Regent Square Resident Embarking on Coast-to-Coast Cycling Journey

By Chuck Finder

Her career path brought her to Pittsburgh in 2004, but by that juncture the sum total of her time on a bicycle seat was a few miles pedaling across a campus.

Preparing to cycle coast-to-coast in the Race Across America in June?

Spending almost two full years training to ride nine days, two eight-hour shifts each day, for 3,000 miles for charity?

Somewhere along the way in the past decade, Dr. Patty George’s life made a hairpin turn.

This Regent Square resident’s adventure in cycling all started her second year at the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC, where she works as an expert in lung transplant and pulmonary hypertension (PH). She was a softball and soccer player in Naperville (Ill.) North High School, and, after veering from international relations to medicine at Duke University, she later took up running and participated in a marathon while at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

“I was busy all the time. But I didn’t really ride my bike. . . seriously, until Pittsburgh,” said Dr. George, 39.

She felt a need to get back into shape, and in 2005 she fell in with a group of triathletes and bicycle racers called Steel City Endurance, headquartered in Regent Square and coached by Suzanne Atkinson. Dr. George started racing bikes. She spent February vacation weeks at a cycling camp in Tucson, Ariz.

This idea began to germinate. Stacie Truszkowski, a colleague in Pitt’s Department of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine, and she are the same age.

“So a few years ago I tossed out this idea: ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to do the Race Across America?’ “ Dr. George recalled. “I remember saying to Stacie, ‘When you turn 40, either you put black crepe paper and tombstones all over your front yard, or you do the Race Across America.’ Stacie was in.”

It remained strictly in the idea stage until 2010, when Dr. George found herself at the Pulmonary Hypertension Association national conference – where doctors sit next to patients, a rarity in the realm of such medical meetings. But PH is a disease with a narrow audience and a medical awareness issue, often getting misdiagnosed or mistaken for asthma. PH is a chronic, life-changing disease in which high blood pressure in the lungs creates a lack of blood flow to the left side of the heart and the rest of the body. It affects people of all ages, races and ethnic backgrounds.

Sitting in the audience during a presentation about a medical team that climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro for PH, “It kind of clicked,” Dr. George said. “This could be how we could do something tremendous – the perfect charity to partner.”

“She kind of danced around the charity part until we had all of our members,” added Truszkowski, who turned 40 on Sept. 30. “The two of us would laugh, thinking we would never find someone as crazy . . . to do this with us.”

They added some cycling friends to form Team PHenomenal Hope, and together they’re training and planning to pedal from Oceanside, Calif., to Annapolis, Md. – two at a time constantly on bikes – to raise awareness and donations for pulmonary hypertension (PH).

Triathlete and engineering manager Anne-Marie Alderson of Washington, Pa., and Ryanne Palermo of Butler, Pa., pursuing her Ph.D. in pharmaceutical science at Duquesne University, joined first to make it a racing foursome. They later added: Greta Daniels, director of alumni relations at Sewickley Academy, as alternate racer/crew chief; Kate Bennett, an IT administrator at Carnegie Mellon University, as crew chief; and Sara Harper of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, as an alternate racer /crew member. The team was formally announced in July 2012 at the PHA annual meeting in Orlando.

Since then, team members have been compiling thousands of miles -- in mountain or endurance events ranging from a Maryland climb called the Cranky Monkey to a 100-mile, mountain-bike race and a 200-mile race in Ohio patterned after the Race Across America, where Dr. George on Sept. 29 finished 2nd overall and 1st among the women entrants. The weekend races are a diversion from their daily training or their wintertime work indoors at Cycling Fusion, an Oakmont fitness center where they have done webcasts of benefit events.

All around Pittsburgh and Patch, residents might see them in their blue-and-gold Team PH kits riding through the streets.

“You know what I’m doing now?” Dr. George said. “Here’s the deal: It’s really hard with my profession to fit in training. So I get up early, somewhere before 5 a.m., and hit the streets. I can bike from Regent Square to Downtown, and the streets are totally clear. I have all these lights. I can get a decent workout in Downtown Pittsburgh and come home right about rush hour. There’s nothing like getting out before the birds are up. And it’s just you and a couple of cars. Peace.”

The team has held numerous benefits over the past year and will take part in the Oct. 3 Day of Giving along with events throughout November’s PH awareness month.

“We have a person with PH who’s doing a Tough Mudder,” she said, awed by the support displayed already. “There’s a PHA staff member who lives with PH, and he’s pledged to ride 3,000 miles from now through June with Team PH. And these type of events are called Unity Miles events – we are inspired by patients and supporters who are doing this with us. The passion of someone who has PH, you can’t match that, you know? It’s special.”

That reaction throughout Western Pennsylvania and the country to this little cycling idea? It has eclipsed her initial idea.

 “It has been tremendous,” Dr. George said. “I had a preconceived notion. When UPMC jumped on board, when PHA jumped on board, in concept you thought: This could be really cool. But it has surpassed my preconceptions about how cool it is. Patients are excited about what we’re doing. We’re certainly excited by people participating and organizing their own events. It’s tremendous.

”We get emails, Facebook posts. . . or, for instance, a patient the other day told me she saw something about it. Ever since the beginning, it isn’t about the group of us. Everybody is Team PHenomenal Hope.”