Dille Dille
Franconia man bicycles through the weather, readies for MS rides
FRANCONIA » This year’s March snowstorms kept a lot of people home from work, but not Joe Dille.
“I made it through all four nor’easters this year,” Dille said.
And he did it on a bicycle, the same as every other day.
“He goes in the rain. He goes in the snow,” his wife, Patti, said. “He has studded tires for the snow, believe it or not.”
It’s a five-mile ride from his Franconia home to his Hatfield job, but since he takes a longer route in the evening, it ends up being about 21 miles round trip, Joe Dille said.
Some people think he’s crazy, he admits.
“His wife included,” Patti good-naturedly adds.
Joe Dille said he rode bicycle as a child and in college, then again with his sons, but then let it sit for a number of years.
“Then my doctor started to tell me things I didn’t like to hear,” he said.
He’d gained some weight and his cholesterol and blood pressure were a little high.
“Don’t worry. We’ve got some pills for that,” his doctor told him, but Dille had another idea.
“I go to work every day — I figured I’ll take the bicycle,” he said.
“The first couple times I did it, I needed CPR when I came home,” Dille said.
From riding two days a week, he progressed to three, still only
bicycling on nice days, he said.
“Then I just started to redefine what was nice and now I ride pretty much every day,” Dille said. “Last year, I rode 361 days.”
Along with riding to work, he does longer rides on the weekends, he said.
“It’s been really good for my health,” Dille said.
He’s dropped about 30 pounds and his blood pressure, heart rate and blood sugar are all in good shape, he said.
Dille, who recently turned 60, said he returned to bicycling in the early 2000s, but really got involved in it after the 2014 death of son Matt.
“I think it was kind of a healing thing,” Patti Dille said. “I really think that helped Joe through the grief.”
On the weekend before Matt’s funeral, Joe had planned to do a ride to raise funds for the battle against multiple sclerosis and had raised more than $2,000 for the ride.
With Patti’s encouragement, he went ahead and did the ride.
“It was fantastic because I was sad, but whenever I felt sad and angry, I just pedalled harder and I was crying, but who cares? You know, the tears blew away in the wind,” Dille said, “and I was just venting all that grief energy out and it helped clear my head and just helped me work through it.”
He also built a bicycle in memory of Matt, with the number 84 on the front, because 84 was Matt’s quarter midget race car number.
This will be the sixth year that he is doing fundraising rides for the National MS Society, Joe Dille said.
Patti Dille was diagnosed with MS in 1990, she said. She has two brothers who also have MS, but her twin does not, she said.
“She’s been on a number of therapies and the one that she’s on now is helping her quite a bit, and it’s a direct result of research funded by the MS Society, so I feel this is our way of giving back to the Society for good things that they’ve done for us personally and millions of other people afflicted with the disease,” Joe Dille said. “It’s a tough disease.”
Last year, he rode in two MS rides and raised almost $7,000, which gave him Passport status allowing him to be in any MS ride in the country this year, he said.
His slogan this year is “A Million Meters for MS,” although the five MS rides he is taking part in will actually total more than that — 775 miles, which is 1,250 kilometers or 1.25 million meters.
The rides will be the Coast the Coast on May 19 and 20, Tour De Farm on June 23 and 24, Great Maine Getaway Aug. 11 and 12, City to Shore on Sept. 29 and 30, and Bike NYC on Oct. 21.
During the The Tour De Farm in Illinois, the Dilles said, they will also be able to visit son Joey in Chicago.
Since the City to Shore is Dille’s home ride, all donations to his five rides this year will go to the National MS Society via the Delaware Valley chapter. Information is available and donations may be made at the http://main.nationalmssociety.org/goto/a_million_meters website.
“I’m really looking forward to all this riding and all this fundraising,” Dille said.
“A lot of people are doing it not for me, but for Patti,” he said.
Dille said he has a 20-speed racing bike, but more often uses his one speed with a fixed gear.
“It keeps you in a little better shape,” he said.
One year his slogan for the MS ride was, “One gear, one cause, no coasting,” he said.
That’s because you have to pedal the bike all the time and there is no coasting, he said.
“When the bike is moving, like if I’m going down a hill, I’m pedaling fast as heck and then if I’m going up a hill, I have to press real hard because I can’t shift down a gear,” Dille said.
He said he has blinking lights front and back and wears high-visibility clothes when he bicycles on the road.
“Seventy percent of the accidents come from the front, so people seeing you from the front makes a huge difference,” Dille said.
The accidents from the front often come when a driver is turning left and has not seen the bicyclist, he said.
Most of the drivers in this area are pretty good around bicyclists, he said.
“They’ve seen enough bicycles and they treat me with a decent amount of respect,” Dille said.