SKATE 4 CANCER

Terry Fox On Wheels

An idea, some passion, and a skateboard can go a long way

At only twenty-two, Rob Dyer knows a lot about suffering.  Within a years span, four people that were close to him; his mother, both grand mothers, and good friend, were affected by cancer.  But unlike what so many other people would’ve done given his circumstances, he turned the source of his suffering into a reason for inspiration, a cause to dedicate himself, and a project through which he displays a person’s capability to persevere to all around him.  Taking matters into his own hands, in 2004 Rob would begin to strike back at the disease that had made such an impact on his life and to also take part in something that would give meaning to both that painful past as well as the future he hopes for.  Following through on what started as just an idea, Rob started the Skate 4 Cancer; a project that would see him and his crew skate across North America, building awareness and raising money to fight cancer.  A little more than two years and thousands of kilometers later, he continues on in his fight and has vowed to continue the drive until cancer is defeated.  For many, the fact that someone so young would take on something so big is a frightening prospect.  But Rob sees it differently.  In his eyes, the accomplishments of Skate 4 Cancer are just proof that all people, regardless of their age, can play an impact that is only limited by the size of their imagination.  As we sat down with Rob and did this interview and video piece with him, we realized that he might not be far off; an ordinary kid with an idea and a lot of passion can achieve a great deal.

 

 

EW: From what I can tell, your whole life is dedicated to this for an indefinite period of time.  So what was Rob Dyer doing before any of this, in 2004?
RD: That’s sort of a funny thing to answer because it’s almost like you don’t remember what it was like before you get involved in something that is your passion in life.  Everyone is looking for a passion, whether it be a soul mate or something to make your life about.  I think that’s what life is about, dedicating yourself to something.  But basically I was skateboarding, playing in a band making music, I was a really quiet kid in high school, didn’t really socialize that much.

 

EW: Not headed towards accounting school? No goal like that, just trying to do your thing?
RD: Well, I was really into kinesiology and really interested in how the body works.  But that was in high school, when you’re really pressured to choose what you want to do with your life, and it doesn’t really flow into that.  You’ll find a lot of people come out of university and are still like ‘What am I doing?’ and ‘I don’t feel ready to know what I wanna do’.  I think everyone eventually falls into it, and I was really lucky to fall into it at a younger age.  I was given a passion in 2004 at twenty that a lot of people don’t find until they’re twenty five or older.

 

EW: Do you feel like you fell into Skate 4 Cancer?  I know you had a friend of yours, your grandmothers, and your mother all going through it simultaneously.  You had the idea of doing it before you actually did it?
RD: I had the idea actually, I was working at hotel, a Howard Johnson in Aurora and there was this girl I talked to that worked the desk.  And we always talked about what we wanted to do.  We were asking each other, ‘What’s your one dream?’ And hers, she wanted to move out to California and I was like ‘I don’t really want to say it’ cause I had never really told anyone before.  She was the first person I mentioned it to, and she said ‘Yeah, you really have to do that. That’s something you’ll love doing’.  She knew me pretty well and she was supportive of me doing something she knew I’d love doing.  I had mentioned it to a couple of people before and they sort of shut me down.  She was the first person that told me that I should do this, and finally believed ‘Yeah this makes sense’.

 

EW: Can you give us a recap of what you’ve done so far in terms of the actual traveling?
RD: In terms of the actual traveling, our first skate was from Los Angeles, to just above Florida, and then up to Toronto and that took about five months.  We did the Alexis On Fire tour, where we went on tour to promote cancer prevention, and that was about two and a half months.  It was across Canada and down a bit to the U.S. We did a similar thing with a couple of dates on Warped Tour.

 

EW: During your tour, how many hours were you actually skating a day?
RD: How many hours totally depended on a lot of things like the weather or how the road was; whether it was a hill or down slope.  But I think on average, anywhere from around fourty to eighty kilometres a day.  It really varied.  There was one day that we did like a hundred kilometres and it was weird because it was really hot that day.  It was something about the heat that made us keep riding.

