I finally officially signed up for Braking the Cycle 2012 this week. This will be my fifth AIDS bike ride, my fourth since 2008.

I don’t always look this serious when I cycle.

This year’s Braking the Cycle will benefit the services of Housing Works, a grassroots AIDS organization that has been devoted to building a healing community for people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS since its founding in 1990. Its services for homeless, formerly homeless, and low-income New Yorkers living with HIV and AIDS include housing, primary care, dental care, mental health services, case management, transgender health services, job training, wellness programs, and more.

I ride my bike because cycling makes me feel free and grounded at the same time. What is freedom if it’s not zooming down the road at nearly 40 miles an hour on The Blue Streak, the bike I bought in June 2008? And what could be more earth-bound than listening to the grind and click of its chain and its gears as I drag myself up a steep hill, the excruciatingly slow rhythm of the tires peeling over the asphalt with each pedal rotation?

I ride my bike to raise money for AIDS/HIV services because HIV is still here. I remember a world without AIDS, but that was over 30 years ago. People still live with HIV, and people still die from it. I ride because I’m blessed with good health, and I can ride. I’ll stop riding for organizations that serve those who battle with and against HIV when the fight is over.

When I bought my first road bike in 2008—the first bike of my own I’d had since the age of 10—I had never ridden more than 85 miles in a day, and I had never done back-to-back endurance rides. I purchased an odometer after I’d been riding my new bike about a month. At the time I mostly wanted to get a better sense of how fast I was going and how many miles I’d ridden on a given training day. The odometer also tracks the total number of miles you’ve ridden. As of this writing, it’s at 8,154 miles. That’s roughly the distance between New York City and Mumbai in India. I’ve never been to India, but it’s mind-boggling and reassuring to think that if there were enough land between here and there, I could bike there.

By the time September rolls around, the odometer will be somewhere around 9,000 miles. In the months between now and then, I will be training—riding 60, 70, 80 miles on Saturdays and Sundays every weekend, riding to and from work, riding riding riding.  It was over 100 degrees when I rode two Saturdays ago. I rode anyway.

I’ll also be fundraising all summer long. Here’s where you can donate to support my efforts: Mika’s Braking the Cycle 2012 Donation page.

This blog is where I’ll be posting periodically all summer to chart my progress.