DETROIT (Michigan News Source) – After a 22-day consecutive bike ride, rider Tim Ward,  wrapped up his roughly 2,200 mile journey in Detroit. 

Ward is the president of Michigan Legislative Consultants, finished the trip of a lifetime traveling around Michigan in his “Trace Michigan” tour to raise awareness for Chance For Life – a group committed to helping formerly prison inmates reintegrate into society. 

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According to the group,  the recidivism rate for Chance For Life’s core members is just 6 percent. Since Chance for Life pledges to “go the extra mile” for the people they serve, Ward did the same.

“Chance for Life is a progressive transformational program that works,” Ward said previously. “The group has developed an approach that changes the community and creates a better future one life at a time.”

Through job training, job placement, mentoring, and family reintegration, CFL provides the tools needed to help core members become rational, critically thinking people that are motivated to help themselves and others.

“We’re here to service the people of the population that God has bestowed us to deal with,” Tom Adams, President of Chance for Life said. 

While Ward has been actively riding for many years, and even has professional coaching, this attempt was the longest series of consecutive rides he has ever completed. 

“I’ve had a longer individual day, like 143 miles, I think the longest One Day Ride Across Michigan (ODRAM) here was 124 point something,” Ward said in an interview with Michigan News Source after his trip ended. 

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The more than 30 year political consulting veteran said that he was convinced he wanted to help not only after meeting Adams, but also visiting Macomb Prison and seeing how the program could help them. 

“When we explain on this ride what Chance for Life is I hope people come away with a couple things,” Ward said before the ride, “One is that there is this amazing program that’s not a gift, that is not a handout, but it’s a skillset that also holds up the bar and says you have to get over this but is also a hand to help them make it.” 

Ward averaged close to 120 miles of riding per day, sleeping at campgrounds along the road to rest and resupply overnight. 

According to Ward it was the strict training ahead of the ride and the greater purpose that helped him accomplish the feat. 

“I guess the most important lesson, since I had never done anything like this, I faired a lot better than I thought I would,” he said in an interview adding, “I wasn’t just doing this for myself, I was doing this for Chance for Life, I was doing it for a purpose.” 

In the final days of the ride, Ward took a spill transitioning from asphalt to a gravel road that resulted in his head hitting the ground and a secondary impact on his shoulder and right side of his body. 

“I had to get it done, it didn’t matter how I felt,” Ward said, adding the motto that helped him endure, “Perseverance over pain.” 

Ward rode his bicycle around the entire Lower and Upper peninsulas beginning on July 10th and ending the ride in Detroit on Thursday, and hopes to do the ride again with some tweaks next year.