Latest bike trek to raise money, awareness left San Francisco, to arrive in O.C.
OCEAN CITY — When his mother was dying from lung cancer, John Matthews promised her he would do something in her honor. That something was to ride his bicycle cross country — more than 3,500 miles — to raise money and awareness for lung cancer patients.
In 2017, Matthews rode from Newtown Square, Pa., where he worked, to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
This year, his nephew Jack Owens is following in his uncle’s footsteps (er, tire tracks?), but reversing the course by riding 3,600 miles from the West Coast to the East Coast.
Owens left May 20 and is expected to arrive July 6 in Ocean City. There he will ride past the Seaspray Condominiums at 34th Street and Bay Avenue, where the family used to have a residence, and then take his bike to the ocean to dip the front tire into the Atlantic.
Owens is on a mission to raise $100,000 for Ride Hard Breathe Easy in honor of his grandmother, Kathleen Matthews, who succumbed to long cancer in December 2011.
John Matthews is president of Ride Hard Breathe Easy (RHBE), a nonprofit he founded with other volunteers two years after his cross-country journey.
RHBE partners with Fox Chase Cancer Center, Temple Lung Center, Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center and Jefferson Health in the Philadelphia area, and with Duke Cancer Institute, Dartmouth Cancer Center and Johns Hopkins Medical Center.
Money raised by the nonprofit supports cancer patients at those institutions. Matthews said the money ends up helping patients with financial struggles.
“We provide (the hospitals’) social programs with funding for those times when a patient says, ‘I need a hand,’ ‘I need a ride to an appointment from Lyft or Uber,’ or ‘I need someone to pay a utility bill or I have food insecurity.’”
“The money we raise is distributed through these seven hospitals, these seven cancer centers, and since we’ve started they helped more than 2,500 patients,” he added.
Matthews said the organization has raised $1 million.
“The number that we’re proudest of is that about 92 percent of the money that we raise goes right back to patients,” he said. “We have no staff. It embodies some words that my mom always said, which is ‘many hands make light work.’”
Kathleen Matthews was diagnosed with lung cancer in March 2011. That was a learning experience for John and his family about the statistics of lung cancer and the “stigma” because the first thing people ask about victims is whether they were smokers. His mother hadn’t smoked in 30 years and when she did, it was just a couple cigarettes.
The five-year expected survival rate for lung cancer is different than prostate, colon and breast cancer; each of those has ages at which people are supposed to get tested to help with early detection.
The mother’s diagnosis left the family stunned and frustrated, Matthews said, and that was when he promised her he would do something about it. It took a few years, but in 2015 he decided he would try to raise $1 million for lung cancer, he came up with the ride and later founded Ride Hard Breathe Easy.
Support teams joined him on his trip across the country. He said he grew up one of six kids in a row home so the family didn’t have a lot, but it instilled the concept of everyone helping out.
That support went with him in 2017 and now support teams are out there with his nephew, who had never ridden more than 65 miles in a day — this trip will take him about 3,652 miles. (He noted Owens is slightly outdoing his trip of 3,553 miles and doing it a few days faster — 48 days instead of 51.)
Owens did have one type of prior experience. When he was in seventh grade in 2017, he was part of one of the support crews that would accompany Matthews in a van for four or five days before another crew took over.
“He got to see what I was doing and I’m sure he thought in the back of his mind I’m a little nuts to do this, because I was not a cyclist and I’d ridden 80 miles twice in my life up until then,” Matthew said.
Actually, Owens, now 20, was thinking something else.
A few years after that first ride, Owens’ mom, Karen Matthews Owens, told her brother if ever one of his 18 nephews or nieces was going to try the cross-country journey, it would be Jack.
“Seeing me do it, I think, probably gave him confidence that people can do this kind of stuff. He decided to call me two Septembers ago and said, ‘Uncle Jack, I want to ride across the country.’ I said, ‘Go for it. It’s hard, but you’ll do it.’”
In a television interview with CBS News (KPIX) in the Bay Area, where he was starting his ride, the Notre Dame University student talked about the difficulty of the trip, including getting over the Rocky Mountains, as well as something he knows is more difficult.
“It gives me comfort knowing that if a lot of these people can go through such intense procedures … throughout their lung cancer experience,” Owens told the reporter, “then I know I can make my way up a hill eventually.”
To learn more about Owens’ ride or donate to the cause, go online to RHBE.org.
– By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
