“Storm The Bastille!” Explained

Imagine having a dream where Type 1 Diabetes is a Dragon, and you can slay it on a guillotine to end the disease forever! Wow! You’d wake up feeling great for a moment, but reality would intrude and this 24/7/365.25 Disease would still be controlling millions of lives.

That dream sounds a little crazy, but that’s just to throw you off guard for my next proposal:
We can end Type 1 Diabetes by riding our bicycles.
Full stop.
See? Now that sounds perfectly sane after the Diabetes Dragon Concept.
Smart, right? I should have been in Sales.

What I’m proposing is a fundraiser in the form of a bike ride on a beautiful crushed gravel path along the beautiful Delaware River and canal. Our efforts will help fund the organization Breakthrough T1D (formerly JDRF).
It’s a Gravel Ride!
Cars are only at a handful of intersections
No hills to speak of! There’s about 300 ft of elevation change over the 100 km course.
You can abbreviate the ride! The ride is out and back, so you can go out and turn around wherever you wish for the desired mileage.
E-Bikes welcome! You can CHARGE the Bastille.

I’m looking for up to 23 riders to join me in celebrating Revolutions this July.
We start in Frenchtown NJ on Bastille Day Weekend, July 11th at 9AM, and ride to the Trenton Battle Monument in Trenton, NJ, all on the crushed rock surface, with a round trip distance of 100 km. (Part of me only wants to ONLY use metric because of the French Revolution thing but this is about 62 miles)

We’ll be riding through the quaint River Towns of Frenchtown, Stockton, Lumberville PA, Lambertville, Washington Crossing, and Trenton itself.
Too much? That’s ok, the nice thing is that you can go as far as you want and turn back for a shorter ride.
If you “only” went to Lambertville and back to Frenchtown, that’s an incredible ride and has great coffee stops, cafes, restaurants and even an awesome homemade ice cream stop (with Vegan options and Gluten Free ice cream sandwiches!)

Doing the full Route from Frenchtown to Trenton Battle Monument is special and has some deeper meaning.
We’re riding from Frenchtown on Bastille Day, and going to a monument in Trenton, the Trenton Battle Monument.
We’re celebrating REVOLUTIONS!
BUT not just Revolutions. We’re celebrating TURNING POINTS in those Revolutions, because we believe we are at a turning point in our battle to end Type 1 diabetes. We are close to a Breakthrough. We’re so close now that we changed the name of the organization!
JDRF got us to where we are, Breakthrough T1D will take us the rest of the way!

So how do you ‘sign up’ and join me on my Quixotic quest to Storm the Bastille and Turn Type One into Type None?

Four Steps are required for “Storm the Bastille!”

Here’s the overview:

–Sign up for a Breakthrough T1D! “MyRide”. It’s free and you get a fundraising web page where your friends and family can make donations to your ride.
You can do that here: https://www2.breakthrought1d.org/site/TR?fr_id=10667&pg=entry

-To come along on MY “MyRide” I call “Storm the Bastille!”, I will require a minimum of $100 for your fundraising to qualify. That gets you on “Storm the Bastille”.
The $100 gets you on the Ride, but there’s goodies along the way to encourage more fundraising!
NOTE: If you are already doing a BT1D National Ride, then you can just raise man additional $100 towards that Ride, and you qualify! BUT, if you want to have your Fundraising considered for any awards or prizes for “Storm the Bastille!”, I would ask that you fundraise on a separate “MyRide” page.

–Fill in an entry form and email it to me. I just need to know who is coming, contact info, etc, and I need to limit the ride to 23 Riders, First to send in an entry form and raise $100 gets on the ride. I’m just looking for basic info, safety contacts, email address, any allergy information, etc.
Here’s the form. Fill it out and send it to me at StormTheBastille@icloud.com

– Pass a Test about Diabetes! This is a bit different, but the last thing I require is a short TEST on Type One Diabetes. Don’t panic! It’s not too difficult. The Answer Key itself contains a message!
“But WHY a TEST John??”.
Well, over time I have done several organized rides for charities, usually connected to a disease or illness. Some of these were great rides with great friends and memories. The MS 150 in Michigan comes to mind. I rode with my brother and some of his friends in the early 1990s. 75 miles to Lansing one day, then 75 miles back the next. Stayed at the state college dorms, they had a dance party and good food.
I think back to rides like that and realized I learned nothing about MS that weekend! So when I developed the idea for “Storm the Bastille!” I wanted to address this shortcoming. I might add, Diabetes Type 1 is a disease where there is much misunderstanding and in fact bullying and punch lines that punch people. I don’t hear many jokes about Cancer or MS on late Night TV, for example, but somehow Diabetes is an acceptable target for laughs.
I wanted an inexpensive entry level ride where there were likely going to be riders with no concept of what Type 1 Diabetes was. (I had no idea myself until my daughter was diagnosed in 2006. ) . This test is my way of displacing misconceptions about Type 1 Diabetes.

