Greg Wells Completes Grueling Charity Bike Ride, Averaging nearly 100 miles Per Day for 11 days to Benefit Open Door Sports

Most people are proud of themselves for doing a century ride – 100 miles - in one day. Greg Wells, 58, completed the herculean feat of biking roughly a century a day for 11 days in a row in order to raise money to benefit Open Door Sports (ODS), a DC-based nonprofit that provides adapted sports programs for children and young adults with disabilities. After completing this amazing physical challenge, he finished in style by proposing to his girlfriend, Pam Chareon, now his fiancé! Chareon, concurrently drove the route for safety and support, along with his daughter, Emory, who has Autism and has benefitted from ODS programs for years. Wells, nicknamed Diesel, started October 15^th from his Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) office in Rockville, MD and finished at RBC headquarters in Montreal on the 25th, raising nearly $70,000 for ODS. His route included biking from Pittsburgh to Niagara Falls via the Chesapeake & Ohio (C & O) Canal and the Great Allegheny Passage (GAP); from Pittsburgh to Lake Erie; Lake Erie to Niagara; over the border to Toronto; and ultimately biking along the St. Lawrence River to Montreal. Wells chose to outdo the charity bike ride of 700 plus miles he did last year with a different route from Rockville to Montreal and added 300 more miles to his adventure.

Specifically, the ride involved:

• Averaging nearly 100 miles per day for 11 days
• Climbing 33,235 feet
• Over 500 pounds of ice total for his daily recovery ice baths
• 320 miles on the C&O’s and GAP’s dirt and stone trail
• Over 20 hours of biking in darkness in 30-degree weather at 15 miles per hour
• Biking 6 - 8 hours per day
• Headwinds 80% of the time
• Biking 50 miles in one gear into Canada because the battery on his new bike with electric shifting (NOT an electric bike) had reached 40,000 gear shifts
• AND, a marriage proposal!

For the second year in a row, Greg took on this incredible challenge so that children and young adults, like his daughter Emory, could be part of a team, have an increased sense of confidence and meet new friends in a safe, inclusive, fun sports environment. He fought through fatigue so teens like his daughter and Emory’s twin, Marlie, could be part of the solution – developing understanding, respecting difference and finding out that we are all more alike than we are different.