Pedal for Impact: What 1,040 miles on a bicycle taught two Marines about kindness on the back roads. Ashton and Casey Kroner set out from Florida to reach Congress. They found a tropical storm, a suspicious man on a moped, and strangers who would not let them pay for lunch.

Riders at the Georgia state line. Photo courtesy of Ashton and Casey Kroner.

A tropical storm caught up with them a few days later, and Casey, who had it on his personal bucket list to ride in the rain, decided this was the moment to check the box. Lightning followed. Ashton trailed behind him in the support vehicle, half filming a moment of what she calls publicity gold and half convinced her husband was about to get blown off the road. "This fool is going to get blown over," she remembers thinking, right up until she made him get in the car.

"This fool is going to get blown over."

They split the riding in shifts, one on the bike while the other drove a support vehicle a few miles ahead, then leapfrogged. Over the fifteen riding days they covered 1,040 miles instead of the planned 1,010, partly because of detours around highways that do not allow bicycles, and partly, as Ashton admits, because her GPS once dropped her in the middle of rural North Carolina with no cell service and no idea which direction to go.

Casey Kroner on the Pedal for Impact route. Photo courtesy of Ashton and Casey Kroner.

The running joke of the entire trip, documented across their social media the whole way, was that Casey missed almost every state line sign. Ashton knew the route from building it herself and always managed to be the one riding when they crossed into Georgia, then South Carolina, then North Carolina, then Virginia. Casey would be mid-shift in the support vehicle every single time, then have to hop out and pose in front of the sign after the fact. "Did Casey get to see anything today?" became the question their followers asked on nearly every post.

Ashton Kroner at the South Carolina state line. Photo courtesy of Ashton and Casey Kroner.

The Marine on the Side of the Road

Not every encounter was funny. Early one morning outside Kingsland, Georgia, a Marine named Jerry Hitchcock pulled his truck off the road specifically to find them, having tracked their route through Ashton's posts. His daughter had also served as a Marine. She had been diagnosed with cancer and later died. He handed the Kroners one hundred dollars on the spot, tearing up as he talked about what the ride meant to him. "I cannot believe this happened," Ashton said. "We are in the middle of Georgia at six o'clock in the morning, and that was the last thing on our minds."

Savannah gave them something just as unexpected. VFW Post 660 opened on a day it was not supposed to be open, just to buy the Kroners lunch, then invited them back two nights later for what Ashton assumed was a small raffle. Two to three hundred people showed up. Someone handed her a megaphone to say a few words about the mission, and the battery died the instant she raised it to her mouth, on camera, in front of the whole room. The raffle alone brought in eighteen thousand dollars that night, and attendees who had not been asked for a dime donated more than six hundred dollars in cash on top of it.

"We weren't asking for money from anybody," Ashton said. "We just wanted to spread our message and have them sign our Marine Corps flag. That was the goal."

Ashton Kroner at Francis Marion National Forest in South Carolina. Photo courtesy of Ashton and Casey Kroner.

A Guy on a Moped and a Boxed-In Backroad

Not every stranger was friendly, or at least not in a way that read as friendly at the time. In a quiet-looking subdivision, a man on a moped with his motorcycle helmet perched on top of his head like a hat rolled up close to their support vehicle while they were swapping bike duty and asked how much their bicycles cost. "Get my knife," Casey said, only half joking, and loaded the bike back onto the vehicle without unpacking a thing. "I'm not even gonna unload this," he said. "We're out of here." Casey maintains the man was harmless. "He's the friendliest person, though," he said. Ashton was not convinced. "When you start a conversation about how much are your bikes," she said, "that's a red flag."

A hillier stretch produced a more serious scare. Ashton called Casey mid-ride, panicked. "I am boxed in right now," she told him. "I got someone selling drugs with a truck and a low boy in front of me, and then a person that keeps following me from behind. I cannot move from this place." Casey, grinding up a hill himself at the time, could not get to her fast enough to matter and told her to sit tight. It became, inevitably, another running joke between them, one about Ashton's apparent lack of what Casey calls Darwinism. "Your survival instincts are one, right?" he told her. "We need to bump that up."

Casey was quick to clarify that his wife was not simply fearless in the moment. "That's not it," he said. "That's not it where she was kind of boxing. She calls me, she's like, you're not coming through here. I'm freaked out."

Somewhere around Wilmington, North Carolina, hunger nearly ended the marriage anyway. Ashton called Casey mid-ride to say she wanted Dunkin' Donuts, ten miles off course, and he told her to go ahead, handing over the water bottles in the support vehicle to make room. "Go ahead, it's fine," he told her. What was supposed to be a quick detour stretched past an hour, then closer to two, with Casey sitting in full sun with one bottle of water and no sign of his wife. "I had no water for like thirty, forty minutes," he said. "I was living at that point. I was like, just don't talk to me." Ashton's GPS kept dropping pins that made no sense to either of them. "You had the same GPS up right now," he told her once she finally caught up. "All you gotta do is get behind my last ping." It remains, by Casey's own account, the one time on the entire trip he was genuinely angry with his wife.

