Superheroes Take Over the Skyline

Janet — along with her dad, her brother, three cousins, and two nieces and nephews — is registered to ride in the 2026 TD Five Boro Bike Tour, the 40-mile, car-free ride through Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. All eight members from Janet’s family are riding for Ronald McDonald House New York (RMH-NY).

They call themselves The Stanley Steamers — every one of them is descended from (or married to a descendant of) Janet’s great-grandfather Stanley Birdsall. The annual reunion, naturally, is Stanleyfest.

Five of the eight rode last year, including Janet’s dad and her brother. This year, Janet straps on her first-time rider bib alongside two other rookies about to discover that the five boroughs are bigger than they look on a map.

They booked it last year,” she says. “And now there are eight of us.

That’s how the Tour tends to work. You do it once. You come back with reinforcements.

Biking has been a Potter family thing for a long time. Janet’s dad has been a long-distance cyclist since she was a teenager — he’s done RAGBRAI, the legendary weeklong ride across Iowa, and most summers he adds a handful of 50-milers somewhere in the Midwest.

Janet, who lives in Chicago and works as Director of Marketing for a small publisher called Disruption Books, gets out on a bike whenever she can. She has arthritis, which means most high-impact sports are off the table. “I trained for a 5K once,” she says.

After a few months my knees were like — no. Cycling is where I have the highest ceiling.

Eight Stanley Steamers. Forty miles. One ceiling.

Janet grew up in rural Indiana, which meant the nearest specialist who could figure out what was happening to her body was two, three, four hours away. Chicago. Then Cleveland.

Janet’s mysterious medical issues began at two years old. A year later she was diagnosed with arthritis—the root cause for the list of medical issues that plagued Janet early in life. Her eyes. Her lungs. Her joints. “It was a lot of whack-a-mole,” she says. Treat the symptom. Hit a wall. Drive three hours. Try again.

For years, Janet chased down everything arthritis dragged along with it.

Janet had five more surgeries as a kid — most of them to address chronic inflammation in her eyes, a condition she is still being treated for today. From kindergarten through college, she and her parents made the drive to the Cleveland Clinic two or three times a year, sometimes more. A lot of those trips were supposed to be day trips.

We thought we were driving there and back in a day,” Janet says. “And then they’d be like — oh, shoot. You’re not leaving. We’re prepping the OR.

If Janet’s story stopped there, it would be reason enough to ride. It doesn’t stop there. Her nephew — now nineteen — was born with spina bifida and spent his first weeks in the ICU in Indianapolis. Her brother and sister-in-law stayed at the Ronald McDonald House there. They’ve been back many, many times since; he’s had roughly twenty surgeries by the age of ten. The family keeps the tradition going in typical Potter fashion, which is to say Janet’s nephew is the unofficial pop-tab czar of the extended family — everyone in his orbit collects them, and whenever the Potters make the drive back to Indianapolis, they show up at the House with, in Janet’s words, “wagonfuls of pop tabs.”

Her cousin’s baby, born this past November with a heart defect, spent a month or two in the same Indianapolis NICU. Her cousin and her husband stayed at the House, too.

It just feels like it keeps coming back into our lives,” Janet says. “Not in the most — obviously, we’re not happy that we —” She doesn’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t need to. “But it’s been important so many times over the years. And we appreciate it so much.

Janet’s ride this May is not her first act of giving back. She volunteers with an organization that knits blankets for kids in the hospital. She’s tried to volunteer directly at Ronald McDonald House Chicago, too — there’s a long enough waiting list that she hasn’t been able to get in yet. She’s drawn to anything involving kids who are sick. She says it’s because she remembers being one of them, and because she knows how much it matters when someone shows up.

So, when she saw that riding for RMH-NY was an option for the 5 Boro Bike Tour, there wasn’t really a decision to make.

I was just like — oh, well, that’s obviously what I’m going to do, she says.

For anyone new to this: the 5 Boro Bike Tour is the signature event for charity bike riding in New York — 32,000 cyclists, 40 miles, all five boroughs, zero cars on the course. Riders roll out of Lower Manhattan, head up through Central Park, touch the Bronx, swing through Queens, coast down Brooklyn, and finish over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge on Staten Island. Charity partners like RMH-NY receive a limited allotment of rider spots, and each rider commits to raising funds. It’s one of the largest single-day philanthropy events on the New York calendar.

Janet’s fundraising ask was pure Janet. One email. A few dozen people. One line.

I’m riding forty miles. Will you pitch in forty bucks? A lot of people gave exactly forty.

What surprised her, she says, was how many people wrote back wanting to know more.

A lot of the people in my life now don’t know anything about what I went through as a kid,” she says. “It just doesn’t come up.

When she sent the email, some of her oldest friends wrote back saying, hey, I kind of knew this, but — can you tell me more? And some wrote back with their own stories. Because, as Janet puts it, “everybody knows a kid who had to not be a kid.

What surprised her, she says, was how many people wrote back wanting to know more.

A lot of the people in my life now don’t know anything about what I went through as a kid,” she says. “It just doesn’t come up.

When she sent the email, some of her oldest friends wrote back saying, hey, I kind of knew this, but — can you tell me more? And some wrote back with their own stories. Because, as Janet puts it, “everybody knows a kid who had to not be a kid.”

Before we got off the call, I asked Janet what she’d say to a donor who was on the fence. She thought about it for a second.

It makes a difference,” she said. “I think it’s easy to assume that the service the Ronald McDonald House provides is a nice-to-have. Like — let’s not make people stay at a motel. Let’s give them popcorn. But it makes a real difference in the healing process. People heal better when they’re loved and supported. The memory of going through medical trauma is less traumatic, because of the Ronald McDonald House. It’s not just, ‘let’s save somebody a hundred and ten bucks on a hotel.’ It’s part of the healing. In the moment. And afterward.

She paused.

And if donating isn’t in the cards right now — come cheer our riders on in NYC. The 5 Boro Bike Tour rolls through the city on Sunday, May 3rd. Grab a coffee, find a corner along the route, and clap for people you don’t know. The riders notice. They always do.

Because somewhere out there, another family is bracing for a day trip that won’t end up being one. Another mom and dad will walk across a bridge after forty-eight sleepless hours and be greeted by name. Another kid is about to find out that the sterile, scary part of their life has a soft-landing that feels a lot more like home waiting on the other side.

That’s why Janet rides.

And if you’ve ever thought maybe you’d ride the 5 Boro yourself next year — ask Janet’s dad and brother how they ended up outnumbered. You do it once. You come back with reinforcements.

See you at sunrise on the Verrazzano.