'I am Ironman'

Paul Schaye stood in front of a crowd at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston, conducting a PowerPoint presentation. Click: Here he was in 2004, completing the Paris-Brest-Paris bike race, the legendary 750-mile odyssey that must be completed in 90 hours or less.

Click: Here he was in 2005 at the Mount Washington Auto Road Bicycle Hillclimb, perhaps the toughest one-day biking event on the planet.

Click: Here he was last year, at the EagleMan Ironman: a 1.2-mile swim in open water, followed by a 56-mile bike race, followed by a 13.1-mile run.

Click. Wait, what was this? Some sort of ultrasound? A CT scan?

"This is me in 2007," Schaye told the hushed crowd that just minutes before had been laughing at his tales of derring-do. "I have cancer. That yellow [on the screen] is my cancer. This is one event I didn't sign up for."

An extreme athlete and successful entrepreneur, Schaye, 54, is now taking on the biggest challenge of his life. Last October, he was diagnosed with a rare form of stomach cancer called gastrointestinal stromal tumor. A tumor larger than a baseball was growing in his stomach. It was stage four, having spread to his liver.

"It's the call that literally redefined my life," he told the audience, which consisted of "Heavy Hitters," or top fund-raisers for the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge. For the past nine years, Schaye has been one of those Heavy Hitters himself, downing hors d'ouevres at the reception and listening to the tales of cancer patients. The annual cycling event, which aims to raise $27 million this year for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, takes place this weekend, with 5,000 cyclists riding the 190 miles from Sturbridge to Provincetown. As always, Schaye will be on his Serotta, "Sally," at the starting line, but it will be his first year riding with cancer.

Do not make the mistake of calling him a cancer survivor. "It gives you a mental image of someone who washes up on the beach, like Tom Hanks in that movie, someone with a life preserver wrapped around his neck. That's desperation. I'm not desperate. I'm not clinging to life. I'm thriving through life."

Indeed, three weeks after beginning treatment last fall, Schaye ran the New York City Marathon. In June he completed another EagleMan Ironman, and in May a triathlon in Florida. "I cringed as a 70-year-old woman ran past me. (I'll get her next year)," he wrote on his blog, thriveblog.typepad.com/thrive. He closes his posts with, "I am Thriving, I am an Ironman, Paul."

Schaye grew up in Chestnut Hill, the youngest of three children born to a retailer and a housewife. His father, James, who attended the Heavy Hitters event, stayed in Chestnut Hill after the death of Schaye's mother, Adele; his brother lives in Marblehead; his sister in Los Angeles. Schaye attended Newton South High School and earned a bachelor's degree and PhD in business at UMass-Amherst. In high school he chose debate and theater over sports. But he rode his bike everywhere. "For me, the bicycle was my transportation," he says.

Schaye is the founder and managing director of a mergers and acquisitions firm, Chestnut Hill Partners, named after his hometown but based in New York. He and his wife, Gay, live in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and have a house in the Hamptons on Long Island. Every weekday morning, he hops on his Go-Ped, and rides to work among the taxis, trucks, cars, and limos, then folds up the electric scooter and stashes it in his 10th-floor office in the Helmsley Building near Grand Central Station. His office walls are covered with Tour de France photos, and in his bookcase volumes such as "Word of Mouth Marketing" and "The Discipline of Market Leaders" mingle with "Magic Cancer Bullet" and Lance Armstrong's "Every Second Counts." In one corner are boxes of vitamins and other promotional materials from his sponsors.

Sponsors? For this year's Pan-Mass Challenge, Schaye has put together "Paul's Posse," a team of friends who will do the two-day ride with him. Few have ridden the PMC before, including his two doctors: Gary Schwartz at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and George Demetri of the Dana-Farber. In fact, neither owned a bicycle until Schaye became their patient. Ben Serotta, owner of the world-class Serotta Competition Bicycles, is part of the posse. So is talk show host Laura Ingraham, a breast cancer survivor, and Ron Kiefel, the retired professional cyclist.

