Brad Serot’s first 110-mile Triple Bypass bicycle ride through the Colorado Rockies drove the Chicago office tenant broker to tears.
The CBRE vice chairman is ready to do it again a year later, though, after raising more than $367,000 for charities that support kids such as his 8-year-old daughter Ava, who has cerebral palsy and epilepsy.
This year, he and a few friends are more than halfway to their goal of raising $500,000 in donations through Serot’s website for the mountainous ride from Evergreen to Vail.
The funds that Serot raises in this year’s Aug. 20 ride will support Easterseals DuPage and Fox Valley, the Epilepsy Foundation of Greater Chicago and Kidnectivity.
Riders of the Triple Bypass — named for the Juniper, Loveland and Vail passes — make a vertical climb of about 11,000 feet. Serot’s ride last year took 8½ hours.
“It was the most difficult, excruciating experience of my life,” Serot told CoStar News. “I cried two times, for emotion reasons and physical reasons. It comes down to sheer willpower. I was broken.
“Having a purpose allowed us to finish the ride. Without that, we couldn’t have finished.”
Serot is known in Chicago real estate for representing several large office tenants, including the namesake tenant in a 500,000-square-foot lease at the nearly completed, 60-story Salesforce Tower along the Chicago River. Other deals in recent years included Aspen Dental’s headquarters move to Chicago’s Fulton Market from East Syracuse, New York, and Abbott Laboratories’ more than 100,000-square-foot lease in Willis Tower.
Serot, who lives with his four kids in Winnetka, Illinois, had never tried road biking until joining a group of friends in the northern suburbs on rides of up to 40 miles after the onset of COVID-19.
Those relatively long rides, on flat Illinois ground, didn’t fully prepare Serot for the grueling climbs through the Rocky Mountains.
He labored through the high-elevation event accompanied by four colleagues from the Chicago commercial real estate world — Andrew Najem and Eric Nixon of Maron Electric, architect Michael Berger of Lamar Johnson Collaborative and Andy Halik of construction firm Skender — and Denver-based friend Chris Powell.
“Not only being around Ava but being around other children who don’t have the same access and financial ability to buy equipment like orthotics and wheelchairs that I’m fortunate to be able to have, you want to do something,” said Serot, whose daughter gets around via wheelchair or walker.
“These kids struggle to do things that we take for granted,” he added. “If I could do anything to bring awareness of cerebral palsy and epilepsy and raise some money, I wanted to do that. As a father, there’s nothing you won’t do for your kid. She's proud that I'm her daddy and that I'm trying to make a difference.”