Raccoon River Valley Trail

PANORA, Iowa, December 5, 2011 – Iowa native Charlie Wittmack, who at 34 years old is recognized as one of the leading athletes and most engaging personalities in the world, will be special guest speaker at the fifth annual membership banquet of the Raccoon River Valley Trail Association.

Wittmack in 2010 and 2011 completed an almost incredible “World Triathlon” covering more than 8,000 miles from England to the summit of Mount Everest.  He swam the Thames River through England and continued right on across the English Channel, then rode a bicycle 7,700 miles to India, then ran through Nepal, and finally, in early May, climbed 29,035-foot Mount Everest.  It was the second time he’d climbed Everest, the first having been in 2003.

“That year, doing all that, was a fun year, you know?” Wittmack said in a recent interview.  “But at the same time, it was so hard.  And it was an incredibly humbling experience.  Every aspect of it seemed to be for some greater purpose.”

One of those purposes now is sharing his story with audiences across the nation and around the world, with his speeches, photos and video.

And that’s what he’ll be doing on Saturday night, February 18, when he speaks at the RRVT Association banquet, which will be held at the Lake Panorama National Resort Conference Center, located just north of the trail town of Panora.

That event includes a social hour, big dinner and fundraising auctions that support the work of the trail association.  That is the non-profit group that does the marketing and promotion of the RRVT, the paved trail that now stretches 69.5 miles in west central Iowa.  An additional 20 miles of paved trail is scheduled for completion in 2012.

Tickets for the banquet are $40 and are available now to members of the RRVT Association.  You can buy memberships in the association online, in the “RRVT Store” on this Internet site, and be qualified to buy banquet tickets right now, too.  If you buy or renew your association memberships now, you will also receive your trail user permits for the 2012 year. 

Banquet tickets will go on sale for the general public on January 6.

Capacity for this event at the conference center will be about 300.

“We’re thrilled that Charlie has agreed to come share his story with us at the banquet,” said Carla Offenburger, of Cooper, president of the RRVT Association.  “He’s been riding our trail from when it first opened back in 1989.  Then my husband Chuck and I got to know him real well in 1995, when we were organizing the Iowa 150 Bike Ride across the U.S., and we hired Charlie – who was then a senior in high school – to be the mechanic for the 308 cyclists on that 100-day ride.  Over that summer, we learned what a fun character he is, but we could also see that there was a lot of bold adventure in him, too.  We all called him ‘Wrench’ that summer when he was our mechanic.”

The Offenburgers and Wittmack stayed in touch over the years and, after Wittmack first climbed Mount Everest in 2003, Carla Offenburger brought him to Buena Vista University in Storm Lake in a lecture series she was coordinating then.

“His story and photos were amazing then,” Offenburger said, “and of course, what he did that year hardly compares to what he did on the World Tri in the past two years.”

Wittmack, the grandson of a former Iowa governor, Norman Erbe, grew up in Des Moines. He graduated from Roosevelt High School.  He worked at the Barr Bike & Fitness shop in West Des Moines during his high school years.  Following his summer as a mechanic on the Iowa 150 ride, he enrolled at the University of Iowa, began mountain climbing and earned his undergraduate degree in 2001.  That’s when he started training for his first Everest ascent, although he didn’t tell family and friends he was thinking about doing that for a long time.

He also decided to look into an interest he’d long had in practicing law.  To test that, he took a job as a paralegal in the summer of 2001 at a law firm in Washington, D.C., he met another paralegal Catherine Scharf, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, and a recent graduate of Villanova University.  They fell in love and eventually married.  Their son James is now 3 ½ and Cate is pregnant with a second child, due February 10.

After Charlie’s first climb of Everest, he enrolled in law school at the University of Iowa and graduated in 2006.  He then went to work as a trial lawyer and lobbyist with the Davis Brown Law Firm in Des Moines.  He continues to be “of counsel” with that firm, although this fall he took a full-time job as executive director of the new, Des Moines-based “Above & Beyond Cancer” program.  That was founded by Des Moines oncologist Dr. Richard Deming, who has become a close friend of the Wittmacks.

Charlie and Cate became sensitized and involved in the battle against cancer when she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2008.  She has recovered from that, but both of them continue to be dedicated to improving life, treatment and recovery experiences for cancer patients everywhere.

Charlie and Dr. Deming have built a partnership for Above & Beyond Cancer with the American Cancer Society.  They put together an “Everest experience” in the spring of 2011 that took 14 cancer survivors and 15 caregivers to Nepal – with all of their expenses paid by Deming’s organization – to do a trek to the Everest Base Camp.  Wittmack spent a lot of time with the group around his own six-day climb to the summit of Everest.

They are now putting together another group of cancer survivors and caregivers to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in Africa.

Meantime, life is hectic for Charlie Wittmack.

“I’m traveling pretty much all the time, doing a whole lot of speaking and working on a book on the World Tri,” he said.  “Since Catie is pregnant, we decided for her to live for now in North Carolina because she’s got a good network of support there from family, and I’m back and forth all the time.  We no longer have our home in Des Moines – you remember, we sold it to raise money for the World Tri – but I have an apartment.  Seems like I’m almost never in it, though.”

He said that it has been difficult physically to wind down from the tremendous level of fitness he built himself up to for the World Tri.

“Of course, I took some time off from training and exercise after I got home from Everest,” he said. “But, you know, when you’re used to exercising 8 to 10 hours a day, it’s hard to scale it back.  At first, it was hard to sleep if I wasn’t working out 4 to 6 hours a day.  But gradually I dropped it back to an hour or two a day, and that’s where I am now.”

We’ll learn a lot more about it on February 18 at the RRVT Association banquet.

Guest speakers in past years at the banquet have been cartoonist Brian Duffy, TV news anchor Kevin Cooney and former First Lady of Iowa Christie Vilsack – all of them veteran cyclists and longtime users of the RRVT.

When we told Wittmack that the former speakers had a good enough time at the banquet that they’ve been coming back to successive ones as ticket-buying attendees, he said, “Well, those are three of my own favorite people in Iowa, so I’ll probably be the same way.”

More details about the banquet and the auction items will be published in coming weeks on this Internet site.