LAST Sunday, only hours after he'd completed crossing Canada by bike, Tony Griffin was approached by a stranger outside his campus apartment in Halifax, Nova Scotia. "Are you the fella I saw on television?"

the man asked. Griffin could tell by his voice that he suffered from throat cancer, that he was the kind of man who he had ridden those 7,000km for.

"I am, " smiled Griffin. "Nice to meet you." The man raised his finger, bit his lip, and whispered, "You're doing a great thing." Then he turned and walked away. He hadn't said much yet he'd said everything and he'd felt compelled to say it.

All the way it's been the same. A woman who has lost all her hair kissed him on the cheek and told him she'd followed the ride by internet for the past two months. On Day 17 a Mayo man whose daughter had died by suicide three months earlier waited in a Clare jersey on his bike 40 kilometres outside Saskatoon to share some of the journey and his story and tears with Griffin.

On Day One, a woman pulled up on the highway to tell him she was a survivor and for him to pedal faster to tell as many people as possible that cancer can and will be beaten.

That same day after he'd dipped his bike in the Pacific Ocean to bless the start of the Ride for the Cure, a woman from Navan stood an hour and a half in the rain on the outskirts of Vancouver just to shake his hand. For some reason, people connected with and appreciated that an athlete in the prime of his career was sacrificing that career to do this for cancer victims and the memory of one of them, his own father, Jerome.

It's why today, Joe Deane, who had his own brush with cancer, and over 150 other cyclists will join him on his trip from Athlone to the Market Square in Ennis. It's why Bernard Dunne will be there.

They get it. They get what this and he's about.

Others don't. He knows that and he smiles at that. In his weekly diary for The Clare People, he's liberally quoted Gandhi and written about celebrating life and his certainty that cancer will be beaten, and he's heard that there are people choking on their cornflakes, baffled at the Oprahisation of a country lad from Ballyea.

"A few years ago that would have crushed me, " he says.

"But that's what I'm going to have to contend with for the rest of my life. I now realise that I'm trying to make a difference and if they can't understand it, fair play to them, God bless them, but I can't be dissuaded from trying to help people.

"I know I sound idealistic but if I didn't dream big, I wouldn't have cycled across Canada. I definitely wouldn't have won an All Star because I'd have given up four year ago. I just want to get the message across that what we think becomes what we are. Jonas Salk, the guy who helped find the cure for polio; eight years he struggled against the medical establishment but he kept telling them polio would be a thing of the past. When Magic Johnson got HIV, everyone thought he was finished. But he said, 'No. This is not going to beat me.' Sixteen years on and he's still living strong.

"I would never have thought I could cycle 100km, let alone 7,000, until I went about trying to do it. The fact there'll be over 150 people cycling into Ennis, that's a statement. They could have chosen to be elsewhere this weekend but they've chosen to bike across the country and celebrate the fact they can do it.

"People say I've been very lucky, like on this trip, like getting to meeting Lance [Armstrong] in his house. It's not because I'm lucky, it's because I chose to be open to that possibility. For me it was most difficult when I was in [St] Flannan's and then the Clare panel. I didn't feel I was adequate enough and I got exactly what I thought. But when I started telling myself I was entitled to this, things started to happen. We choose our attitude and what we attract into our lives. But I know after this ride how hard choosing your attitude can be."

CHOICE NUMBER ONE:

'GRIFF, YOU'RE NOT DOING ENOUGH FOR OTHERS' It started on a snowy evening in Halifax last November. Griffin was in his campus apartment, checking his mail, when he came across footage his roommate Matt Bethune had zapped to him. It was of a man called Dick Hoyt and his son Rick who is disabled from the neck down. The clip showed Dick pushing Rick along to complete marathon after marathon and triathlon after triathlon, yet Dick maintained that it was Rick who was pushing him. Father and son, on a journey together, each driving the other. It moved Griffin to tears and to action.

