Chuck and Lijie's annual charity bike rides

Why these two rides

Charlie Eesley — Chuck’s father, the Vietnam-veteran-turned-Marietta-businessman whose 1969-1971 letters home make up the largest single corpus on this archive — died on 26 November 2015 of complications from diabetes. He had carried Type 2 diabetes for years; the eventual cause of death sat on top of decades of the small daily diabetic toll the disease takes on heart, kidneys, eyes, and feet.

Beginning in 2016 — the year after Charlie’s death — Chuck and Lijie have ridden every year in the American Diabetes Association’s Tour de Cure, the ADA’s nationwide cycling fundraiser, which raises tens of millions of dollars each year for diabetes research, awareness, and patient care. The continuous record runs 2016 through the present.

The National MS Society’s Waves to Wine — the two-day Bay Area MS Society route running from San Francisco through the Sonoma wine country — runs a year longer and is anchored differently. Chuck and Lijie’s friend Paul Twohey got Chuck onto the ride in 2014, before Charlie’s death, and they have ridden it every year since — 2014 through the present. No immediate family member has MS, but the years of riding have put Chuck and Lijie in contact with many people living with the disease and reinforced the commitment.

Not every year has a five-minute video posted to YouTube; the years collected below are the years a video survives. The years not listed are years the rides happened anyway.

The Empo Health connection — the same impulse, made scientific

The same year-after-year ride for diabetes carries a second, harder thread: Chuck’s venture investing in Empo Health, a company building diagnostic technology for diabetic foot ulcers — one of the most under-recognized and under-treated complications of advanced diabetes, and a leading cause of lower-limb amputation for diabetic patients in the United States. The funding decision is not separate from the rides; the same impulse runs through both. Show up where the disease that killed your father is doing its quiet daily damage, with whatever you have — legs, money, attention, network.

A note on dating — the cycling practice predates the charity rides

The cycling-life corpus is older than the post-2015 charity rides. The earliest video entry is the 2014 Sequoia Half Century — a Western Wheelers Bay Area club century — predating Charlie’s death by more than a year. The Sequoia entries continue across the post-2015 period (most recently the 2026 Sequoia Half Century with the Stanford team) alongside the ADA Tour de Cure and MS Society rides. The same cycling life runs through both periods; the charity rides are the post-2015 layer that the November 2015 loss added on top of an existing practice.

A handful of destination rides — Mo’omomi Beach on Molokai (2025), Asti Tour de Vine in Sonoma (2025) — also sit in this corpus. They aren’t fundraisers in the formal sense, but they belong to the same cycling-life record and are collected here for continuity.

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Prehistory — the earliest documented rides, c. 1981–1986

Before the charity rides, before the Bay Area road bikes, before Sequoia or Asti or any video at all, there were two stretches of toddler-and-elementary-school riding in the family album. Surfaced here, in jest, as the deepest archaeological layer of the cycling corpus.

Annapolis, c. 1981–83 — the Radio Flyer trike

Chuck on the red tricycle in the driveway of the Annapolis house, c. age two — in the Annapolis years before the family moved back to Marietta. The earliest known frame of him on three wheels.

Hillcrest, c. 1984–86 — the BMX cruiser indoors with training wheels

Chuck at roughly five or six on the same red BMX bike with training wheels, indoors at the Hillcrest house, grinning. The brick fireplace + wood-paneled rec room places the family’s first house after the 1983 Marietta return.

Highland Ridge, c. 1984–86 — the wet blacktop loop

Same bike, same training wheels, outdoors on the blacktop loop driveway at Highland Ridge — the house Will the architect had designed for the family.

A thirty-year gap then runs to the 2014 Sequoia Half Century below — the first ride in the corpus with a five-minute YouTube cut.

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The video record, year by year

Each ride below is a roughly five-minute YouTube recap.

2014

Sequoia Half Century — Western Wheelers. The earliest video entry in the corpus, predating Charlie’s death. A Bay Area club century.

