When I pre-registered for the Tour de Cure, the organizer asked me if I'd like to say a few words before setting out. It's apparently the tradition to ask a Red Rider to "rally the troops", as it were, and she offered me the honor since it would be my birthday -- unless, of course, I was too shy to speak.

I may be a number of things, but shy about public speaking is not one of them. Give me a microphone and and audience, and I'll ramble on until someone comes with the big hook to pull me offstage. However, trying to figure out what to say might be challenging.

My first thought was to shout out to everyone in the Diabetes Online Community who has entered my life, or with whom I regularly correspond by e-mail, twitter, forums, and blog comments. That list would be a speech as long and as dull as an Academy Award acceptance speech. I could list the people close to me with diabetes, but that list would be just as long. I knew I'd need to use my birthday as a jump-off point, but my initial premise -- that the dearth of adult cyclists is an indictment of our transportation system, our educational system, and our culture -- required a development path that brought my delivery to somewhere between four and five minutes. Getting folk excited to ride should not take more than two minutes -- three at the most.

Like all writers, I hate to lose an elegant turn of phrase or passage of oratory to the editor's pen. Nevertheless, I needed to cut, and cut ruthlessly. Every person, every group I wanted to call out -- cut. Agglomerated into some generic group of people who have some connection to me. The anti-self-propelled-transportation environment? Somewhere behind a political smokescreen. And every type of diabetes-related program ever concocted by the American Diabetes Association... purged.

I finally got it down below three minutes, and I was fine with it -- until I arrived on site. What on Earth convinced me to believe that there would be more Red Riders than not? I made a few extemporaneous last-minute changes, but in the end, it was still mostly about us -- the people with diabetes who inspire, encourage, and ride alongside every person who chooses to ride a Tour de Cure.