During the 2010 Texas 4000, another rider rubbed Jordan Deathe the wrong way.
The epic charity bike ride between Austin and Anchorage forced his team into close quarters every day as they crossed the Rocky Mountains on their way to Alaska.
“Every single person in this world has their struggle,” Deathe, now 27, thought. “They are just trying to get through it just like me. I realized that I shouldn’t be so hard on them. Give them the benefit of the doubt.”
The Texas 4000, which raises money and awareness for cancer causes and starts June 1 from the LBJ Presidential Library Plaza, is known for its incredible endurance tests.
If a rider is not fit on Day 1 — and some are not — they are in pretty awesome shape by the time they reach Alaska.
Yet University of Texas student and cancer survivor Deathe, who met me recently at a campus-area pub, revealed the ride’s social and psychological side.
“Because the atmosphere is so positive, people feel free and feel safe to feel vulnerable,” he says. “You see that everyone else is like you. Sometimes you are crying on the inside and this gives you a chance to cry on the outside.”
Pale and somewhat somber on a somber winter day, Deathe — rhymes with “teeth” — remains dedicated to the ride three years after heading out into the mountains.
Thirty students made the trip in 2004. By 2010, there were 47. This summer, 70 or 80 riders will saddle up.
The riders split into two wriggling streams, one going through Denver, the other through San Francisco, with a third route planned via Chicago.
A summer lifeguard, Austin-born Deathe grew up Balcones Woods and attended Davis Elementary, Murchison Middle and Anderson High. Playing baseball and soccer or swimming the breaststroke and butterfly, he never got into big trouble.
“I never fell out of a tree,” he smiles. “Never broke my arm.”
Yet he also never really learned to study until college because the reasonably smart guy could skate through school with respectable Bs.
“College was a rude awakening,” says the student who switched from TCU to UT Austin when his cancer relapsed. “But I finally got my act together.”
Deathe expects to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in government next spring. He plans to celebrate with his girlfriend, Hannah Nelson, a buyer for Whole Earth Provision, probably by sharing some outdoor activity.
Deathe was first diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in December 2005. It started out as a cough.
“In an otherwise healthy 19-year-old, they don’t look for cancer,” he says. “But I ended up in the ICU on a breathing machine in a medically induced coma.”
He underwent therapy including a stem cell transplant in 2006, remained healthy for a year, then relapsed in May 2007. Since a second stem cell transplant in October 2007, he’s been cancer free.
“I had my family,” he says. “And faith in myself. I say that only in hindsight. Dying never occurred to me. The realization just never set in. I just kept showing up.”
Showing up counts. One day on campus after his medical trials he spied a flyer: “Ride a bike to Alaska. Raise money for cancer.”
Perfect for Deathe, who had raced in triathlons and had supported cancer causes.
“Above all, they are looking for good, well-spirited people,” he says. “Fitness is not a criterion. The truth is, the trip is not that hard. You just have to hang in there.”
Not that hard? Really?
“You have so much positive peer pressure around you, you get through it,” he says. “You are not ridiculed or belittled into getting back on the bike every day. We share a culture of not giving up. It seeps into everything.”
Deathe’s now helps out through the ride’s alumni foundation and expresses reservations about how quickly the event has grown in size and formality.
He avoids answering too many questions from new riders.
“I’ve learned to give as few tips as I can,” he says. “It can be detrimental to get too much information. One of the keys is ‘not knowing what to expect.’ The growth happens when you face the unknown. When you do something you didn’t know you could do is one of the best human experiences on the trip.”
Put in another way
“Once you do ride up the mountain,” he says. “You realize you are a different person today.”
He says the socializing was robust back during the 2010 trip.
“Every day, we found ways to entertain ourselves,” he says. “New roadside games during rest stops. We are like a microcosm going down the road with our own norms or our own senses of humor. It’s a rich culture.”
The riders are young, so some incidental dating goes on.
“You meet new people every day,” he says. “You find a lot of generosity along the way, too, Churches and schools put us up, fed us. Meeting those people stimulated discussions, broadened our human contacts.”
Pretty darn wise for somebody in his twenties.
Deathe: “The Texas 4000 gave that to me.”