Patient Bikes East Coast to Fight Myeloma

Alan Wolfson’s eight-day 260-mile bicycle ride through the state of Virginia last year was just one of the many he has made over nearly 20 years in support of the UAMS Myeloma Center.

Since 2002, Alan Wolfson of Lakewood Ranch, Florida, has taken an annual bike ride most years along the east coast to raise money for the UAMS Myeloma Center.

Averaging about $20,000 in contributions from his friends and supporters for each ride with the donations divided between the Myeloma Center and two other programs, he has already pedaled his way to nearly $250,000 for the center.

In 2019, Wolfson, 70, took an eightday, 260-mile ride from Virginia Beach, Virginia, to Front Royal, Virginia, and raised $9,443.40 for the Myeloma Center.

“My goal is to raise money to help people overcome damage to their lives caused by myeloma. It’s easy for me.

The donors do the heavy lifting. All I need to do is pedal my bike.”

Wolfson, recently retired from a Florida-based real estate development firm, was diagnosed with smoldering myeloma at 47 in 1996. When he arrived for an appointment with clinic founder Bart Barlogie, M.D., Ph.D., the myeloma program was just being established.

“There was construction everywhere and patients sitting in the hallways,” he said. “Dr. Barlogie told me, ‘I can tell you honestly that your blood chemistry is not good. You are in no immediate danger but without more testing over time, I can’t tell how quickly, if at all, it’s progressing.”

Subsequently, he had numerous visits to the UAMS Myeloma Center and many tests. Eventually his diagnosis was changed to MGUS. Fortunately, he has never undergone a day of treatment.

However, at the start he had no idea what was going to happen with him. He was afraid for his future, and was profoundly affected by the courage and stoicism of the other patients he met and observed.

“When I was coming every three months, I got to see a lot of the other patients and we began recognizing one another,” Wolfson said. “I was affected by the seriousness of this illness and how ordinary people are so brave in the face of it.”

After coming to Little Rock for regular visits over a dozen years, he shifted to a local oncologist in his home of Sarasota, Florida, for regular monitoring and began to wonder if there was something he could do to help myeloma patients.

“One day the idea just came to me that I was going take a bike ride and ask people for money. It was very spontaneous,” said Wolfson, who was then living in Buffalo, New York. That Friday morning, he put his bike on the back of his car on the way to work and at 4 p.m., called his wife and told her he was going for a bike ride that weekend.

“I just changed clothes and went,” he recalled. “All I had with me was my wallet. I didn’t have any pack or bike tools. “

“I did no pre-planning and everything I did was wrong,” he recalled of his first ride. Despite a flat tire, heat, rain, strong opposing winds, and steep hills, he rode 240 miles in three days from Buffalo to Pittsburgh. When he returned home, he sent an email to 20 people, told them what he’d done and asked them to make a donation. The first ride raised $9,000.

Each year thereafter he continued north, traveling eventually to Cochrane, Ontario, and, hitching a ride on a train, made it as far as the Hudson Bay shore at Moose Factory, Ontario. His rides after moving to Florida have included a trek to Mobile, Alabama, followed by a series of northerly trips.

“I figured if I kept riding north, I could continue on and eventually make it back to Pittsburgh, where I concluded that first ride,” said Wolfson.

In 2019, he intended to go from Virginia Beach to Pittsburgh, where he ended his inaugural ride, but, for the first time, had to cut his ride short after realizing he had underestimated the steepness of the hills in West Virginia. He plans to complete the final leg of his trip this year and arrive in Pittsburgh then. “I was affected by the seriousness of this illness and how ordinary people are so brave in the face of it.”