Cross-country bike trek helps reporter tell story of beating cancer

"You couldn't have just thrown a party?"

That's what a friend of Elizabeth McGowan said of her decision to bike from the Pacific to the Atlantic in the wake of successful cancer treatment in 2000.

McGowan's new book, "Outpedaling 'The Big C': My Healing Cycle Across America," was the subject of a National Press Club Virtual Headliners Book Event on Wednesday, May 19.

Diagnosed with melanoma in her 20s, the same cancer that claimed her father at age 44 when she was in high school, McGowan quit her newspaper job to do more living.

"I thought that was my fate, I'm not going to make it beyond age 44, I have to fit things in," said McGowan, a Club member who won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2013.

In the online conversation with former Club President Tammy Lytle, McGowan said she hiked the Appalachian Trail, a longtime dream. But later, after five years free of cancer, she said, "I was just itching to do something big."

The "something big" was to bike the entire 4,000-plus-mile length of the TransAmerica Trail, from Astoria, Ore., to Yorktown, Va. She used the trek to raise funds for the Wisconsin hospital where she'd been treated and to spread awareness of melanoma.

On her way west from Wisconsin to start her journey, she passed landscapes that she said caused her to ask herself, "Elizabeth, what have you bitten off? … Why didn't I tell that hospital I would ride my bike around the state of Wisconsin?"

But she embarked on the odyssey anyway, persisting even after a nasty fall early on.

She wanted her trek to be an "outreach trip." She camped but didn't take a camp stove so that she'd have to go into restaurants and interact with others.

"It was really about trying to make a connection with people," she said. "Most everybody has a cancer story, whether it's them [or] their relatives. And if you make yourself vulnerable by talking about this, people open up."

She took neither a laptop nor cell phone. She wrote out journal entries in longhand and emailed them to the hospital upon reaching an internet-connected public library. The hospital posted the entries along with a map showing McGowan's progress.

"The bicycle is a great ambassador," she said, noting that wherever she stopped, it prompted questions and sparked conversations. She raised $15,000 for the hospital, a notable sum in the pre-GoFundMe era.

"It took me a long time to write this book," she said, "because it's really hard for reporters to interview themselves."

But winning the Pulitzer gave her the confidence to push ahead. McGowan said she didn’t want the book to be just a travelogue, though it is that. It also is about her fight with cancer and her father's.

"I reconnected with him and I rediscovered him," she said.