How It All Adds Up: Notes from the 2025 MS Ride
“What made it meaningful wasn’t the distance we covered. It was the way people kept showing up for each other.”
I want to begin by telling you what we raised, actual numbers, the kind that add up slowly, one donation at a time.
I raised just over $1,000. Natalie and I, together, passed $3,000, our best year yet. Our team raised $22,745, which Canada Life is matching. And across the whole ride? $750,000.
None of that happened dramatically. No viral video. No celebrity endorsement. Just a steady accumulation of care: one email, one conversation, one person saying, “Sure, I’ll help.”
Now that money will go where it’s needed: to support people living with MS and to fund research that turns slow progress into lasting breakthroughs.
But numbers alone don’t capture what the ride felt like. For that, you need the ride itself: two days on quiet country roads, through wind and heat and weather that shifted just enough to keep us honest.
Day one was bright and generous, the kind of day that doesn’t ask too much. Natalie and I rolled out of Grand Bend under clear skies and found our rhythm early. Warm but forgiving, with the wind mostly at our backs. We waved to other riders, spotted a few recumbents, a tandem or two. At the rest stops, stories drifted between riders like pollen. Everything felt slightly surreal, but in a good way.
Day two was different. Hotter. Slower. Not punishing heat, but the kind that settles in and stays, making hydration a moral imperative. The wind had turned full in our faces. Every pedal stroke came harder, but not cruelly. The headwind resisted, then cooled, as if trying to make up for its own insistence.
That tension made day two feel more deliberate. Like the ride was asking whether you really meant it. Whether you’d keep going once the novelty wore off. Whether you’d lean into the work.
Somewhere around the thirty-kilometer mark, I noticed monarch butterflies drifting across the road, flickering over milkweed and chicory in that sideways, unhurried style they have. They didn’t arrive all at once. Just one, then another, until it felt like the landscape was exhaling in colour.
It’s easy to miss them if you’re staring at the next hill or watching your Garmin, trying to decide whether “Turn left” means now or in 500 meters. But if you lift your eyes, even briefly, the ride fills with motion and wildflowers and small, extravagant gestures.
The food stops were another kind of grace. Nothing fancy, but after an hour in the sun, a quartered orange tastes like absolution. And part of why we come back is knowing that somewhere up the road, a volunteer waits with a cooler full of carbs and kindness.
Natalie and I held our rhythm through the heat. Not fast, but steady. She trained seriously this year, and it showed in the way she climbed, held her own in the wind, and rode ahead when she needed to. We’ve done enough of these rides to know that pace matters less than presence. Sometimes the best part of the day is riding side by side, saying nothing.
Riders come for different reasons, the cause, the challenge, the camaraderie, but the ones I notice are those who show up every year without drama, doing their part like it’s the most ordinary thing in the world.
Tim and Brenda, both randonneurs, can knock off a 300 km ride on Saturday and lead a club ride on Sunday. They’ve done Paris–Brest–Paris, cycling’s Everest with fewer sherpas and more saddle sores. Yet here they are, riding 150 km for MS, easing their pace, decorating their bikes, and wearing plastic butts over their shorts.
They ride with Butt Ugly, one of the oldest MS fundraising teams in the region. The butts are cartoonish and deliberate, a tribute to the body parts that suffer most on long rides. Some get lacy underwear, others Sharpie tattoos. Absurd and oddly moving.
There’s humility in that kind of effort. A willingness to be silly in service of something serious. A kind of wisdom, too, the sense that care doesn’t have to look solemn. That joy counts. That laughter helps the caring land.
What I admire most isn’t just the strength, or the distance, or the finish-line photo. It’s the steadiness, the way some riders have folded this event into their lives with the quiet regularity of a seasonal ritual, returning each year not to make a statement or put on a performance, but simply to take part in something shared, something that matters.
Over time, that steadiness ripples. Riders return with someone new, a partner, a friend, a teenager on a borrowed bike. No speeches, just an unspoken invitation: a hand on a saddle to help them start uphill, a bottle passed into the wind.
Tracy joined after co-workers invited her, and her son Tyler insisted on coming too. He was eight then, still learning to push through heat or wind without dropping off. He’s fourteen now, climbing with patience, pulling on the flats, chatting at rest stops like someone who has grown into the ride without noticing.
They ride together now because that’s what they do. A habit that became a tradition.
And that’s what we pass down. Not fitness or speed, but the quiet belief you can only earn mid-ride — that effort matters, even when no one is watching.
Somewhere ahead, a teenager eased into the rhythm of something shared. Beside him, his mother smiled into the headwind.