Not only will each raise at least $3,600 to ride, but Schaye plans to conduct an online auction at pauls posse.com (he hopes the site will be up today), with all proceeds going to Dana-Farber. Among the items, Serotta is donating a $15,000 custom-made bike and TD Banknorth is offering an executive suite for 12 for the Genesis concert on Sept. 11.

"Every penny we raise goes directly to George Demetri and his research," says Schaye. "Is it self-serving? Yeah, sure." Demetri, a Dana-Farber oncologist, is currently treating Schaye with Gleevec, a tumor-starving drug. The tumor has indeed shrunk, and Schaye may undergo surgery in the fall.

"If and when I go that route," he writes in a recent blog, "it will be after the Mighty Hamptons Triathlon, Tour de Pink (3-day, 200-mile cancer ride) and the NYC Marathon (Just getting in shape for surgery)." He knows his cancer is incurable, but he hopes the treatments will buy him time until a cure is found.

At the Heavy Hitters reception, Demetri took the podium right after his patient; the two embraced tightly. This will be his first-ever Pan-Mass. Challenge, and the self-described non-athlete says he had no choice. "Paul is a force of nature. He told me I was doing this ride. I told him I didn't have time, I wasn't in shape, that I'm busy trying to cure cancer. He told me it would be good for me, it would give balance to my life." Though he doesn't have a lot of patients on chemotherapy "doing what Paul is doing," Demetri is quick to add that he is riding for all of them.

Schaye's got a contagious, almost childlike optimism. He's the kind of guy who loves to be a social director, loves having people around him, loves to organize parties and outings. A recent e-mail to his posse includes an itinerary that starts with a cocktail party in New York tomorrow night. Then it's over to a nearby restaurant for carbo-loading. Friday, the "Party Bus" will leave, stopping in Connecticut to pick up more riders.

"We will group up at the last water stop and ride in together to the glorious Provincetown finish." He signs off: "Thank you for Thriving along with me."

If Schaye is angry or depressed about his cancer, he doesn't show it. "It is what it is," he says, shrugging. "I don't look at it in terms of 'woe is me.' This is just a speed bump on that bike road. It's gonna slow me down a little." The only time he becomes emotional is when he mentions his wife, whom he married 13 years ago. The couple has no children. "She has supported everything I've ever done," he says. "She's the enabler."

Gay Schaye, an architect, marvels at his attitude. "He just has great spirit, great energy, and he's not slowing down," she says.

Schaye is approaching his illness as methodically as he runs his business. He keeps a three-ring binder containing every test he's had. He's got copies of all his scans on a CD-ROM. His questions are businesslike, too: What do I have to accomplish? And how do I accomplish it?

But he's not naive about his prognosis. "The biggest deal to me about cancer is that I won't be here for my wife. If I can squeeze out four more years, I'm a happy guy. I'm a lucky dog," he says. "I'm not someone who looks in the rearview mirror of life. I never have."

He believes -- and his doctors agree -- that his competitive nature is essential to his well-being. On the 750-mile French bike ride, he fell and ruptured the ligaments in his right hand before the race even started. Though his hand was swollen "like Popeye's," he finished in 88 hours, and then flew home for hand surgery. Shortly before the Mount Washington ride, he broke his collarbone. He rode anyway.

"I'm still training, and that's very important to me, so I can sustain the chemotherapy and drugs I'm on. I don't put my cancer in front of me. I put it behind me." He goes on regular 100-mile training rides and two-hour runs.

That "speed bump" has slowed him down some, but not much. He's looking forward to the Pan-Mass Challenge, a triathlon in September, then the New York City Marathon. Cancer, he says, is "an inning, not the end of the game."

When he finished a half-Ironman event recently, he announced on his blog: "Paul-1, Cancer-0."

Correction: Because of a reporting error, a story about Paul Schaye in the Aug. 1 Living/Arts section contained an inaccurate quote. It should have read, "The biggest deal to me about cancer is that I won't be here for my wife."