In spite of endless hours of training Gary Bohn of Sedona undertook during the last year in preparation to participate in the Tour 21 a week before the 110th edition of the Tour de France, he hasn’t been resting since then.

“Living life one day at a time hit home during the ride,” Bohn said. “Everyone tends to say that. But the experience really hit home after that. I think spiritually, it showed me how. My faith has always been the most important thing, but even doing the Tour de France didn’t satisfy me. It was great and I would never trade it, but it still doesn’t fulfill you. The only thing that has ever fulfilled me is [my faith].”

Which is partly why you will see him remain a fixture on Sedona’s mountain biking trails after he exceeded his initial fundraising goal of $40,000 by about $7,000. He was riding for the British nonprofit Cure Leukaemia, which raised over $1.2 million this year for their Trials Acceleration Programme, a network of research nurses at 15 blood cancer centers across the United Kingdom.

“This network enables accelerated setup and delivery of potentially life-saving blood cancer clinical trials to run, giving patients from a  UK catchment area of over 20 million people access to treatments not currently available through standard care,” the organization said in a press release.

Bohn’s ride started on June 24 in Bilbao, Spain, and continued for approximately 2,200 miles across the Alps, Pyrenees, Massif Central, Jura  and Vosges mountain ranges. “It was incredible, exhilarating, exhausting, insane, magical and it was sweaty,” Bohn said from his living room in Uptown. 

“It’s the hottest and the coldest I’ve been in a long time physically, within a matter of five days apart. When I finally got to the hotel at the end of the day, and by the time you get to dinner, it’s 10 p.m., and you just want to go to bed because you have to start again at 5 a.m. It was nonstop everyday. That was psychologically grueling. The biking was almost a respite.”

Pedaling across Europe was something that Bohn never imagined he would be doing in his late teens growing up in his native Minnesota, but he also never saw himself having a successful career in heating and cooling.

“When he went to the trade school Dunwoody, he originally got in line for woodworking because he’s a good woodworker, he did a lot of shop,” his wife Janet Bohn said. “When he got to the head of the line, it was full. So he got in another line and it was HVAC. There are these decisions in your life where it totally changes your trajectory.”

Bohn said it ended up being a better financial decision for him, but it never stopped him from expressing his more artistic side, as he went on to do furniture making and carpentry throughout his home. Bohn’s woodworking skills were sufficiently impressive that his former home in Minneapolis, called “Hidden Oaks,” was featured in the Feb. 2005 issue of American Bungalow.

“We love what’s called the arts and crafts style from the 1920s,” Bohn said. “But there weren’t any houses in Sedona with that style. So we added all the woodwork in our home here,” he remarked, pointing out the wood trim adorning the living room and kitchen “to make it more similar to that home.”

“Also, we’ve just bought a cabin at Mormon Lake, and we just finished that, which was our COVID project,” Janet Bohn added. “That’s 300 square feet, which is a nice size to work with compared to [Hidden Oaks]. That was 3,000 square feet. We spend Biking a lot of time at Mormon Lake. It’s a seasonal six-month cabin which is perfect for us.”

Gary frequently trained by biking the seven-and-a-half-hours from Sedona to their cabin, which involved over half a mile of elevation gain.

While the Bohns are used to tackling challenges, the idea of raising $40,000 for Cure Leukaemia seemed daunting at first. “When Gary told me he had to raise that much money, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, how are we going to do that?’” Janet Bohn said. Gary added that he almost backed out two weeks after getting accepted. “I thought that was just such a large amount and I asked, ‘What have we gotten ourselves into?’”

The outpouring of support from the Sedona community and Bohn’s own personal connections made the impossible become the possible.

“My sister-in-law is battling blood cancer right now,” Bohn wrote. “At this point she is winning the fight. [Janet] is also a lung cancer survivor, so I am determined to do all I can to wipe out this dreaded disease. I know through my fundraising efforts I can continue to make outcomes like this possible. I know I can’t do this alone, so with your help we will win this battle!”

“It’s part of what makes Sedona a community, and with all the sad things with the short-term rentals and people having to move away and not be able to stay, it’s good to have something that binds us together,” Janet Bohn said.

Gary Bohn said that he doesn’t consider himself an elite athlete and isn’t focused on another goal. “I just ride every day,” he said.