MS Society Waves to Wine. Paul Twohey’s introduction year — the MS-rides practice begins here. Continued every year since.

Lijie crossing the finish line, 20 September 2014. A phone-video clip from the same year’s ride.

2015

MS Society Waves to Wine. The same year Charlie Eesley died of diabetes complications — the post-loss period and the ADA Tour de Cure practice would begin within the next year.

2018

ADA Tour de Cure. The earliest documented ADA ride in the corpus — the load-bearing annual fundraiser anchored in Charlie’s November 2015 death.

MS Society Waves to Wine. Four years into the MS-rides practice.

2019

ADA Tour de Cure. Third year of the post-Charlie diabetes-ride practice.

2021

ADA Tour de Cure. The COVID-era ride year — five-year mark of the practice.

MS Society Waves to Wine. Seven years into the MS-rides practice.

2022

ADA Tour de Cure. Six-year mark of the post-Charlie diabetes-ride practice.

2023

ADA Tour de Cure. Seven-year mark.

2024

ADA Tour de Cure. Eight-year run of the post-Charlie ride.

MS Society Waves to Wine — with Vasyl Dub. Tenth-year mark of the MS-rides practice. Vasyl Dub — recurring riding partner, also on the 2026 Sequoia Stanford team — joins.

2025 — the most-documented riding year

Waves to Wine + Tour de Cure combined recap. Both rides done in the same year.

Asti Tour de Vine. Sonoma County wine-country cycling in Asti, on the Russian River.

Mo’omomi Beach — Molokai, Hawaii. The corpus’s first non-mainland entry. Echoes — at a long distance — the Honolulu thread the 1953 Eesley 50th-anniversary trip with Stella Sunn and Ted Chong set running through this archive.

2026

Sequoia Half Century with the Stanford team — Western Wheelers. The metric century (100 km / 62 mi) route with Chuck, Lijie, Vasyl Dub, Anton, and Andrew. Twelve years on from the 2014 Sequoia that opens this corpus.

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Where this fits in the family threads

The annual charity rides anchor the current generation’s instance of Thread #7 (Showing up — in small, daily, unglamorous ways) in the family-threads synthesis essay. The earlier instances of the thread the essay surfaces:

• Charles Leonard Eesley taking in Stella Sunn during the war and keeping her in the household for the next decade
• Will and Peggy Eesley at the First Congregational UCC in Marietta, on the Tree Commission and the Bicentennial Commission, decade after decade
• Norm and Betty Wolfe at the Sixth Street Church of Christ congregation in Marietta, taking food to the sick and driving the elderly to appointments across the rest of their lives
• Faye Angel keeping young Chuck on his sick days at her Marietta house, just as Aunt Betty Wolfe did at hers
• Charlie Eesley himself visiting his mother Peggy at Harmar Place every week of the years she lived there
• Briana Massaro Lockett as a Stanford physician’s assistant — the medical-care-as-vocation version of the same thread

The annual charity rides are the 2010s-and-2020s version of the same pattern: not heroics, just sustained showing-up against the specific diseases the family has lost loved ones to.

It is the smallest possible practice and the most compounding. Twelve years of annual five-minute videos is a documentary record of who the rider was each year, and a financial record of the money raised, and a kinship record of who the ride was for.

See also

• Charlie Eesley’s eulogy — Chuck’s eulogy for his father in November 2015, the immediate context the post-2015 rides started in
• Letters from Vietnam — the corpus of Charlie’s 1969-1971 letters home; the prior decades of the same father whose 2015 death set the rides in motion
• Scuba diving trips — the underwater companion corpus
• Family threads — Thread #7 in particular, the broader pattern this practice continues

Sources: Chuck and Lijie’s annual ride history c. 2014-onward; the American Diabetes Association Tour de Cure; the National MS Society’s Waves to Wine; Empo Health. Charlie Eesley’s 26 November 2015 death from diabetes complications is the load-bearing biographical anchor and is documented on his page and in Chuck’s eulogy.