 

 

EW: What type of board are you riding?
RD: Just a regular popsicle stick deck but we had Sector Nine wheels, like big fat soft ones.  The bearings were SKF they were resistant towards sand, and a lot of rain.  We were really lucky for that because we got almost all of our gear sponsored.

 

EW: How many wheels and bearings have you gone through so far?
RD: Wheels, like fourty or so.  But bearings we went through almost everyday just because we had a lot of them and it was really hard to keep using old ones.

 

EW: The next thing is that your planning a cross Canada tour.  What’s the next year gonna be looking like?
RD: The next year…  Well in February we have our next program called ‘Cure is Knowledge’ which is about cancer prevention and getting more education in high schools towards that and really push the government towards getting mandatory checkups for people so that we catch cancer at an early stage instead of catching it too late and not being able to do anything about it.

We’ve got a clothing label coming out called ‘Dream, Love, Cure’, and all of the proceeds from the t-shirts and jeans and other items are going to go towards Princess Margaret Hospital.  And then in June, we’ve got a cross-Canada skate that’s gonna go from Vancouver to Toronto that will last until August.  And then we’re gonna do a music tour and then we’re gonna try and do Australia in December.  Umm yeah, big year.

 

EW: Skate 4 Cancer doesn’t take any direct donations.  How is (Toronto’s) Princess Margeret Hospital working with you guys?
RD: How it works, is that we’re basically a third party charity with them.  Any of the donations that come in go directly to them.  We don’t take any.  We’re doing this out of love, and charity, it’s basically just like volunteering.  We have Justin our web designer, who volunteers his time to build the website.  It’s really a bunch of people pulling together their talents to put this thing together.  It’s, you know, we’re trying to teach kids you don’t have to do everything just for money.  If you’ve lost someone to cancer, that should be reason enough to do something.

 

EW: Your life is volunteering pretty much right now.  Is it hard to pay your bills and maintain a balance?
RD: No, I have it pretty good.  I’m not paying for rent, the El Mocambo is sorting me out.  I work at the Ryerson University Pub like three days a week so I can pay for things like entertainment and food.  I sort of take it one day at a time.

 

EW: Do you have sponsors helping you out?
RD: Yeah, we have sponsors that pay for gas, help pay for a van.  We’ll hopefully get one donated by a company.  Things like that.

 

"It’s not necessarily all about the cure for cancer, it’s about this world growing, and people taking responsibility for things we’ve done to each other." 

 

EW: Your plan is to do this until there’s a cure, so you’re pretty much doing this indefinitely.  In that regard, where do you see yourself five or ten years from now?
RD: I know it sounds silly, but I’d love for Skate 4 Cancer to be done tomorrow, ‘cause that would mean there was a cure for cancer.  But like, I can see 2007 and I really think it’s gonna be a huge year for this disease and taking it down.  In my heart, I don’t want to believe it’s gonna be around in 2008 and I’d be happy if it was done tomorrow.  I’d be like ‘Alright cool, now let’s move on to something else’, because really there are a lot of other problems with this world that we haven’t focused on.  Like global warming, I mean it’s the middle of January in Canada, and there’s no snow on the ground.

Like why not?  I think people are afraid of committing themselves to something, because you leave yourself open to criticism.  For every ten people that support you, you’re gonna find there’s one person that’s gonna say you’re wasting your time and you should be doing something else.  Which can be amazing as well, ‘cause hopefully that person is gonna find something they’re passionate about as well.  That’s what we should strive for, for people to be standing up and saying ‘This is something we need to do’.  Get a group of your friends together and build it.  It’s not necessarily all about the cure for cancer, it’s about this world growing, and people taking responsibility for things we’ve done to each other.  Living for something other than yourself, I think, is the most important thing.  You have all these religions in the world but the basic overview of them all is to live for something beyond yourself.