Seventeen Meetings in Four Days

They rolled into the Washington, D.C. area on June 28, escorted the last stretch by members of a Baltimore-based cycling group who rode alongside them from Alexandria and photographed the whole approach. A friend named Daniel Odell, who had quietly been fundraising behind their backs the entire trip, met them for a celebration dinner he insisted on over Ashton's objections that she would rather just shower and get takeout.

Ashton and Casey Kroner near the end of the ride. Photo by Michael J Avilez

There was almost no rest between finishing the ride and starting the advocacy. A volunteer scheduler had spent two weeks getting doors slammed on her before congressional offices realized two Marines were biking a thousand miles to get to them. Once that detail landed, the calendar filled fast: seventeen meetings across Monday through Thursday, some running the full fifteen minutes the Kroners had planned for, some cut down to three minutes when a staffer's schedule collapsed.

"Three minutes," Ashton said. "You learn how to talk quick, and it's just really long elevator pitch at that point." She would introduce herself and Casey, hand the floor to him for a thirty-second version of his diagnosis, then pivot straight into the ask: restore multi-cancer screening access inside the VA, move the screening age threshold from a fixed number to a documented risk factor, and start asking civilian and VA providers alike a simple question, have you ever served in the military.

"You learn how to talk quick. It's just a really long elevator pitch at that point."

Congressman Aaron Bean, who represents Florida's Fourth Congressional District, had already spoken about the Kroners' mission from the floor of the U.S. House before he ever met them in person. When they finally sat down, his staff had not briefed him on who was in the room, and it took him a moment mid-conversation to place them. Once he did, the meeting turned into a tour: the room where the President delivers the State of the Union, a walk through the Capitol, and an invitation to his gala later that month. He signed their Marine Corps flag alongside a photo of the whole group holding it up.

The week also brought a meeting with Thomas McIntosh, a deputy policy director working under the current administration, and an interview with representatives from Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the advocacy group known as IAVA. "There was a bit of a miscommunication and I thought we were meeting the President," Ashton laughed. "We did not meet the President. He was in a different state."

The Kroners at the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia. Photo courtesy of Ashton and Casey Kroner.

Home, Dogs, and a Standing Ovation

The drive back to Florida took eleven hours, a stretch of highway the Kroners covered without much conversation at all. "We didn't want to talk to each other," Ashton said. "Comfortable silence is what that was." Fifteen days of nonstop riding and talking to strangers, followed by a week of nonstop talking to congressional staffers, had worn them both down to the point of near silence.

They got home around 10:30 at night to two dogs who had been waiting, and spent the next forty-five minutes on the living room floor instead of unloading the car. Casey's exhaustion caught up with him almost immediately, three weeks of adrenaline arriving all at once in the form of a head cold that knocked him flat for a week. Ashton got her own welcome a few days later, at a Clay County Chamber of Commerce gathering that gave her a standing ovation twice and a birthday check made out to the Veteran Cancer Network.

There was no grand homecoming beyond that, and both Kroners insist that was intentional. "We didn't even have a real wedding, to be honest," Ashton said. "That's just how it is. This is our life, and we want to celebrate the big ones with things that actually matter. Us driving home isn't one of those big things."

What mattered, in their accounting, showed up in the weeks after: an invitation to a cancer coalition round table in California, a request from the VA's own California office asking the Kroners for resources to share with a patient, and a growing list of congressional staffers who told them to stay in touch as legislation moves. Casey is closing in on five years of remission this winter. The bicycles, for now, are staying in the garage. "I'm not doing that again," Ashton said. Casey, predictably, is already asking where they might ride next.

Resources

Veteran Cancer Network | https://veterancancernetwork.org/ |
The Kroners' nonprofit, connecting veterans and families with early detection resources and advocacy updates.

Pedal for Impact | https://veterancancernetwork.org/pedal-for-impact/ |
Details on the 1,040-mile Florida-to-D.C. ride and how to support future advocacy rides.

Major Taylor Association | https://www.majortaylorassociation.org/ |
National network of cycling clubs, including the North Florida chapter that escorted the Kroners out of Green Cove Springs.

Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) | https://iava.org/ |
Nonpartisan advocacy organization that met with the Kroners in Washington, D.C. on veteran health policy.

Rep. Aaron Bean, Florida's 4th District | https://bean.house.gov/ |
Official House website for the congressman who toured the Kroners through the Capitol and signed their flag.

TRICARE Galleri Multi-Cancer Early Detection Test | https://www.tricare.mil/CoveredServices/IsItCovered/GRAIL-Galleri | Coverage details for the blood test central to the Kroners' screening advocacy.