have ridden circles around me, athlete that he was!  But G-d had a different agenda and I had to settle for an empty seat behind me . . . and tears and memories to help me over the hills along the 192 miles.  A while ago I told Steven’s parents, Ken and Maddy, that to commemorate 10 years since his passing I would captain a tandem again.  With the help of a loaner from my tandem riding friends, I will. 

I need to take a moment to remember a friend who I last visited with on June 10^th and whose funeral Karen and I attended on June 26^th.  I was a runner before I was a cyclist, a marathoner at the height of my running career in the 80’s.  I trained for and ran the Boston Marathon in 1983 with Joe Tryon, a friend and colleague from the Gaebler Children’s Center who got married and was raising a family the same time I was.  Fast forward 30 years��"what appeared to be frostbite this past winter was secondary to clots from advanced lung cancer that had metastasized to other organs.  There was no shortage of love, prayer and bedside visits from family and friends.  Again, G-d had other plans, as he so often does and I cried after his wife Peggy confirmed what I feared a few days before he died��"there would be no miracle on A Street in Belmont.  Yes, cancer sucks and that is truly an understatement.  But for as many loved ones as we’ve lost, many more survive than ever before and there is more hope and promise for those diagnosed today.     

A few weeks after the PMC will mark the 10 year anniversary of September 11, 2001.  I will be helping to lead 50 riders bike from Ground Zero to Boston over 3 days to raise money to benefit Afghan widows.  It has been a privilege for me to work with Susan Retik, co-founder of Beyond the 11^th, since I first rode with her and Patti Quigley from NYC to Boston in 2004.  Susan was pregnant with her third child when her husband, David Retik, was on board one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center.  Susan was one of 13 winners of the 2010 Citizens Medal, the nation’s second-highest civilian honor.  It was presented to her by President Obama in August for all her acts of loving kindness and using a personal tragedy to improve the lives of those less fortunate than us.  Later this month a friend and I will ride the 250+ mile route to arrow it and ensure it is ready for our epic ride the weekend of September 11^th.

I would greatly appreciate donations to both my rides this year.  I have pledged to raise at least the minimum required for each event--$4,200 for the PMC and $4,000 for Beyond the Bike.  100% of all PMC funds raised go the cause and a very high percentage of all funds raised for Beyond the Bike go to the cause as well.  The easiest way to donate is via the two links below.    

http://www.pmc.org/egifts/MS0025

http://BeyondtheBike.kintera.org/melstoler

If you work for a company that will match all or part of your donation, please refer to this page for more information:

http://www.pmc.org/fundraising.asp?topic=/tools/corpmatch

If you prefer to mail checks, please make them out to “PMC-Jimmy Fund” and “Beyond the Bike” and mail them to me at 9 Coolidge Street Brookline, MA 02446.  Thanks for reading my letter.  I will send a recap of both rides in September.  In the meantime, I wish you and yours a wonderful rest of the summer and thank you for supporting my rides.

Best,

Mel