RRVT News
Here’s a preview of this Saturday night’s banquet of the Raccoon River Valley Trail Association, which will include an inspiring speech & video presentation by adventurer Charlie Wittmack, “the studliest Iowan.” We also tell you about 14 unique packages that will be auctioned live, and about 50 other offerings on the silent auction. Only a few tickets remain — you better act now if you want to be in the audience of more than 220!
PANORA, Iowa, February 13, 2012 – More than 220 people who will be attending the fifth annual membership banquet of the Raccoon River Valley Trail Association here this Saturday night, are going to hear and see the story of perhaps the biggest challenge any individual athlete has ever undertaken – the World Triathlon that Iowa’s Charlie Wittmack completed in 2010 and ’11.
Charlie Wittmack
The 34-year-old attorney will be on hand to tell the story of how he covered more than 8,000 miles from England to the summit of Mount Everest on the triathlon that he designed for himself. In July of 2010, he swam the Thames River through England and continued right on across the English Channel. Then he rode a bicycle 7,700 miles from France to India, and followed that up by running through Nepal. And finally, in early May last spring, he climbed 29,035-foot Mount Everest. It was the second time he’d climbed Everest, the first having been in 2003.
It’s an adventure that has now been dramatically told on TV by ESPN, with video and interviews the network captured along the way.
And Wittmack will tell the story himself here Saturday night at the banquet and fundraising auction at the Lake Panorama National Resort Conference Center. His photos and video will be projected as he speaks on two 8-foot-square screens to make them clearly visible to all in the banquet room.
Only a few of the $40 tickets for the event remain. If you still want to try to get one, you need to call RRVT headquarters immediately at 515-386-5488.
Wittmack’s program is being generously underwritten by WDM Farms, LLC, of Panora, in honor of Timber Creek Therapies. That unique program, which operates at facilities between Panora and Guthrie Center, offers equine-assisted and aquatic therapies for physically-challenged patients, as well as speech-language therapy. You can read more about it by clicking here.
It’s a fitting sponsorship because in the aftermath of his World Triathlon, Wittmack has committed himself to helping others. He gave up the daily practice of law with the Davis Brown Law Firm in Des Moines, and now serves as executive director of “Above & Beyond Cancer.” That is a Des Moines-based organization that seeks to create inspirational adventures for cancer survivors and others, headed by Dr. Richard Deming, who is medical director of the Mercy Cancer Center in Des Moines.
The 56-year-old Deming and Wittmack put together a group of 14 cancer survivors and 15 caregivers for an extremely challenging trek to the 17,500-foot-high Mount Everest Base Camp in Nepal in April 2010. And last month, they led a group of 37 people, 17 of them cancer survivors, to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in the African nation of Tanzania.
Deming, who spoke recently to the annual convention of the Iowa Newspaper Association, said those two “Above & Beyond Cancer” adventures fit with what Wittmack has wanted to do after his World Triathlon.
“Charlie conceived of this World Tri not just to prove he’s the studliest Iowan, which he is,” the doctor said, “but rather to inspire people to dream big and live out your dreams.”
Deming was a substitute speaker for Wittmack in front of the newspaper association on Feb. 3, because Wittmack had to make a hurried trip to Charlotte, North Carolina, where his wife Cate gave birth to a baby boy, Jack. The Wittmacks, with son James, 3, live in Charlotte now because that is Cate’s hometown, and her family is still there with lots of support while Charlie is traveling and speaking so extensively.
Two huge Charlie Wittmack fans who will be in the audience Saturday night at the RRVT Association banquet are Phil & Cyrena Buschmann, of Sigourney in southeast Iowa. They’ve known Wittmack since 1995, when as a high school senior, he served as the mechanic for 308 people who rode bicycles across the U.S. on the “Iowa 150 Bike Ride – A Sesquicentennial Expedition.” The Buschmanns were among the riders on that 100-day, 5,048-mile trip across the nation. That’s what led them to sign up last spring to join with a dozen people to make an April trek to the Everest Base Camp, in a separate adventure from the one for the cancer survivors.
Cyrena Buschmann, a 60-year-old retired elementary school teacher, wrote from the Everest Base Camp about an inspiring moment on the ninth day of their 10-day trek up to the Everest Base Camp. They had not yet seen Wittmack, who’d been elsewhere in the Everest region, training. Their escort Bikal Adhikari, a Nepali who is a great friend and former climbing partner of Wittmack, told the group “we were really going to have some fun this afternoon,” Buschmann wrote. “How surprised we were when Charlie Wittmack walked in an hour later! It was an emotional moment for me. He looks absolutely fabulous and is in great shape for the summit.”
So how does Buschmann assess Wittmack now, 17 years and a whole lot of adventures after she first got to know him?
“I think he’s one of the most caring, generous people I’ve ever met,” she said this week. “He has so much faith in people. And he is such a motivator. He’s pretty phenomenal at that. At our ages, Phil and I would have never thought about doing that trek, because we were the oldest people in our group, except that Charlie convinced us we could do it. He’s got a great message out there for people now.”
The social hour for Saturday night’s banquet begins at 6 p.m. Silent auctions and raffles will begin then, in support of the RRVT Association, the volunteer organization that does the marketing and promotion of the trail in west central Iowa. At 7 p.m., a full dinner will be served, followed by Wittmack’s presentation. And then Daugherty Auction Service, of Adel, will conduct the live auction of 14 unique items.
Among those items, in honor of Wittmack’s appearance, will be two outfits for hiking or trekking, including packs and poles, put together by the RRVT Association.
But also up for auction will be a “Giant Roam 2 Bike” bicycle from Bike World; original RRVT artwork by cartoonist Brian Duffy of West Des Moines; a 12-foot kayak from the Greene County Environmental Habitat Corporation; an original stained glass work by artist Tammie Sobkowiak of Jefferson; a dog sled ride on the RRVT when snow conditions are right, led by Chris Beyerhelm of Dallas Center’s “DC Huskies”; a fabulous dinner for eight at the farm home of Allan and Carole Sieck of Rippey; a week-long stay in a condo at the Lake of the Ozarks, provided by Matt Marckmann of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in West Des Moines; another week at a condo in either Frisco, Colorado, or Scottsdale, Arizona, provided by Mark & Char Vukovich of Lake Panorama; a trailside “Cooper Cookout” with barbecue, all the trimmings and Greene County’s best homemade pies, for up to 24 people, provided and hosted by Carla & Chuck Offenburger of Cooper; long cuts of pork tenderloins from Tyson Fresh Meats in Perry; a “Readers’ Delight” package from the RRVT Association including a Kindle Fire with case, and a Templeton Rye package including a whiskey barrel , two jugs of the famous Templeton Rye and accessories provided by the RRVT Association.
When the RRVT Association puts together special packages for the auction, it does so with cash donations from banquet sponsors. There are 22 of those this year, and they will all be recognized at the banquet.
Meanwhile, there are more than 50 items that will be up for bid in the silent auction, and those span a wide range of values and interests. They include artwork, overnight stays, recreational opportunities, meals, theater tickets, sports apparel, and special lunches & tours with celebrities. The latter include CEO Jeff Stroburg at the huge West Central Cooperative in Ralston; Iowa State Cyclone radio broadcasters John Walters and Eric Heft, and KCCI-TV news anchors Kevin & Mollie Cooney.
You can read more about Charlie Wittmack’s background in an earlier story we pubished by clicking here.
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