Pablo Castelaz was six years old when kidney cancer took him. What his family built afterward — a foundation bearing a version of his name, love folded into the syllables — has spent years finding new ways to turn grief into motion. This September, that motion takes the shape of a bicycle.
The Pablove Foundation calls it Pop-Up Pablove, and the premise is almost defiantly simple: ride 100 miles sometime during Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, however and wherever that happens to mean. No start line. No corral. No matching kit unless you’ve earned it through fundraising. A rider in Ohio might knock out the miles on a gravel loop before work; a family in Arizona might trade the distance back and forth on a stationary bike in the garage, one kid at a time. The road doesn’t matter. The mileage does — or doesn’t, really, since the number is a suggestion, not a gate you have to clear to belong.
That looseness is the point. Pablove has run organized rides before, Pablove Across America chief among them, drawing cyclists who wanted to show up in the traditional sense: register, gather, roll out together. Pop-Up Pablove keeps the spirit and drops the logistics, betting that more people will come to a mission if the on-ramp is a driveway instead of a starting corral.
Behind the casualness is a number worth sitting with: more than 15,000 children and adolescents will be diagnosed with cancer in the United States this year, and funding for the rarer pediatric cancers still lags well behind the science trying to outrun them. That gap is where the money goes — into Powered by Pablove research grants chasing early leads that bigger funders haven’t reached yet, and into Pablove Shutterbugs, a photography program that hands kids in treatment a camera instead of just a diagnosis, something to point outward when so much of their year is spent looking inward at hospital rooms.
Emily Keith, the foundation’s executive director, frames the ask in the same unpretentious terms as the ride itself: you don’t need to be a serious cyclist, she says, just someone willing to put miles toward a mission bigger than the ride. Board chair Charlie Vinopal, riding this year as a Pop-Up Coach, puts it more personally — cancer touches everyone somehow, he says, and this is simply where he’s chosen to put his own energy.
Registration is free and open through September 30, with riders building personal fundraising pages, picking their own mileage goal, and posting their progress under #PopUpPablove. Hit certain fundraising marks and the foundation sends apparel and other gifts back your way — a nice touch, but beside the point. The real transaction is the one underneath: miles, howsoever ridden, converted into research dollars and cameras in small hands.
Pop-Up Pablove runs September 1–30, 2026. More at pablove.org/popup26.
