Sam Satterfield- Local rides for cystic fibrosis

Warner Robins business owner Sam Satterfield recently participated in a bicycle ride near Atlanta to help raise money for cystic fibrosis.

“This was my third year in a row participating in it,” Satterfield said. “This year I personally raised $1,400, and the actual event this year passed its goal and raised more than $130,000.”

The CF Cycle for Life is a bicycle ride of 15, 30 and 65 miles for all people to participate in. This year the ride was held in Senoia.

“I’ve been doing the 30 mile, and I have a GPS and measured it; it was actually 32 1/2 miles,” Satterfield said. “It took me two hours and 10 minutes, and I had approximately 25 donations made for my portion of the donation.”

The ride is a fundraiser for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation that gathers several sponsors as well as teams and individuals who are interested in cycling, or in Satterfield’s case, cystic fibrosis.

“My wife — I was married for 15 years before she passed — had a very rare type of cystic fibrosis,” Satterfield said. “She was quite sick for a number of years. She worked on base and took medical retirement.”

The donation portion of the ride is usually done through social media and the CF Foundation website. People can make a donation online or give a check or cash to be turned in on the day of the ride.

Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disorder that usually affects the lungs. It is characterized by difficulty breathing as well as coughing up mucus as a result of frequent lung infections.

While usually detected in infants and children, there is no cure for CF, so it is instead treated in several different ways depending on the type of the disease a patient has. Most people who have it die by age 25, Satterfield said.

“It’s a younger person’s or kid’s type of disease, and they usually don’t survive past the age of 25,” he said. “She was 48 when she passed away, and at the time we had spoken to an elderly doctor who said she was one of the oldest, if not the oldest, CF patient he had ever worked with.”

In the case of Satterfield’s wife, Joy, she continued to get progressively worse over the course of several years, staying in the University of Alabama Hospital at Birmingham for weeks to a month at a time.

“She was on the lung transplant list. She had to go over there (UAB) and stay there for six months before she passed. She kept getting worse and worse and never got the transplant,” Satterfield said.

Joy Satterfield passed away in 2005, leaving behind her son, who was in seventh grade at the time, and her daughter, who was in fifth grade.

“It was a rare type that she had, which helped prolong her life,” Satterfield said. “There’s over 1,200 different forms of CF. Her whole life, she was treated for severe asthma, and she wasn’t diagnosed until after all the

different tests.”

After three years of competing in the ride near Atlanta, Satterfield is interested in making the

fundraiser local.

“Now that this event is over, the principal party I spoke with will get back with me in the next month or so to put something together here,” he said.

While the closest fundraiser is a CF walk in Macon, Satterfield envisions a bicycle ride at the Georgia National Fairgrounds in Perry in the spring. He said he would like to set up an event similar in nature to the Relay for Life in which different teams raise money for the event.

“My thought is of the Ag Center, and it being somewhat of a child’s disease, we could have a kid’s fun ride in addition to a 10 or 15-mile ride,” Satterfield said. “It would encourage parents to bring the kids out for a ride around the whole loop of the fairgrounds for a fun ride. It wouldn’t be just from a cyclist’s point of view, but a family kind of thing for a fun ride in addition to different levels of 15, 30 and 60 miles.”

There’s still a lot of planning to do before making the CF ride of Perry a reality — for example, permission needs to be obtained from the Georgia Agricultural Exposition Authority in order to use the fairgrounds — but Satterfield is

confident that the community would take up for the good cause.

“One of my friends, Chris Moran, has donated the past three years and has ridden with me the past three years also,” Satterfield said. “He’s just a good friend of mine, and he rides quite a bit more than I do. He got me interested in doing it.”

Satterfield said he and Moran have ridden in bicycle fundraisers for other groups together, such as the autism ride in Macon and Alzheimer’s Association bike ride.

“I’ve only gotten serious about being on the rode and cycling for about 4 1/2 years. I do enjoy it, but it can be dangerous with traffic in and around the area. I don’t ride on major roads,” he said.

Satterfield started off slowly, riding only five miles at a time and then challenging himself to go further and faster. Now, he rides 20 to 25 miles at a time two to three times a week.

“You just have to set goals and keep riding toward them,” Satterfield said.

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