1. This morning I’m drinking coffee and getting ready to go ride 100km with Jen’s daughter Fenner. Fenner (I’m sure you know) is part of Team Knit for the third year and the fact that I’m going anywhere with her without Jen and nobody’s calling it babysitting still freaks me out.
2. I’m also feeling kinda freaked out about The Rally in general. We leave in 8 days and if I were to make a list of the things that I have to do before we leave it would be longer than this blog post. (Someone said to me the other day that they’d love to do the Rally but they don’t have time and I didn’t say anything because I was (rather uncharacteristically) wordless.) For starters, everyone on Team Knit has at least a full time job, and besides that if anyone has a minute to figure out why my office will not stay clean for more than 4 minutes every time I clean it I would be very much in their debt. The upside of working this hard to get things done before I take a week “off” is helping to keep me from freaking out about the riding part, which remains something I have way more than a healthy respect for. 660km is no joke.
3. If any one of you ever hears me say again that I am going to knit a hoodie- especially an intarsia one, I would like you to come over here and slap my needles from my hands, preferably so that they make a loud and shocking clatter and unsettle me badly. I’m completely incorrigible. I knit a hoodie about 20 years ago and hated it so much that I guess it took this long for the memory to wear off, but mercy do I dislike them. I am absolutely reconciled to all the usual parts of a sweater, even in pieces. You’ve got a back, a front, then it’s sleeve island and at worst you’ve got to steel yourself for a collar or a buttonband. Hoodies? You do all that and then there’s another huge part as big as a third sleeve. Who, I ask you, has the strength for that.
4. Apparently I do because stick a fork in me knitters but I am done. All the parts are finished and last night I started sewing it together and you bet your sweet little stash that there is going to be a sweater today (if I have the strength after the training ride to do anything but weep) or tomorrow.
Pattern is 172-Pull à capuche (that’s french for hoodie) and I knit it in Double Sunday because Elliot likes that yarn. (I do too, so no problem. Clearly the training is taking hold.) NOTE THAT THIS PATTERN IS ONLY AVAILABLE IN FRENCH.
5. I’d like to thank Mme Lessard (name made up to protect the innocent) who was my high school French teacher because I’m really sorry I skipped your class so often to go hang out with Sean. (Real name. He wasn’t innocent at all.) He was seriously smokin’ hot and I loved him but in the end the French has been more useful.
6. Nobody on Team Knit has met their fundraising goal yet, which is kinda the times we’re living in I think, but I like to think that knitters rise above. If you are able to do anything to help, we’d for sure appreciate it, but not as much as the clients who rely on us to raise the operating capital for the charities we ride for. Our links are here.
Team Knit has Bike Rally problems. This should surprise no-one, considering that we are all human, and problems are a very human… problem. All of us are struggling to get to the Bike Rally this year. The Bike Rally is a six-day (or 1-day or 3 day, but we are doing the 6 day version) bike ride that goes from Toronto to Montreal at the beginning of August each year. It’s about 660km, and participants camp at night as we go from stop to stop. It raises money for several ASO’s (AIDS Service Organizations) along the way and for one of them (PWA) it raises the vast bulk of the money they need to provide services at all.
Doing this ride is a huge challenge and one that I’ve met for 14 years now (Ken’s even longer) and every member of Team Knit (except Fenner but she’s just a baby) hasn’t just fundraised and completed the ride multiple times, we’ve also all served as leadership in some capacity (or in my case, most capacities) or another. To do this, you have get over all your barriers, and cope with all your problems and this year Team Knit has a lot of problems. Mine? Mine are mostly related to an aging body that doesn’t always share my training goals, and the phenomenal amount of time it takes to get ready and fundraise. It’s been a ridiculous struggle.
Ken’s problem has a lot to do with this picture (not the knitting, I think he’d tell you that’s the only challenge he’s meeting) but that he’s on the train, again. Ken moved to Ottawa a few years ago and trying to train/be a Team Leader/support everyone else while home is there and work and the ride are happening here is… a problem. He’s on the train a lot.
Jen’s problem is that she’s a full-time working midwife with a practice in another town. She’s on call and away a ton, and the time when she can be on a bike is super limited. She’s using her holidays for training and the ride. I know she’d love to be resting instead but she’s a beast.
