A Solo Ride Becomes a Beautiful Friendship
Elizabeth Page supports the MS movement in so many ways, she calls it her career. And it all started as a way to prove to herself she could still ride a bike.
Page, of Raleigh, N.C., was diagnosed with MS in 1995 after three years of symptoms and uncertainty. Her strength declined rapidly — “There were days I couldn’t go to the mailbox,” she recalled — but she rebounded almost as rapidly thanks to exercise, a disease-modifying drug, and adequate sleep.
She’d been a cyclist before having her two sons, so, “as a personal challenge, just to see, could I do maybe 50 miles?” Page enrolled in a Bike MS event in Northern California, where her husband had been temporarily transferred.
“ I did it! And I found it was not that hard to raise the money, which surprised me.”
The next year she increased the mileage and the money. In year three, back in North Carolina, friends and relatives joined her and formed a team which they named Missing Spokes. They’ve been together ever since, raising more than $35,000 yearly.
En route to becoming a great fundraiser, Page became many other things to the Eastern North Carolina Chapter: a legislative advocate, a research advocate and a member of the board of trustees. She also serves on a state board charged with administering the high-risk insurance pool that she helped get through the state legislature as a Society activist.
“The bike ride was my door, my entry,” she said recently. “I went on to other things because I needed to prove that I could be successful in the business world, so to speak,” she said. “I don’t get a paycheck, but I feel that what I’m doing is very professional. And the Society has been wonderful in trusting me to represent them.”
Page and her teammates ride stronger every year in Bike MS: her father-in-law rode 75 miles on his 75th birthday; one of her sons helps manage communications for the event; the other rides double centuries. Her husband and many other relatives ride and volunteer as well. While they always look forward to the Bike MS weekend, Page’s commitment runs strong all year round.
See Elizabeth Page — and many other people who are vital to the movement toward a world free of MS — in the Society's fiscal 2007 progress report!