BETH HAMON

Cyclist feels unified at ride to raise funds to battle Crohn’s

By Deborah Moon

All the important aspects of Beth Hamon’s life came together in one moment recently when she lit Shabbat candles at a bicycle ride to raise funds to battle Crohn’s disease and colitis.

Hamon, 44, has suffered from the symptoms of Crohn’s disease since about age 6 and was formally diagnosed with the inflammatory bowel disease 13 years ago. Crohn’s symptoms can include abdominal pain, diarrhea, rectal bleeding, weight loss and delayed development in children.

Aug. 3-5, Hamon rode in the second annual Seattle Get Your Guts in Gear three-day, 210-mile bicycle ride. She raised in excess of $3,400 from more than 60 individuals and six organizations. GYGIG is still collecting donations in the names of riders. To donate in Hamon’s name, visit www.ibdride.org/bhamon. Rider sites will be online until Sept. 30.

Founded in 2004, GYGIG hosted three rides this year—in New York, Austin and Seattle—with nearly 200 riders raising in excess of $500,000. The funds go to research to battle Crohn’s disease and colitis as well as to organizations that support IBD patients and their families.

“My Crohn’s is mild enough I can still do most of the things I want to do,” said Hamon in an interview in her Northeast Portland home two days after the ride. “I am really blessed. I did the ride in recognition of the people who have these diseases who are in hospital beds.”

Hamon is well aware of how debilitating Crohn’s can be.

“I’ve probably been symptomatic since I was 6 or 7,” she said. “I had to know where a bathroom was at every restaurant and mall. Certain outdoor activities were closed to me because I didn’t know when I’d have to make a dash for the bathroom.”

After two decades of repeated cycles of inflammation and healing, scar tissue had virtually blocked her terminal ileum (end of the small intestine).

“In 2000, I had surgery so I could eat again,” she said, noting surgeons removed about three feet of her small intestine.

With her disease once again a chronic condition she could live with, Hamon said she quickly returned to her lifelong passion for bicycling.

Long distance cycling is one physical activity that Hamon said has worked well for her.

“Where there’s asphalt, there’s civilization,” she explained, adding she, like most IBD sufferers, has learned to locate and talk her way into bathrooms even if they aren’t typically open to the public.

A bicycle commuter who for years has ridden 10 miles a day, Hamon said she decided to train for and enter the Seattle ride “to see what I was physically capable of.

“On a personal level, the ride was really great for me,” she said. “I’ve been a bicycle enthusiast for all my life, but this was the first big bike event I went to where I didn’t have to explain myself (according to GYGIG, more than half of the riders and crew were either IBD patients or relatives). The ride was like a great big rolling support group.”

In addition to fellow IBD sufferers, Hamon said she also met a lot of Jews during the GYGIG ride.

Crohn’s disease, to which sufferers have a genetic predisposition, is more common in people of central and eastern European Jewish descent, according to an April 17, 2007, Reuters Health article posted on the Web site of the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America (www.ccfa.org).

“It seemed like every third person who went by would see my Mogen David hanging out of my jersey and say, ‘Hey, you’re a member of the tribe—me too.’”

“One of my absolute best moments of the ride was on Friday night after dinner when I was in my tent,” said Hamon.

One of the women she had met on the ride tapped on her tent and said Jennifer, a Jewish woman from Florida, was looking for women interested in lighting Shabbat candles.

“Three of us put candles down, covered our eyes to say the prayers and wished each other Shabbat Shalom,” said Hamon. “It was a tiny window of a moment, but it made my day. I had all the parts of myself in that moment.”