As summer fades through fall, Dallas cancer survivor Buddy Boren's thoughts usually begin to drift toward planning another long-distance bicycle ride to raise funds and awareness about the deadly disease.

FILE 2005/Staff photo

This year might be different.

On Aug. 22, Mr. Boren completed his fifth such solo ride, this time tracing the path of old Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica, Calif. After finishing the approximately 2,500-mile ride, he said he would probably hang up his pedals.

Mr. Boren took his licks on Route 66. He had bronchitis before he left Chicago on July 8. He hammered into a stiff headwind all the way. He wasn't prepared for the rolling, often steep hills of Missouri, which left his knees unable to continue by Amarillo.

When he finally made it to Los Angeles, after taking a break to recuperate, he had his first two falls in his touring history. He chipped a tooth on the first, a run-in with a city trash can. Later that day, he fell when a city bus squeezed him toward and over a curb.

"It was good ride. I'm glad I did it. It's something I always wanted to do, but believe me, Route 66 should be done in a '66 Corvette, not on a bicycle," said Mr. Boren, the founder and former executive director of the Grand Prix of Dallas.

Ask Mr. Boren his plans, and he'll tell you about the book he is writing about his two trips around Texas, the ride to New York, the adventure from Savannah, Ga., to California and the most recent ordeal down Route 66.

Talk to Mr. Boren about this year's ride, and he'll tell you about the good and the bad, from classic tepee motels to sharing a shoulderless road with tractor-trailers.

He'll also tell you about his decision to get back on the road, after his knees responded to rest back home in Dallas.

"I do these rides to give people encouragement not to give up if they have cancer," said Mr. Boren, who has squamous cell carcinoma, a form of skin cancer. "That's why I go out on the rides. That's why I do it alone.

"When you've got cancer, you're doing it alone. So for me to stop and give up, what kind of message is that going to send ... if the guy who's telling them not to give up, gives up?"

The tough times on this year's ride convinced Mr. Boren that, at age 62, such events no longer make any kind of sense for him.

But, he adds, he might consider another ride around Texas, especially if someone would sponsor a documentary that could be shown to deliver his message.

"To do a ride where you could film it in a documentary, and get it out to thousands of people would be the logical next level for me," Mr. Boren said.

By late October, that city bus from August was beginning to not loom as large in his rear-view mirror.

E-mail jsimnacher@dallasnews.com