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This past Saturday, October 11th, hundreds of cyclists and their families geared up at a very cold and rainy starting line for the Structure Tone Ride to Conquer Cancer.

The nearly 150-mile ride was intense, invigorating, cathartic, full of fun and fellowship, and, most of all, provided a tremendous sense of community, comradely, and personal accomplishment. Over 500 riders finished the Ride to benefit Penn Medicine’s Abramson Cancer Center on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in Fairmount Park with Madlyn Abramson, her daughter Nancy and her two children, Stephanie and Rachel, and many other family and friends of the riders, cheering at the finish line. The Ride was phenomenal, and its success was a total team effort.

Thank you very much to all of our volunteers, staff, friends, family, and faculty for participating, helping, and contributing to the Ride.

A special thank you goes to our title sponsor, Structure Tone, and founding sponsor Ben Shein Law Offices.

Also, thanks to all the team members and captains for their dedication. The medical team led by Drs. Linda Jacobs and Alvin Wang was phenomenally helpful for many riders in need of treatment or wound care, including me. The development staff was terrific and special thanks goes to Karrie Borgelt for making it a wonderful event.

The feedback on peoples’ experiences with the Ride has been amazing. We have been successful in not only building our community spirit and engaging a new group of supporters, but also created an "esprit-de-corps," as one department chair who rode told me. Cancer survivors from the Philadelphia area, as well as from as far as Canada shared their appreciation of what we are trying to accomplish.

And, Carl June rode with his team that included a colleague from Texas. The Ride has had a more far-reaching impact than we could ever have imagined.

Thank you everyone!! The Abramson Cancer Center team is not only innovating in research and clinical care, but also innovating new ways to engage our patients, their families, our community and new partners through new events such as the Ride. Stay tuned as we plan several new events for next year. Several of you have shared your own experiences of the ride, and we will be posting these in a new series on our Focus on Cancer blog. To share your experience, contact Michal Greenberg at michalg@upenn.edu.


Check out photos from the weekend here. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be posting more photos to Facebook, we encourage you to tag your photos with #TheRidePHL and tag Penn Medicine’s Abramson Cancer Center.