Fenner – Fenner’s a teenager who just finished her first year of Uni and is spending her summer planting trees in Northern Ontario. She’ll land home right before the rally and leap on her bike, hoping that the backbreaking work she’s been doing is enough to train her up. Her current problems are black flies (they are so miserable holy s**t) and a lack of internet.
Cam’s problems are a lot like mine – time and work, and like me he couldn’t even get it together for a picture for this post. Cameron is crew again this year – a commitment that takes the same time and moxie. Here, since neither of us could do a picture, take this one from last year.
Since this ride is a fundraiser to support people with AIDS, it’s probably worth mentioning here that AIDS causes pretty big problems for the people who have it. Problems like living or dying, suffering or enjoying happiness, the financial costs of having the virus, or being unable to work because of the virus, or being a child with the virus, or having to suffer the stigma and shame of having the virus and all the consequences and discrimination that entails.
Here we come to the interesting part. For the very largest part, when Team Knit tells people that it’s really hard to get ready for the Rally, that it’s a really big challenge and presents some real difficulties – most sweet, generous and loving people will tell us that we should try and solve our problems by not doing the Rally. They tell us about “self-care” and resting, and that’s it’s okay not to do hard things, and that it is very much okay to prioritize your personal problems, and do you know, I agree with that. I think all of Team Knit would agree that taking care of yourself is important and that sometimes you need to put on your own oxygen mask first. Thing is that doesn’t really hold up if the other person needs the air more than you do. Somewhere near here there is an HIV positive mum who is just like me, and she’s trying to solve her problems too and I don’t know about you, but before I make the decision to prioritize my problems, the scope of our problems would really need to be at least equal, wouldn’t they?
Some other people would tell us that other people’s problems aren’t our responsibility, that we don’t need to stay up at night worrying about HIV/AIDs because it’s got nothing to do with us, but Team Knit firmly rejects the idea that humans have no responsibility for helping each other with their problems. We’re on board no matter where or who they are. (It is worth mentioning too that even if you are the sort of person who is very good at deciding that problems belong to the people experiencing them – HIV/AIDs causes problems for people who don’t have it too – it is a terrific burden on our health and social systems and we’d all be better off without it.)
Some other people will suggest that it won’t matter that much anyway – that HIV/AIDs is such a big problem that even trying to deal with it is folly, and to them I say BAH and you are incorrect knitter. Reset your thinking.
Did you know that for many years running the segment of the United Nations that concerns itself with AIDS has had a target for eliminating it as a health crisis by 2030? That this is possible and real and nothing needs to be invented for it to work? We don’t even need new drugs or more research or a vaccine (although those things would be great). All we need is based on what is possible now. Decent drugs for treatment and prevention, funding and distribution for them, robust testing, and the understanding that we need to remove the stigma and shame around the virus so that people can access those things, and so that other people think it’s important too.
This is so real that Donald Trump said it was his goal in his first State of the Union address in 2019. (Obviously he changed his mind about it as a priority – cancelling USAID without notice wasn’t exactly helpful but I digress.) It is so real that just last month in the 2026 UN Political Declaration on HIV/AIDS they reaffirmed the goal was 2030 and it was adopted by an overwhelming majority of Member States, with 149 votes in favour, 8 against.
149 countries agreed that this is completely and totally doable, if only we have the political and financial will. That’s very much almost all of them.
Amazing news, the Bike Rally can help. Since the plan relies on people finding out that they have HIV/AIDs, receiving the drugs and achieving U=U (Undetectable levels of virus are Un-transmissible) basic community based services like ASO’s can make a real difference today by skipping over the “political will” part. It can simply be our will, yours and Team Knit’s.
Unlike me and the work, or Jen and her shifts or Ken and the distance, or Cam and the time or heavens help her, Fenner and the black flies… this is a problem that we can solve. This is fixable. AIDS as a public health crisis is fixable. Not at some crazy obtuse time in the future either, but within our lifetimes, or even within a few years if enough of us can agree at the same time.
Knitters have been sustaining this event for years and years, and Team Knit is asking you to do it again this year, should your problems be smaller than this one. The cancellation of USAID has meant that global funding for HIV/AIDs is being redirected to support those programs as best they can, and that leaves ASOs all over the world in a lurch, especially as politics in so many places take their eyes off this. If you have any ability to help – even if it’s just the financial equivalent of a few stitches, or if your problems don’t permit that, just forwarding this post around? Team Knit would love that. The best way for us to solve our Bike Rally problems would be if we didn’t need a Bike Rally anymore.
