printable versionCycle for life: Doctor, patient train together for rides
Negrin and colleagues at the medical school to raise funds for leukemia society
BY TONYA CLAYTON
Robert Negrin and his patient Mike Wu prepare for a recent training session in Santa Cruz. Negrin will be doing a 200-mile ride in July.
On a recent sunny morning, an upbeat crew decked out in eye-popping turquoise, purple and lime green jerseys gathered at a coastal park in Santa Cruz. Most everyone straddled bikes with skinny tires and wore the requisite padded black shorts. But this was not your ordinary weekend ride.
This was a crowd with a mission—their shirts bore the logo "cycling for a cure"—and it included a special pair of pedalers from Stanford. One was Mike Wu, who was diagnosed with leukemia two and a half years ago. The other was hematologist Robert Negrin, MD, professor of medicine, who administered Wu's life-saving bone marrow transplant just last summer.
The two, along with dozens of others, were about to pedal 80 miles up the breezy coast and back in preparation for rides later this summer to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Through the group's one-of-a-kind Team in Training® Program, volunteers sign up to raise funds through ambitious events like triathlons and marathons. In return, the society provides coaching, fellowship and inspiration to help everyone—elite athlete or not—cross the finish line.
When Wu and Negrin spotted each other in the milling crowd at Natural Bridges State Park, they embraced, posed for a picture, then headed off to join their separate coaches and training teams. Wu, who rides with the "Tiger Sharks," is training for America's Most Beautiful Bike Ride, a 100-mile jaunt around scenic Lake Tahoe this weekend. Negrin and his fellow "Nurse Sharks" are training for a 200-mile sojourn from Seattle to Portland in July.
"I didn't quite realize how far 200 miles was," Negrin said with a laugh. "It's pretty far."
Wu and Negrin are joined in their athletic endeavors by four members of Stanford's Bone Marrow Transplantation program, plus several current and former patients. They have been working out all spring as members of the world's largest sports endurance training program.
"It's been great," said Wu, who spent six weeks in Stanford Hospital last summer. "Participating in Team in Training serves two purposes: It helps me to inspire others and also helps me to get back in shape physically." He is gradually regaining the 25 pounds he lost to illness.
In April, Negrin and Wu pedaled 70 miles together. "If he can do it, I should be able to do it, right?" Negrin said. "To see that, you forget about how much your legs hurt."
This year's training season is Wu's fourth and Negrin's first. The physician has long served the leukemia society as a medical expert, and he has been hearing about Team in Training for years from enthusiastic patients. They've been participating as runners, walkers, bikers, triathletes and inspirational cheerleaders at rest stops. "So I thought, 'The time has come,'" Negrin said. "Stop listening. Start doing."
The timing was good, too, in that his 50th birthday this year presented a great fundraising opportunity. He has said to friends, "Instead of giving me a present, give money to the society."
In 20 years of practice, the hematologist has seen the organization provide help available from no other source—for example, gas money for patients to get to the clinic. And patient support groups are an especially important element of the society's work.
The society also awarded Negrin a translational research grant at a key juncture in 1998. In collaboration with Christopher Contag, PhD, professor of pediatrics, of radiology and of microbiology and immunology, Negrin's lab developed a new method to track donor T cells in laboratory mice. "It turned out to be very, very successful," Negrin said, "much more successful than we expected." The investigators won subsequent support from the National Cancer Institute, and the results have already made their way into clinical treatments.
Negrin deeply appreciates the "team" in Team in Training. "The society uses the concept in a very broad sense—your event team, the little team you practice with, the team of you and the patients, the team of people doing research, and the team of the medical community," he said. "I think it is a really good choice of metaphor."
BMT team members include Kevin Sheehan, PhD, who runs the hospital's BMT clinical laboratory, and assistant clinic manager Mysti Smith-Bentley. Both will be pedaling with Negrin on the 200-mile ride in July. Administrative director Laura Adams and Janelle Olson, a graduate student in Negrin's lab, have laced up their running shoes for the cause.
Since 1988, more than 265,000 Team in Training volunteers have helped raise more than $595 million for the fight against blood cancers.