Ron Rand didn’t intend to undertake a decades-long cycling streak. But once he got in the saddle, he rode through cancer treatment, an appendectomy, a vacation in torrential rain and 10 days aboard a cruise ship — without a day off.
The now 79-year-old Long Beach resident begins each day on the bike, usually well before sunrise. For years, his alarm would ring at 2:45 a.m., and he would ride 10 miles, return for a walk with his wife along the shore and arrive at his Morgan Stanley office by the time markets opened at 6:30 a.m.
Rand has always had an appetite for the extreme and the perseverance to see his endeavors through, his daughter Courtney Stammerjohan said. When she was in elementary school, she agreed to join her dad for a 75-mile bike ride in Mexico.
After weeks of preparation (Rand bribed her with Abba-Zaba candy), they began the race in Tecate, Mexico, in 100-degree heat, Stammerjohan remembered. In the first five minutes, “I locked handlebars with him and took us both down.” Stammerjohan wanted to quit, her hair a sweaty mess, a monstrous hill ahead on the course. But her dad was a problem solver: he “took a piece of Velcro and tied my hair back,” she said. Hours later, they both finished, Rand in last place, Stammerjohan’s hair so tangled she thought they would have to chop it off.
For that race, and many to follow, Rand rode a heavy brown Peugeot bicycle. For his 61st birthday, Stammerjohan and her two siblings took Rand to Jones Bicycles, a since-closed, beloved bicycle shop on Second Street, and bought him a new model. Rand protested that he already had a working bike, which “deflated all three of us,” Stammerjohan said.
But when he rode the bike home, it changed everything: “He instantly fell in love with that bike,” Stammerjohan said. The streak started that day in 2007, and didn’t stop for nearly 18 years.
To hear Rand tell it, if his kids were going to buy him an expensive bike, “I wasn’t just going to let it sit around in the garage and collect dust.” He fell into a routine of cycling daily.
Soon, Rand saw his first goal on the horizon: breaking baseball legend Cal Ripken Jr.’s “Iron Man Streak” of 2,632 games played in a row. Rand blew through that milestone, but not without obstacles.
One early morning, he went in for an appendectomy. On waking from surgery, he executed a plan to “trick the doctors into releasing” him early. “I said, ‘You know, I feel really good. Can I just go ahead and go home?’” The doctors agreed but told him to take it easy; Rand hopped on his bike.
Another year, Rand and his family were leaving the Kentucky Derby when Rand spotted something outside his car window: “Stop the limo. I’ll be right back,” he said. He jumped out and approached a man sitting on a porch next to a child’s bike with pink streamers. “I’ll give you $20 if I can ride that bike down to the end of the block and back,” Rand remembered saying. The streak survived.
Rand proved himself unrelentingly creative, charming and unflappable in his quest to ride every day. He carried a folding bike aboard a cruise and rode it on the exercise track. He took a trip — sans bike — to a coastal northern California town and knocked on doors in a torrential rainstorm until one woman relented: If he was crazy enough to ride in the downpour, he could borrow her bike, Rand remembered.
“It feels natural to me,” Rand said of his dedication to riding, rare time free from screens and the interruptions of daily life. The wind whooshing past as he peddles “turbo-charges me,” he said.
That feeling has powered Rand through some of his most challenging moments. He cycled through the grief of his wife’s death due to COVID-19. (“My foil with the bike riding,” Rand described her. “She was always supportive. She just thought I was crazy.”) He cycled as he underwent treatment for prostate cancer this year. (A recent test showed his cancer was now undetectable.)
But when he felt a piercing pain in his hip earlier this year, imaging revealed the cartilage in his socket had worn away. His hip joint was bone on bone, and the streak was at stake.
Rand went under the knife in June. His surgeon, Dr. Michael Hunter of Hoag Orthopedic Institute, completed the surgery in under an hour, using the newest joint technology available, reducing the need to cut muscle and allowing patients to go home sooner. When Rand woke up, pumped full of pain medication, “he really wanted to cycle the next day,” Hunter said — not medically advisable.
But the next day, his leg swelled “absolutely huge,” so large Rand couldn’t move, he said. He sat next to his daughter, Stammerjohan, who was helping him recover. “She said, ‘You know, this is going to break the streak.’ And I said, ‘I don’t look at it as breaking the streak. I look at it as enabling me to continue biking,’” Rand remembered.
One November morning, Rand wheeled his lightweight bicycle (“just a feather,” he said) from his home in Belmont Park to the water and carefully mounted, using a curb for assistance, as his doctor instructed. He looped around the parking lot, youthful and almost giddy as he blew past a couple waterfowl in Alamitos Bay. Then he rounded a corner and briefly disappeared from view, emerging again to dismount, beaming.