A ride for life

UW employees are going the extra mile — 500 of them — to fight AIDS

Beth Brace, UW Hospital and Clinics department of nursing training officer, training for the Twin Cities-Wisconsin-Chicago AIDS Ride.

When Beth Brace hauled out her old three-speed bike last year, the one with the coaster brakes and the baskets on the back fender, she only intended to get some exercise and lose a little weight. What she actually got was much more.

First she became hooked on riding. By the end of summer, she was circumnavigating Lake Monona almost daily, and she turned in her old three-speed for a high-tech road bike. Then she saw a newspaper ad about the Twin Cities- Wisconsin- Chicago AIDS Ride.

“I called, and I was immediately convinced that I had to do it,” she says. “I was so impressed by the magnitude of it.”

Brace, a training officer in UW Hospital’s department of nursing, is one of at least a dozen UW–Madison employees dedicating themselves to the AIDS ride, a six-day, 500-mile trip that begins July 6 in Minneapolis and ends July 11 in Chicago. About 2,000 riders are expected for the event, which could raise as much as $6 million. Each rider must raise at least $2,300 in pledges to take part. Funds raised by Wisconsin riders go to Wisconsin AIDS-related organizations.

“This event has amazed and inspired me, both because of the dedication of the people who organize it and because of the tremendous response I’ve gotten in fundraising,” says Brace. “I live, breathe, eat and sleep this ride.”

Last November, she began getting up at 5 a.m. every day and riding at least 15 miles, often in the dark. Now she is putting in 125 to 175 miles each week. Late in December, she frostbit the bottom of her feet on a cold winter 35-mile training ride, but she kept training, moving indoors on a special stationary trainer when the weather was cold.

“I guess I’m motivated,” she says.

Brace is doing the ride primarily, she says, for her children.

“People have told me the ride sounds crazy, but it’s my commitment to my two sons and their friends,” she says. “They need to know about this disease and its risks.

“I see it as a ride for life.”

Although she never has been able to ask for money from people — “I couldn’t borrow $5 from my mother,” she says — she already has exceeded her fundraising goal and is aiming for $5,000 in pledges.

“I’ve done volunteer work before, but I never felt I’ve done anything that would have such an impact,” she says.

Her fellow UW riders are equally motivated. A few of them, including Chip Quade, who works at the Center for Health System Research and Analysis, have done the ride before and are returning for more. Quade says first-timers are in for quite an experience.

“This ride is a powerful demonstration of what a community of people can accomplish,” says Quade. “I’ve spent a good chunk of my life not giving anything back, and this has been my chance to do that. It has completely turned my life upside down in a positive way.”

The riders see the trek as a personal challenge, and virtually all have been or know someone who has been touched by AIDS and HIV. First-time AIDS ride participant LuAnne Greiner, a UW Hospital nurse, worked for eight years in the hospital’s general medicine unit, where AIDS patients were admitted.

“The number of inpatients was pretty high back in the late ’80s,” she says. “That was a peak time, when there were very few other options for extended care. I worked with a lot of people who were dying.”

In fact, she and other staff members made their own AIDS quilt.

“There are about 60 names on it,” she says. “It’s a reminder, not only of the patients we had, but of the many, many others who have died.”

Wisconsin organizations benefiting from the ride are the AIDS Network, the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin, Camp Heartland, the Great Lakes Inter-Tribal Council, the National Minority AIDS Council, the Opportunities Industrialization Center of Racine County, and United Migrant Opportunity Services.