I started Riding for JDRF in 2012 and became a Coach in 2013. That means I lead Training Rides locally through the ride season. When you sign up for “MyRide”, you’re welcome to come on our training rides too.
Here’s the Test. Complete it and send it back to me at StormTheBastille@icloud.com

But wait! There’s more!
Beyond the swag offered by our National Ride Organization, I also have a T-Shirt specific to “Storm the Bastille” which will be yours at the $250 fundraising mark. I’ll make a separate post on the T-Shirt. It’s complicated!

“Le champion de la Bastille”

To recognize the top fundraisers I have two cool cycling prizes.
I’m not sure which is the best honestly, so the top fundraiser will get first choice, and the runner up will get the remaining award.
The awards, alphabetically:

Campagnolo “Big” Corkscrew. Classic Italian design where form and function meet!

Wove Mags bike saddle. Leading edge carbon fiber saddle. A Breakthrough saddle design makes a perfect Breakthrough T1D award .
I ride saddles by https://wovebike.com/ exclusively these days. Not for the weight savings, but for the comfort!
Every Diabetes home has a food scale, and they often get used for weighing bicycle components was well.

Is this Ride supported?
This will be a mildly supported Gravel Ride. As you travel down the Delaware canal path the towns offer much in terms of support with food and drink to stay hydrated and fueled up. But once you pass Lambertville, the coffee shops and restaurants dry up. My solution for this is having a ‘Mobile Rest Stop’ at Washington Crossing parking lot. My wife Karen will have her Saturn VUE parked at Washington Crossing State Park, right along the canal path. In the back will be a few coolers of water, drink mixes, bananas, peanut butter and jelly sammiches, fig bars…all the usual suspects.
The ride is limited to 23 Riders planning to go the full 100km because that’s about the limit to what a mobile support plan like this can handle.
So now you can tank up at Washington Crossing, ride the 10 miles to Trenton, then 10 miles back to Washington Crossing, then tank up again if necessary.
She’ll have a list of everyone planning to do the full route to Trenton.
When all the riders going to Trenton are heading back to Frenchtown , the Mobile Rest Stop will drive up to the Pedestrian Bridge at Raven Rock, where you can tank up again for the final leg of the ride back into Frenchtown.

“Is this ride only for locals?”

I imagined this Ride to be a sort of “Boutique Ride” for the Breakthrough T1D Ride Program. Perhaps the dates of our 5 National Rides conflict with your schedule. Maybe you wanted something closer to home, that you could drive to and drive home without shipping your bike, or maybe the National Ride fundraising goals were too intimidating. Maybe you don’t like to ride on the road with cars and distracted drivers, or maybe the idea of climbing hills has lost it’s charm with you.
For all such reasons I feel “Storm the Bastille” is a great option.
That said, I can imagine Riders could travel to Frenchtown for the Ride and make a very nice weekend out of it! Right in Frenchtown there is The National, a historic hotel dating back to 1850.
https://www.thenationalfrenchtown.com/hotel
So you could come to Frenchtown Friday, Ride Saturday, and leave Sunday.
Between Frenchtown, Stockton, Lambertville, Lumberville, and New Hope…you might want to stay longer. Restaurants, night life, live music, wineries and microbrews, art and antiques are all along a 15 mile stretch of the Delaware River.

another close by option would be to stay at the Lambertville Station. Lambertville is a beautiful NJ River Town, and you can walk across the bridge to New Hope PA. Bring comfy walking shoes! It’s fantastic to explore on foot.
Check out their page: https://www.lambertvillestation.com/accommodations.php

I’ll be posting more info and details and photos of the route after the Ride is officially launched.

Any Questions? You can contact me via email : StormTheBastille@icloud.com