First year BellRinger Rider Roni Rivera grew up zigzagging coasts — born in New Jersey, raised in Southern California, and shaped by long days on fields and courts as a Division I athlete. After college, she poured a decade into coaching at the collegiate level, Division III to Division I, until the eventual burnout nudged her toward a different kind of team. She followed her partner to Washington, D.C., traded whistles for mission-driven work, and found a new lane in the nonprofit world. At KABOOM!, where she’s spent the last ten years helping build playgrounds for underserved communities, her competitive fire found a purpose that looked a lot like joy.
She continued training and racing triathlons while her life continued to grow in other ways: marriage, two kids, and the familiar D.C. cadence of work, school pickups, and weekend practices. When her partner received a three-year assignment in The Hague just a few years ago, her whole family moved abroad. Roni kept a consistent training regime through it all, setting her sights on a five-day alpine ride across Switzerland — strong, healthy, and certain of the road ahead.
Without any warning, a routine mammogram in the Netherlands flickered into something else — an ultrasound, followed by an immediate biopsy, and within a week: a diagnosis. By the following Monday she was back in Washington, D.C., medevacked into the arms of Georgetown Lombardi’s care team. Alone without her family, she learned to speak the new language of oncology in rooms where strangers suddenly felt like lifelines. Doctors like Dr. Elaine Walsh and Dr. Lucy De la Cruz became anchors for her, as did all of schedulers and nurses, who anticipated what she’d need at every step, and made an unwelcome journey more navigable.
Roni’s treatment began last year, and she did what athletes do — she set a goal that wasn’t chemo. A fellow triathlete’s advice became a mantra for her: pick something you’re moving toward. She learned her body’s new rules by trial and error, discovering she could go for runs between specific periods of time between her chemo treatments. While the runs were slow, sometimes little more than a shuffle, they gave her back a sense of motion and control. By November of 2024, she crossed a half-marathon finish line just two months after completing treatment, not chasing a personal best but re-claiming her own story.
In April of 2025, Roni had her ovaries removed and entered surgical menopause at 44. The new reality is practical: disrupted sleep, joint stiffness, weight changes, and a need for longer warm-ups. Training helps her metabolize quicker and manage side effects of treatment better, with her doctors expecting about a year of adjustment. She treats it as a calibration period, listening, adapting, and doing the work her body allows on any given day.
Roni first heard of BellRinger from a hallway in 2024 — posters lined up outside her early oncology visits showcasing different doctors’ fundraising and a community woven through the place that was treating her. She’d done charity rides before, but this felt different to her. She didn’t have her bike that year, and October came too soon, so she made herself a promise: in 2025, when treatment was behind her, she’d ride a century, with BellRinger becoming a capstone to a year of hard chapters.
This fall, she’s most excited to bring her whole family to Georgetown, a place her kids have never seen but that shaped her recovery. With years of peer-to-peer fundraising experience, she appreciates that BellRinger is built and owned by the very community it supports, from the touches at check-in, the energy at Opening Ceremony, the feeling at each rest stop that you belong to something purposeful.
Ask Roni what carried her, and she points in every direction: toward physicians she calls rock stars, toward nurses and schedulers who steadied the ground beneath her feet, toward friends who sat beside her when family couldn’t, and toward a finish line that keeps moving forward. This fall, she’ll clip in as a first-year BellRinger Rider, a survivor with an athlete’s heart, riding not to get back what cancer tried to take, but to build the next mile, stronger, steadier, and surrounded by the people who helped her get where she is today.
