Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll look at a father-daughter team that is preparing to ride in the Five Boro Bike Tour this weekend. We’ll also find out what prompted a composer to write a tribute after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 while campaigning for president.
Credit…Anh Nguyen for The New York Times
Thomas Panek has run more than 20 road races. His time in the New York Half Marathon last year was 2 hours 9 minutes 21 seconds.
On Sunday, he will cover some of the same ground in a different way, as a rider in the Five Boro Bike Tour. “I’m a little nervous,” he said. “I don’t know what to expect when you’re using a different group of muscles in your body.”
That sentence skipped over two things that will set him apart from most of the 32,000 other riders. One is that he will ride on a tandem bicycle.
The other is that he is blind.
He has retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative disorder that left him legally blind by the time his daughter, Madeleine, was born 22 years ago. She will be the one in the front seat of the tandem, shifting the gears and calling out when turns are coming or she needs to brake. They have practiced stopping because, as he put it, “if she were to suddenly brake, I would get thrown forward into her.”
