Polly Bartlett was a the type of woman who came in last at a bike race, and didn’t care. She had done the race just to do it, and that was all that mattered.

“My mother was always someone who would set a goal for herself and she was going to do it no matter what,” remembered her son, Jeremiah Bartlett, 36, from his Auburn kitchen. “Sooner or later, she was going to find a way to overcome any obstacle.”

When she was in her 30s, she decided to overcome her fear of swimming in water over her head. She succeeded.

But one day after she turned 48 in 2000, she succumbed to one obstacle she could not power through. The breast cancer she thought she had beat once before, returned and had spread to her lungs.

Her last day of consciousness was her birthday.

So every year since 2000, Bartlett pulls out his Nashbar Road 5000 he purchased in 1992 and rides on the Trek Across Maine in honor of his mother.

The annual fundraiser for the American Lung Society promotes healthy lungs and clean air. 

“Yeah, I was hesitant about the trek at first, but if she could do all those things, then I couldn’t be a coward and say ‘Oh, I can’t do it.’ If she could, then I could.”

But the three days and the 170 miles covered seemed daunting to Bartlett. He never really imagined himself doing anything that athletic that forced him to raise a minimum of $500.

It took his mother’s good friend, Wendy Newcomb, whom he rides with annually, and his mother’s death to push him to commit to that first trek 10 years ago.

And he just keeps going back.

“I said this year was going to be my last year, and then I went and signed up for it again! It’s like a compulsion now.  I can’t imagine Father’s Day weekend without it,” said the single father of one.

But it’s not just the memory of his mother, an avid cyclist, that pushes him to pedal year after year.

It is the organization of the event and the people he meets.

” I would say it’s 170 miles of the best people and the best three days you’ll ever have.”