How a personal setback led Dubai resident Jimmy Wright to attempt cycling 600km to raise awareness on children’s cancer

Prior to March 2021, Jimmy and Abbie Wright had been leading lives that came close to defining happily ever after. Jimmy was a football manager for a rugby team after discharging from the Australian military after 19 years service while Abbie, who was also in the military, had just been promoted to the rank of ‘Major’. The couple wasn’t just thriving professionally, but personally too, being hands-on parents to their three children — Macey, Rafferty and Lennox.

And then a game of touch football changed the course of their lives. Playing the game one day with her colleagues, Abbie groaned in pain when the ball hit her chest. When it continued to feel “tender” after a few days, Abbie, then 36, decided to visit a breast clinic. “I had taken my laptop thinking I would also finish my work while waiting for my turn at the doctor’s. I remember seeing these lovely volunteers who were baking banana bread. What I did not understand then was that the longer you stay there, the worse it is for you.” The red flag was raised by the doctor, who pointed to the fact that it could be breast cancer. A day later, a scan confirmed the diagnosis.

A cancer diagnosis changes lives. From having a loved one witness your life (and vice versa), you suddenly find yourself becoming a witness to their suffering. What was even more difficult for Jimmy, who then worked in Sydney, and Abbie, who lived with the kids in Brisbane, was that their jobs demanded them to maintain a level of fitness. And given that they were healthy eaters, how could she be afflicted by Big C?

When we meet the couple at their residence in Palm Jumeirah, Abbie says she has often looked back at that time, wondering if it was because she never had any time for herself. “I used to have a nine-hour workday, which was normal. And then I’d get home and pick three kids from three different locations, bring them home, prepare dinner, and take them for sporting activities. I didn’t have a lot of time for myself, and often wonder if I did have it, would I have picked up the symptoms early?” she asks. Looking back, Jimmy says the journey to acceptance was all about dealing with the “here and now, and sort of get through with it rather than thinking about catastrophic things”.

Dealing with an illness is a lonely journey not only for the person who suffers from it, but also the near and dear ones. The couple also had to find a language to explain Abbie’s condition to their kids, especially seven-year-old Macey, who was particularly close to her. Today, the 10-year-old remembers that as a time when she was really scared that “something bad was going to happen to mom”. “But when we went to see her at the hospital, we knew she would fight it,” Macey recalls.

One of the couple’s coping strategies has been to count their blessings. And that’s when Abbie told Jimmy, “The only thing that could have been worse would be if one of our children was unlucky enough to have contracted the disease.”

The words stirred something inside Jimmy, and being a doting parent himself, he began to think of all that he could do to help families that were actually living the nightmare of seeing their children battle cancer. By then, the couple had already moved to Dubai with their children (Abbie had undergone chemotherapy, radiation therapy and a double mastectomy and reconstruction, and was declared cancer-free by her doctor), and Jimmy set himself a Herculean task he now plans to fulfil at any cost in early November — cycling 600+ km from the border of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to Ras Al Khaimah in an attempt to set a Guinness World Record in support of children’s cancer. “I am grateful to have partnered with Cohesion and The DXB Club on this exciting journey. Both are leading organisations that believe in community engagement, support and have strong values of giving back. They have demonstrated this by their unwavering and dedicated support in our mission to raise funds and awareness on children’s cancer.”

Today, as he goes about fulfilling his fatherly duties during the day, he reserves night-time for practice. Why cycling? “Socially, I have enjoyed cycling. I feel this attempt is going to charge me emotionally, mentally and physically,” says the 39-year-old.

Every day, the training varies, depending on work, family, kids, among other commitments, but one 11-hour training session included an eight hour period of riding throughout the night, stopping for less than two hours of sleep. “I mix long, slow distance sessions and intervals throughout the week,” says Jimmy.