Eric D. Schabell: ALS - JBoss cycling for a good cause

Thursday, September 6, 2012

ALS - JBoss cycling for a good cause

This is a bit of a different JBoss posting than what we normally do here. I will give a bit of background and tie it back into JBoss by the end, so bear with me.

I have a friend who was a pretty avid cyclist, having done the Alpe d'HuZes (climbing this famous Tour de France mountain 6 times in a single day) just last year. He was in great condition, but in the Fall he was diagnosed with ALS. He has been lucky enough to have an amazing group of friends that have helped to setup a foundation and to organize the Ries van der Velden Classic to raise funds to fight ALS.

Both Oliver Carr (JBoss Consultant in Europe) and myself (JBoss Technology Evangelist) are cyclists and wanted to ride in the Red Hat JBoss cycling kit. It was a loop between Zandvoort and Bloemendaal that we were to ride as much as possible, with each loop being sponsored with 1, 5, or 10 euros. We hit up our local Dutch Red Hat office and everyone sponsored something, what a great team!

We rode the event last Sunday, 2 Sep 2012, together with 152 registered participants and raised over 17,600 euros (estimated). Oliver Carr completed three loops and I completed 5 loops, for together a total of ~170 km in over 4 1/2 hours on the bikes. My personal performance data was monitored and can be found at the bottom of this article. We raised over 700 euros for this effort, a day well spent and we did this with Red Hat cycling gear that features the JBoss logo. Ries could appreciate this marketing as he is a fellow IT engineer.

We wish Ries all the best and look forward to sporting the Red Hat JBoss cycling kit in his yearly event!
Monitoring performance.

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