Dual-sport motorcyclists combat cancer

July 19, 10:13 PMMotorcycle ExaminerKen Bingenheimer

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Dan Patino (left) and Sue Slate head out for the Adventure for the Cures pre-ride

Let’s see. Ride dual-sport motorcycles through the mountains of Colorado. Raise money for breast and ovarian cancer research. Have a heck of a good time.

Enough! Enough!! Please don’t throw me in that briar patch!

One dozen women (the “Dirty Dozen”) will be doing exactly this in August, winding up in Keystone, CO, for the International Women & Motorcycling Conference, sponsored by the American Motorcyclist Association (AMA).

These dirt bikers, all experienced street riders but only one of them experienced on dirt, have paid $400 to register and agreed to raise at least $2,000 apiece for this Adventure for the Cures ride. In fact, $34,000 has already been raised and donations are still gladly accepted at the group's site.

Of course, when you’re taking a group of people who haven’t ridden dual-sport you can’t take them on roads that are overly difficult, so someone has to pre-ride the entire route to ensure it is appropriate. That’s where Sue Slate and Dan Patino come in.

Sue is the National Program Chair of the Women’s Motorcyclist Foundation, which is the organizing group for the event. Dan, operator of Monkey Gripper, a Colorado-based dual-sport motorcycle tour company, is route advisor. The two of them are currently two days into a six-day scouting of the planned route.

Sue rolled into Keystone on Thursday driving a mobile home pulling a “toy hauler” loaded with five motorcycles. Dan came up on Friday and on Saturday morning the two set off, both mounted on KLR 650s.

How the ride came about

Sue Slate would not seem to be the obvious sort of dirt-bike event organizer--unless you know her. Now retired from teaching and 62 years old, Sue got her first motorcycle at age 19. Perhaps accurately described as a fanatic motorcyclist, she rode her bikes to work on a daily basis, trained as a motorcycle mechanic, and brought bikes into her classroom as a way of reaching disaffected students and showing them that any work they chose would require them to be proficient in reading, writing, and math.

In the early ‘90s a conversation with her son about registering for the draft led them to visit the Vietnam Veteran’s Monument, the Wall, in Washington, DC. Deeply moved by that experience the connection then followed that during the Vietnam Era, while 58,000 U.S. soldiers were dying in Southeast Asia, more than 300,000 breast cancer victims also died.

Sue and three friends had been planning a ride to the Arctic Circle at the time and with this new impetus the ride was transformed into a fund-raiser for cancer research. When it finally came to pass two years later the four riders ended up raising $25,000. Not to mention that they rode their bikes to the Arctic without a sag wagon or any other support personnel.

They were hooked, and Sue and her partner, Gin Shear, founders of the Women’s Motorcyclist Foundation (WMF) have remained busy hooking others on the mission to battle these illnesses. Over the next decade, the organization organized a number of fund-raising events, including three Pony Express Relays. These events involved thousands of people across the country, and raised more than $500,000 apiece, but they required a massive volunteer effort to organize and pull them off. And everyone, including Sue and Gin, was a volunteer. The group makes it a point to commit every dollar raised to the cause. Overhead is kept to an absolute minimum and is absorbed by the volunteers themselves or their sponsors.

Sue and Gin eventually concluded that it would make more sense for them if they organized smaller events involving fewer riders who each raised more money. Thus was born Adventure for the Cures, as well as several other projects such as On Track for the Cures. The ride coming up will be the first of its kind but Sue hopes to use this one as a template that can be reproduced in the future, thereby eliminating all the one-time logistical organization and planning that a one-off event requires.

Originally, Adventure for the Cures was planned to cover several western states, but costs forced a major restructuring, focused on Colorado and the conference planned for Keystone. Feeling a need for assistance, Sue did a web search and chanced upon the Monkey Gripper website. She contacted Dan and asked him to critique her planned routes. However, Dan very quickly became interested in the entire event and has signed on, on a pro bono basis, as a much more active route advisor, including doing the pre-ride with Sue. He will probably ride at least part of the actual tour with the group, as well.

Adventure for the Cures takes off from Keystone on Aug. 10. After the ride, the bikes used on the tour will be available for dual-sport training that will be offered during the International Women & Motorcycling Conference, which is set for Keystone Aug. 19-22.

Please see the slide show for additional photos.

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