"For years I felt I hadn't really a purpose and when my Dad died two years ago, I felt it stronger than ever. Then I watched that clip of the Hoyts and I said, 'Griff, for too long you've just been coasting along, worrying about your exams and hurling. You're not doing enough for others.'" That night an idea was hatched - 2007 would not be about the hurley, it would be all about the bike. At the time he didn't own one but cycling always fascinated him. At three o'clock the morning after he'd scored 1-2 in the 2005 qualifier against Waterford, he drove to Dublin to catch a plane to catch a stage of the Tour de France. Seeing the colour and pain and sweat of it all up close left an indelible impression. "You learn, " he said prophetically in an interview last summer, "that we all have this resolve, just waiting to be tapped into."

First, he bounced the idea off his roommates and his lecturer in exercise physiology, Stephen Cheung; then Travis McDonagh. It was McDonagh, a Canadian working in Ennis, who had tipped him off about the course in human kinetics in Halifax and it would be McDonagh who would tell him if this cycling idea was just a pipedream. That's why when Griffin came home and headed up to Dublin to collect his All Star in Citywest, McDonagh was his date. As they were approaching the notorious bridge that joins Killaloe and Ballina, Griffin said, "I've got this idea, Trav."

Minutes later, McDonagh was telling him it had to be even bigger. Instead of cycling part of Canada, he should cycle the width of it. Instead of trying to raise 20 grand for cancer, he should be looking to make Euro150,000. Meet Lance. Instead of it being a charity run, it had to become the Tony Griffin Foundation.

He had to dream big. A few months later when the foundation was launched in Dublin, Griffin declared that if the charity could raise Euro150,000, why not a million? His mentor McDonagh turned in astonishment, then smiled. Luke had Obi-Wanned Kenobi.

CHOICE NUMBER TWO:

'IF I DON'T PEDAL, THEN I WON'T GET THERE' Just when Tony Griffin thought the first day of the ride was coming towards the end, his flatmates and companions, Matt Bethune and Ben Whidden, had some bad news. They'd miscalculated the trip to Hope, British Columbia. Instead of only another 25km to go, he had another 70. And as the lads drove past to co-ordinate Griffin's late arrival into Hope with the local police, Griffin was left all alone for three hours, climbing that mountain road in the lashing rain.

"I broke into tears, thinking, 'I'm not going to be able to make this, I'm not going to be able to make this.' Then I got this text message from my sister, Rosaleen. 'Thanks for doing this for our father.'" Together, they got to the end.

Team Griffin had done a Team Hoyt. The black thoughts would constantly resurface, though. That night and the following morning his knees were killing him.

"I'm not fit for this, " he'd tell himself. He thought the same against a headwind out in the Prairies, where they say you can watch your dog run away for five days. Then there was the day he crashed. That night as he slept in the hospital car park in the group's RV, he was sure his collarbone was broken. It wasn't, it was just that the shoulder was dislocated, but the pain the following day was torturous.

Yet he drove on. Sometimes it would take the craziest of notions. When the shoulder was dislocated, he thought of Tyler Hamilton in the Tour de France, even if it meant afterwards capping the teeth he'd grinded down. After the crash, he just used higher handlebars. As John Lennon told him, there are no problems, just solutions. "There were days when I'd see the bike and I'd say, 'I cannot get on you today.' But I knew that the only way I could get up on that bike was if I chose to. I said to myself, 'If I don't pedal, then I won't get there' and I'd promised myself from the start that even if I had to crawl across Canada I'd get there."

He found inspiration all around him. Matt was just meant to help drive the RV for a few weeks, but instead went the whole way, cycling most of it. Ben had never cycled either and ended up doing 50km a day. One testing day, Griffin asked himself to count his blessings. The list was endless. "I started listing family, friends, then names of tens of volunteers, some of them who I'd yet even to meet, and I ended up saying, 'Why am I feeling sorry for myself? !'

We always talk about what we don't have, when we should be looking at all the things we do have."

He had Jerome all the way too. The group could sense it.

The few days up to the last day, it had rained constantly but Tony promised the sun would shine at the end. On that last day it stopped raining and two kilometres out as the pipers led him into Halifax, the sun came out. It was as if Jerome was smiling down as well.

Today is another sort of homecoming, as a county that this year seemed to forget what hurling and sport is meant to be all about will be reminded what life itself is all about. Get to Ennis if you can.

Celebrate life. Celebrate Tony Griffin. He's doing a great thing.

Tony Griffin is due in Market Square in Ennis today around 3pm. If you want to donate or know more, check out www. tonygriffinfoundation. com