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Pedal Power Two-wheeling across the continent, students bike for bucks, but not for themselves.
Reached via cell phone on Day 37 in Conneaut, Pennsylvania, Gregg says, "I was expecting to be sore the first week or so, but it wasn't so bad. In the Rockies, one of my knees started to bother me, but it cleared up." He is speaking from a firehouse, one of the dozens whose crew offered him and Adam a place to sleep, plus dinner and breakfast, all across America. "That's been the most amazing thing by far — the kindness and brotherhood of the firemen." Gregg and Kaczmarek's route anticipates exactly the route to be used by 35 members of the New York City Fire Department in September. Sponsored by dozens of large corporations, the firefighters will raise not only money for the Widows' and Children's Fund but also awareness of the plight of the FDNY, without a contract or a raise for the past two-and-a-half years. Joshua Gallo of Engine 258 in Long Island City organized the firemen's tour. He appreciates the students' contribution as guinea pigs. "I'm glad they're back safe; now maybe they can tell me about the perils." The firefighters will certainly have more creature comforts: Their accompanying 45-foot RV will be equipped with a bathroom, shower, beds, 600 rolls of film, a defibrillator, and the products of many of their sponsors, such as Advil, Vitamin Water, and Pepto-Bismol. Pepto-Bismol? "Absolutely," says Gallo."The firemen will be cooking for us." The bicyclist firefighters range in age from 22 to 51, and represent largely the department's elite. "We've got a lot of guys from SOC, Special Operations Command — they're the guys who save us if we get in trouble," Gallo says. "We have guys who compete in the Fire Olympics." Gregg himself got into shape biking the hilly roads surrounding Cornell. The Ithaca terrain was good practice, but the mountain ranges of Colorado were beyond anything he had imagined. "I thought the mountain roads would be like the Ithaca hills — steep but short — but because of snow, they can only build roads up to a certain grade, so the hills go on forever. The Monarch Pass across the Continental Divide reaches 11,000 feet; the slope was six-and-a-half or seven [percent ] grade for 12 miles." Gregg rode a Fuji World touring bike that he bought from Glenn Swan, owner of Swan's Cycles, a legendary Ithaca bike racer,and research technician in the College of Engineering for 25 years. Kaczmarek rode a Cannondale racing bike that was ridden in the 2000 Tour de France. Both of them carried rear panniers with clothes, toiletries, and spare tubes and tires, sleeping bags, and tents, and Camelbak packs, a special backpack with a straw used to carry and sip water on the go. On an average day they each carried three quarts of water; in the desert they each carried a gallon and a half. Kaczmarek estimates that, although the frame of his bike weighed only three pounds, his gear weighed close to 30 pounds. Gregg spent the last weeks of his summer vacation sailing his 16-foot catamaran in Great Peconic Bay, near his Long Island home. When he returns to Cornell this fall, he plans to focus on biomedical engineering, maybe prosthetics. He's also the president of Theta Chi, the fraternity to which Kaczmarek belongs at MIT. It's hard to know exactly how much money the two raised because they asked people to send checks directly to the FDNY. But it's not too late to participate. Sponsors are welcome to send checks to: "The more we can raise for the families, the better," believes Peter Gregg. "It's hard to measure their loss." —Melanie Bush |
Peter Gregg biked a lot of miles during the June and July months of his ’04 summer vacation — about 3,336 of them. Gregg ’06, a biological and environmental engineering major, biked from Los Angeles to New York City to raise money for the Widows' and Children's Fund of the New York City Uniformed Firefighters Association, which benefits the families of fallen firefighters, including those killed on 9/11. He was accompanied by Adam Kaczmarek, a mechanical engineering student at MIT whose cousin, a fireman, died in the World Trade towers. The two covered up to 100 miles a day for 42 days, over the Sierra Nevadas and through the Mojave Desert, past the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, and the Continental Divide. 
