Thirteen bicyclists made their way through the foggy streets of Oil City on Saturday to kick off the first ever Foster 100: Oil to Iron ride, a cycling event in honor of area-native Army captain Erick Foster.
“We’re going to ride together as a team, there is no race here,” Nick Liermann told the cyclists before they kicked off for the morning.
Foster 100 is the embodiment of Team Foster, a non-profit charity founded by Liermann, friends of Foster and Foster’s family in 2014, seven years after Foster was killed in action on a rescue mission with his unit in Muqdadiya, Iraq.
Liermann said the first ever Foster 100 was a ride he and friends took on the anniversary of Foster’s death in 2013.
The next year, Foster 100 became an annual public ride from Philadelphia to Cape May, Maryland to raise money to provide service dogs for veterans.
On Saturday, cyclists departed from Oil City, where Foster lived until he was a teenager and is now buried, and rode to the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum in Pittsburgh – another 100-mile ride – in about nine hours, a feat that pushes the cyclists just a fraction of the way Foster pushed himself in life.
“Every chance Erick got he would push himself to see what he could do and to challenge himself,” said Liermann, who befriended Foster pre-Army while both members of the Pitt-sponsored ROTC program.
“He was a student at Duquesne (University) and I was a student at Pitt,” Liermann recalled. “We were commissioned (to the Army) on the same day.”
Foster pushed himself all the way to commander of A-Troop, 1st Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat team; part of the 82nd Airborne Division based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In layman’s terms, he pushed himself out of airplanes to serve his country.
“He jumped out of a lot of planes,” Liermann laughed.
Foster, according to Liermann, jumped from so many he was a certified “jumpmaster,” meaning he was qualified to lead everything about a jump, including the duty of pushing other people from the airplane.
He was also an Army Ranger, having completed the schooling just before his final mission and, Liermann said, “the first one to take care of our team, whether that be on the PT field or the bar.”
“He was a big one to push harder, to work harder as a team,” he said.
Liermann’s speech on Saturday was nothing like a pep-talk given before a friendly bike-ride. While there were smiles and laughter, Liermann told the gathered riders the truth: the trip wouldn’t be all sunshine and good times.
“The next 100 miles are not all going to be fun,” he said to the crowd with emotion in his voice. “When it hurts, dig deeper, because this is not a moment everyone gets to have anymore.”
The one phrase said over and over again, something Team Foster and the Foster 100 live by, was “no hero left behind.”
“We started as 13 and we finished as 13,” Liermann said.
