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What Inspires You Tour

Shad Ireland has posted his upcoming tour across America and is looking for people to support and ride with him. His web site will be up and running December 11th. The tour starts in May.

Shad was the first dialysis patient to ever compete in and complete an Ironman. I heard him speak last year at our NKF conference. I was very inspired by him and his story. He has written books, and details his history of dysfunctional family dynamics and inability to accept his renal failure as a child. Twice he failed transplantation, mostly because his body will not tolerate the anti rejection regimen required to keep the transplanted organs. His story is powerful and really hits home to the renal failure population. The message is simple. Take charge of your own health to the best of your ability, and any activity that you can do is better than doing nothing. He wants people to feel the best they can, no matter what sort of health problems they have going on.

After completing the IM, Shad started the Shad Ireland Foundation. The point of this foundation is to provide funding to kidney patients for exercise equiptment. He is hoping to raise more money by doing this bike ride. I hope he does, and I hope he stops along the way to share his experiences with other dialysis patients. They need his message. I am waiting for him to give out his route. If it is at all possible, I will ride with him for as far as possible. This is one cause that I have seen really make a difference.

YOU ROCK, SHAD!!!

Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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