Why would two young, healthy, successful women who don’t have breast cancer quit good-paying jobs and ride mountain bikes across the country talking to women who do?
That’s exactly what 32-year-old Donna Murphy wondered when less than two hours into a four-month trip, she wrecked her bike in the pouring rain and her co-rider, Porter Gale, announced they were lost. This was not what the two former advertising executives had in mind when, in 1995, they ditched their day planners and hit the road, determined to empower young women to learn more and do more about their breast health. They had done their research, networked with breast cancer organizations in 18 states, coined a catchy name — 2Chicks, 2Bikes, 1Cause — and set up a snazzy Web site for their cross-country crusade.
They were free-wheeling women with a cause. What could stop them?
Slick roads and second thoughts, that’s what. Despite hours in the gym, at the library and on the telephone, nothing could have prepared them for the road ahead. “The `what-the-hell-are-we-doing’ voice in my head was pretty loud,” Murphy says. “The answer that day was simple — just keep moving, get food, get out of the rain and get some sleep.”
And move they did. In a journey that proved as emotionally fulfilling as it was physical draining, Gale and Murphy rode more than 5,000 miles on highways and back roads, through deserts and up mountains, interviewing survivors of breast cancer. They rode through towns smaller than their neighborhoods in New York, met survivors barely out of college and e-mailed virtual road-trippers. They laughed, cried, cussed and got the whole thing on video, thanks to a reliable film crew, following behind in an unreliable RV.
Although they rebounded physically from the less-than-encouraging first day, the what-the-heck-are-we-doing voice didn’t immediately shut up.
“We knew our message was important, but we couldn’t help but wonder what the reaction would be since neither of us have cancer,” says Gale, who started thinking about some kind of educational project when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.
In her research, Gale discovered a terrifying trend: Women her age and younger were battling breast cancer. “Not having it doesn’t mean we can’t get it — that’s what we wanted other women our age to realize. So why not tell them face to face, from the seat of a bike?”
But the questioning voice came along for the ride, at least for the first couple of weeks.
Murphy and Gale, 30, wondered if they were too young, too healthy, too New-Yorkish to just wheel into small-town America and tell young women to touch their breasts and demand exams from their doctors. How could they gain the trust of total strangers who had faced death and were willing to talk about it for a documentary?
“I wasn’t part of the club and I was terrified,” Murphy says about talking with survivors. “I’ll never forget when this woman — after sharing some really painful details — asked how long I had been a survivor.”
Murphy says she began “babbling about the lack of information for young women” when the woman said something that silenced the doubting voice for good. “I wish someone like you had ridden their bikes into my town when I didn’t think I needed to worry about it,” she said.
That kind of reaction became the fuel for their journey. In every city, people thanked them for bringing the message to women who didn’t think they needed to hear it just yet.
Survivors who were scheduling chemotherapy when their friends were planning weddings encouraged Murphy and Gale to let others know that mammograms are not just for your mom.
For every flat tire, financial crisis or freezing night in a tent, they’d meet a woman like Becky, a 25-year-old survivor who’d lost her breasts, her hair and her mother to breast cancer. “My beauty and my sexuality are inside of me, not my breasts,” she told them, giving them just the kind of courage and conviction they needed to get to the next stop, where more unbelievable stories waited to unfold.
On a Navajo Nation reservation in Arizona, Murphy and Gale left their bikes and brochures behind and immersed themselves in the culture. Hunched down in the bed of a pickup truck on their way to a sweat lodge built just for their visit, Murphy couldn’t imagine any immediate return to the corporate world. When they participated in a traditional puberty run later that week with the women of the village, both knew they would never be satisfied with water-cooler chitchat.
Although not every stop was as physically liberating as the one in Arizona, every city opened their eyes and hearts a little wider. In Chicago, they met Lisa Callahan, 29, who found a lump in her right breast three years ago. Because she already had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for the following day, she decided to bring it up if her doctor noticed it. The doctor noticed immediately. In less than two weeks, she had a lumpectomy, lost her right nipple and began imagining herself without hair. When a friend promised not to blab about how sick she was, Callahan encouraged her to do just the opposite. “I told her to tell everyone because I wanted everyone to know that this could happen to them,” she recalls. “I had no history of breast cancer in my family. I worked out, didn’t eat red meat and was too young to get routine mammograms. So I figure I must have gotten it for a reason and the reason is (to) talk about it.”
That’s exactly what Callahan did when the two chicks hit Chicago. With the film crew in tow, she talked about her own experience and what she has learned from a Y-ME support group she started for young survivors of breast cancer. “Finally, people were realizing that breast cancer is something you should talk about before it happens,” Callahan said about the project. “They realized the question isn’t `Why me?’ but `Why not me?’ “
Although biking made both women ache in every part of their bodies, it also made them accessible in every part of the country. “It was like having a puppy along,” Murphy says. “We’d have a captive audience before saying a word, thanks to our bikes.”
Two-wheeling it through town also made it easier for others to join the action and become part of the journey. Often, survivors and family members escorted the two into and out of town. They let them sleep in guest bedrooms and videotape family dinners. “They let us into their lives without a second thought,” Gale says. “You’d have to see it to believe it.”
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You can see it when “2Chicks, 2Bikes, 1Cause: A Tale of Bicycling, Breasts and Bravery” airs on Lifetime Television at 9 a.m. Oct. 18 and at 2 p.m. Oct. 22. Copies of the 71-minute film are available; call 800-680-0168 to order.
