When I first heard that former Bachelorette contestant Ryan Sutter was competing in races for charity, I shrugged my shoulders. I’d been covering this season’s show on ABC and seen a wrestler lie to get his 15 minutes of fame, so I thought similarly of Sutter: Here’s another reality TV star clinging to fame in the name of goodness. But when I interviewed the Colorado native, I realized I couldn’t have been more wrong.
It all started when Sutter met professional kayaker Brad Ludden at the Teva Mountain Games a few years ago, and the two immediately hit it off. Ludden is the founder of First Descents, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering young adults with cancer through whitewater kayaking, and Sutter is now an active supporter.
“I started to get to know the campers and saw the impact of the disease. Ethan’s [Tonic contributor Ethan Zohn] a great example of the strength it takes to overcome that,” Sutter said. “Basically, there’s no choice. You’re forced to summon this physical and emotional strength and power that you never knew you had. I realized that you shouldn’t need that. The goal was to try to take on what isn’t ‘normal,’ to get to the depth of my physical strength, to inspire others the way that those at First Descents have inspired me.”
The Vail firefighter is definitely entering the realm of abnormal this year by competing in 10 races. His website says it perfectly: “By the end of 2010 Ryan Sutter will have trained for 700 hours, traveled 8,500 miles, and climbed the equivalent of Mount Everest four times. He has taken on this incredible challenge all while wearing the Team FD jersey in an effort to challenge 10,000 people to give $10 in honor of First Descents’ 10th year anniversary.”
So far, he’s completed four races: the Bolder Boulder, Teva Mountain Games’ Ultimate Mountain Challenge, the Adventure Team Challenge in Leadville, Colo. (at left) and the Firecracker 50, a 50-mile, Fourth of July race in Breckenridge, Colo. that’s pretty much all uphill.
“Every couple of weeks, there’s a fairly big athletic endeavor. It creates a mental frustration,” Sutter said. “I’ll feel really good about [finishing a race] and then I have to gear up for the next one. There’s no relaxation.”
To get him through each competition, Sutter remembers his motivations: the First Descents campers, Zohn and a girl named Zoe.
“I had a really difficult call at work that involved a young infant and she didn’t end up making it,” Sutter said. “Life is short and I can do [these races] now.”
To date, Sutter has only raised $7,643 but he’s confident he’ll reach the $100,000 mark by year’s end.
“I don’t want to ask for money at a time when people don’t have it,” Sutter said. “I’m not a big shot. I don’t have a lot of wealthy friends. It’s tough for me to build a grassroots program. It gets frustrating to hand out all those fliers and get 10 people to donate, but we’re not giving up!”
And neither should you, Tonic readers. All it takes is $10 and you can make a teenager forget that they have cancer, even if it’s just for a little while, kayaking the Colorado rapids.
Visit Ryan Sutter’s 10-10-10 Challenge today.
Photos by Scott McClarrinon via RyanSutter.com.