Many of the Bike to Beach riders will have their own personal reasons for participating. For Thomas Guerrero (left) and his daughter, Daniela (right), it is wife and mother Andrea Guerrero (center), who has the disease. Son Benjamin, 5, inspects his toes and waits for his turn to ride, when he turns 10.Photo by Lauri Gray Eaton

By Lauri Gray Eaton
Northwest Weekly Editor

For many of the 3,500 riders atop 7,000 thin wheels spinning over the 160 miles toward the Corpus Christi Bay this weekend, this is where the rubber meets the road.

This ride is personal.

For Thomas Guerrero and his 10-year-old daughter, Daniela, who will be riding in Valero Bike to the Beach Ride together on a borrowed tandem “bicycle built for two,” it couldn’t be more so.

Guerrero’s wife and Daniela’s mom, Andrea, has multiple sclerosis, an insidious disease that leaves her able to walk only with the aid of “George,” the cane that she stubbornly refuses to acknowledge with the c-word.

It’s the first Bike to the Beach for Daniela, who has cheered her dad on the past two years as he has made the ride with Team Gore, made up of co-workers and their families from Gore Design Completions, the aircraft interiors company where Tom manages the cabinet shop. Bike to the Beach raises funds for the Lone Star Chapter of the Multiple Sclerosis Society.

This year, the father-daughter team will ride with Team Carpe Diem, which arose of family and friends of the home childcare clients that Andrea once cared for. The team members literally wear Andrea’s name on the sleeves of their team jerseys.

Andrea describes the cyclists who ride for her as “our extended family. … I feel extremely proud and humbled.”

The thought of their commitment makes Andrea’s eyes well up as she says, somewhat disbelieving of the overwhelming show of love and support, “I’m not anybody!”

But she is anybody. It is anybody whom MS, which biomedical researchers don’t believe to be genetic, seems to strike.

Andrea Guerrero is one of the 400,000 anybodies in the U.S., and 2.5 million worldwide, who are diagnosed with the frustrating and progressive disease.

Although she began suffering symptoms after an infection following the cesarean-section birth of her son, Benjamin, five years ago, it took doctors two years to determine she had MS.

The first year after her MS diagnosis, Andrea said, she was in classic denial. The second year she stewed in her “why me?” anger and sat defeatedly in her family-room chair in their Misty Oaks neighborhood watching life go on around her.

This year, more and more, she feels like fighting back. She even organized an impromptu raffle to raise money for the team.

Andrea says is spurred on by her daughter’s encouragement: “Mom, you have to believe that they are going to find a cure.”

Scientists may be closing in on several elusive c-words, although since the discovery of MS in 1868 there has long been no known cause and no real cure for the disease.

For scientists like Thomas Forsthuber, M.D., Ph.D., a pathologist/immunologist and researcher at the University of Texas at San Antonio, the past decade has been one of both hope and belief.

“There has been a tremendous amount of progress in terms of understanding the underlying mechanisms and causes,” said Forsthuber, the recipient of a $600,000 grant from the Multiple Sclerosis Society to study the role of the body’s immunological soldiers, T cells, in the disease’s ransacking of the myelin sheath surrounding the central nervous system. The myelin enables the nerve signals to conduct smoothly, and the demyelination that occurs in MS disrupts those signals.

The progress in understanding of the role of T cells has begun to be translated into treatment, “novel medications and approaches,” said Forsthuber, “all modulating function of the immune cells, T lymphocytes.”

“You have to say we’re on the right track. … Overall, it’s clear we have some treatments now that can really affect the disease. And there are new treatments in the pipeline.”

Forsthuber said he and colleagues are hopeful that some of those new treatments will “allow the brain cells in the central nervous system to come back, repair the damage that has been done.”

According to Mark Neagli, president of the Lone Star Chapter of the National MS Society, the MS Society is the largest fundraiser after the National Institutes of Health, and NIH funding is getting ever tighter.

The MS Society, with the benefit of fund raisers like Bike to the Beach, contributes $40 million a year toward MS research and support, $6 million a year in Texas alone.

Antonio Gonzalez is one of 275 riders on this year’s Valero team, which has the largest group of riders in the field. Last year, Team Velo Valero’s 242 riders raised more than $223,500.

The fundraising is relatively easy, particularly when you have the motivation, said Gonzalez. For him it comes in the form of his friend, Daniel Reyes.

Back when he lived in the area of Bandera Road and Interstate 10, Antonio Gonzalez met Daniel Reyes while working out at a local gym. They became friends, working out and running together. Then Reyes was diagnosed with MS.

“He and his doctors are able to keep it under control,” said Gonzalez, and Reyes, now in his 40s, even has hopes of one day riding in the Bike to the Beach.