EW: How has the skate community reacted?  Have you had support from videos and magazines?  Myself, I haven’t seen that much in the skate community itself about the Skate 4 Cancer, maybe an eighth of a page article in Skateboard Canada.  Have they been receptive to what you’ve been doing?
RD: I think at first, we really focused on getting the word out through magazines and television, which is still cool.  But I think now, our efforts have been based more on Myspace, interacting with people one on one.  On something like Myspace they can actually contact you and ask questions.  We’re not really trying to run around to media and be ‘Hey, hey, hey…look at what we’re doing’.  If someone in journalism wants to document what we’re doing that’s incredible because it will help get the word out, but I think events right now and having the kids come out and get involved is our main focus. We don’t really have paid staff to get someone to do that.

 

 

EW: You think that would help though, the press might allow you to be broader?
RD: I think it would but, you know, I think they’re gonna find out about it one way or another...  I mean the internet is huge.

 

EW: How do you get ready for it physically?  I know on the last trip you had a stress fracture in your foot.  I couldn’t imagine going through the mountains of interior BC with that type of pain.
RD: Last time I was in the gym running a lot.  Which was good for my breathing, but it didn’t really help my muscles.  Skateboarding and running are both kinda using a lot of different kind of muscles.  I think the most important thing is believing in yourself.  I mean you can be as prepared as you want, but you ultimately have to believe you’re ready for it.

 

EW: What type of crazy things have happened on the way?
RD: We had a really hard time with other cars on the road, cops pulling us over and yelling at us not knowing what we were doing.  Cars bumping into us.  Just what you’d expect from being on the road for so long.

 

EW: Which state or province had the most road kill? Did you have to jump around that stuff?
RD: There was one incident, where there was a car honking at me and I turned around.  I ended up falling on my face, splat into road kill.  That was in Texas, there were a lot of animals, like armadillos and stuff.

 

EW: Did you find any cool things on the side of the road?  I know I always do when I'm skating in new places.
RD: A lot of license plates.  Especially in Texas and California, which was strange because I wasn’t even really there that long.  I started collecting them after a while.

 

EW: Now with Skate 4 Cancer, you skate but there’s also event fundraising that goes into it.  What are the tones to some of your events?
RD:  We try to give the most positive vibes at our events.  We sort of do them as parties, or kick offs for projects that we’re launching.  We really try to make it interactive so that people get involved with what’s going on, physically see that there’s a lot of people getting involved, and maybe even network within those events, to get their own projects going.  It’s an amazing atmosphere to be in if you’re looking to get involved one way or another.

 

EW: Other people have done thing like this, like Terry Fox as an example.  Have you been inspired by others?
RD: Terry Fox was totally the biggest influence for me doing this.  Growing up, I always thought what he did was cool and took part in the Terry Fox Run.  It was just amazing that he put his life on the line to beat cancer.  He was truly fighting the thing that was killing him, it was a very unselfish thing.  He could’ve probably just gone to the hospital and sought treatment and fought it that way but he decided to give his life for future generations, to teach them to commit their lives so that people eventually wouldn’t have to go through this.  I think the people I’ve lost to cancer is another source of inspiration.  They gave their life so that we would get inspired.  I know dying is a part of life, but suffering in any magnitude, whether it be of starvation or cancer, isn’t right and it’s something we can work to get rid of.

 

 

EW: Did you have any difficulties with ageism and people not taking you seriously?
RD: When we started, I think we did.  But I think we sort of proved ourselves.  When people find out that we would go out of our way to do the ultimate, to skate from L.A. to Toronto, they’re usually like ‘Whoa, what do they have to say?’  I think age gets associated with things you’ve done with your life and people sort of think your accomplishments are based on that.  But people have seen we’re serious about this cause and now we can talk to people.  And that’s really important; because if 90% of cancer is preventable, then why aren’t we talking about it and trying to prevent it.  People may look at what age you are, and things like my tattoos, but those are stereotypes, that doesn’t sum up who I am and after a while people have to get past them.

 

EW: Is there anyone you want to thank?
RD: The kids on Myspace that really push the cause because they believe in this as much as we do.  We wouldn’t be able to do this and get our message across without them.  I’m so thankful for them.  Everyday I look at it and I’m like ‘Wow, so many kids have added S4C to their name’ because they’ve lost someone and they’re not just gonna take it anymore.  They’re gonna be involved and they’re gonna help find the cure.