“Wow Barry, what happened to you?  You look different!”  That was Libby’s reaction in the fall of 1972 as we both began our freshman year of high school. Apparently, I had changed since leaving Chattanooga Valley Junior High three months earlier thanks, in part, to a short growth spurt and a long bike ride.

When the 3:15 bell rang on our last day of class in Junior High my mom drove me to Nashville, Tennessee where I met up with a group of guys to begin a seventeen day, 1000 mile bicycle ride to Miami Beach, Florida.  For a year I had been planning, exercising, and raising money for a trip that I was scheduled to take with these guys who had come from various churches throughout the United States. The forty bicyclist represented twenty-five different states and we were scheduled to be at the Church of the Nazarene General Assembly which was being held in just over two weeks at the Miami Beach Convention Center.

Collectively our bicycling group was called “The Spokesmen” and along the way we sang, spoke and stayed in churches as we biked through Tennessee, Georgia and down the coastline of Florida to Miami. In addition to bicycles, our caravan had a portable kitchen, motorcycle escorts, vans and mechanics traveling with us as we pedaled our “state of the art” Schwinn Continental ten speed bicycles between 65 and 110 miles each day.

During that summer in Florida between Junior High and High School I grew 4 inches and added 25 pounds to my skinny  5″-9″ and 120 pound frame which may explain why Libby claimed that she barely recognized me when she asked the question, ” Wow what happened to you?”

After the bike ride I stayed several more weeks in Florida with family friends where we spent most days water skiing or surfing. Besides the physical changes that came with an adolescent growth spurt, 1000 miles of biking, lots of time in the water and copious amounts of food; looking back now, I realize how much confidence, self-discipline and perseverance that I gained as well.

Six years later when Libby and I were engaged to be married, she saved up her money from her Red Food Store cashier job and purchased an expensive Italian-made Bianchi bicycle as birthday gift for me, encouraging me to continue riding.  I would often tease her and say that just because my physique was radically changed by a bike ride when I was 14, doesn’t mean it will happen again. Libby’s response was always the same, “Barry, that’s not the reason I bought the bike for you.  I bought the bike because I love you;   Of course if you ride enough…???…who knows???”

I did make lots of bicycling trips in the next 30 years, including one memorable ride on a tandem bicycle with my niece Samantha Gilley where we went from Chattanooga to Memphis, TN to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

After Libby’s breast cancer diagnosis, chemo and radiation treatments, we were all looking for a little distraction from all of the doctor visits, so we decided to put together a bicycling trip. I made the following two posts to the Caring Bridge website during that time; one during our trip and one shortly afterward we arrived back home:

Barry Gilley — Aug 19, 2009 7:24pm