This morning I had a chat with Ross Rader about the upcoming ride across Canada to raise money and awareness about kids cancer (only 62 days left before it starts).
Before I get into my personal story, I want to tell you a little about me and what I’m going to be doing here.
I’m one of Canada’s first professional bloggers and Training Manager at b5media. In addition to helping bloggers at b5, I blog at MapleLeaf 2.0 and my personal blog A View from the Isle. I talk about Canadian tech and Web 2.0 news and photography, with a little general geekiness mixed in for good measure.
For the Sears National Kids Cancer Ride (or snkcr) I’m going to be covering the ride from the road and coordinating all the online media coverage. Ross tells me that after his post last week calling for volunteers, the response was tremendous! So instead of it just being me doing all the blogging, photography, and video, there is going to be a whole blogger corps!
Since we’re just ramping up, even with the deadline looming fast, I still have to work out things like Flickr accounts, places to upload video, planning for connectivity on the road, laptops, you name it… Help? Yeah I’m going to need it. Sponsors? Yes, please! If you or your company can help that will be awesome. I’ll be posting a wish list here shortly.
Now for my story…
When Ross emailed me about this last week I was thrilled, honour, even floored to be considered for this important job. I thought for, oh, two minutes before giving a tentative yes … the next day I said … sign me up!
As a professional opportunity this is huge for me, personally it’s even huger (yes I know that’s not a word). As a dad with two young kids, well you can imagine how important this is to me. Still, it’s more than that.
My father had cancer. He passed away cancer-free from a massive infection. That was September 1992. I have friends with cancer, had cancer, survived cancer. Plenty of people I know have had the cancer scare too. I’m doing this for all of them.
Before, during, and after the ride I’ll be helping the riders tell their stories in words, pictures, video, and audio.
I’ve also been reminded that being a smoker on the ride isn’t a good idea. So this is another reason to accelerate me quitting smoking.
Now … off to start organizing my thoughts and wish list…
