PHOTOGRAPH BY DENNIS DRENNER
Whatever Happened To ...
Brent Thomas, left, and Lee Briggs biking in hunt Valley in 2007.
call with Thomas from San Francisco. Both men, now 30, moved to the area shortly after the trip. Briggs settled in Marin County with his wife, Melissa, while Thomas ended up in the city. When eLIFELIST didn’t take off
as they’d hoped — it has about 1,440 members today, compared with 600 in 2007 — the duo invested their creativity elsewhere. Briggs works for Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucasfilm, where he has worked on visual effects for films including “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” and “Avatar.” Thomas recently introduced a
... the friends who founded a virtual bucket list
by Kris Coronado
in June 2007, Lee Briggs and Brent Thomas were on the brink of a lofty quest. The former Wake Forest University
roommates, featured then in The Washington Post, were preparing to bike across the country, from Kitty Hawk, N.C., to San Francisco, to raise $20,000 for Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong Foundation. It was their way of marking the one-year anniversary of a social networking site they’d created,
For the original story, go to
washingtonpost.com/magazine.
called
eLIFELIST.com, which uses a Facebook-like structure to connect people with similar aspirations. The pair completed their 3,820-
mile journey, arriving in San Francisco on Sept. 5, 2007, with piles of broken bicycle wheel spokes. Despite pedaling through torrential downpours for hours at a time, both marked off goals they’d posted on their own profiles, including cycling to Moab, Utah, and the Grand Canyon. Plus, they raised $11,500 for Livestrong. “I’d do it all again in a heartbeat,” Briggs said recently on a conference
cycling safety product called Bike Wrappers (
Bikewrappers.com). “It’s a reflective fabric that you can wrap around your bicycle frame so motorists can see you at night,” he said. “Imagine your normal bike reflector on your typical bike. Multiply that by 100.” Briggs named Thomas the godfather
of his 1-year-old daughter, Matilda. They also celebrated turning 30 with a physical challenge: Thomas ran 30 miles straight, while Briggs biked for 30 continuous hours. “I told Brent I think running 30 miles scared me more than biking 30 hours, though,” Briggs said. “It’s the opposite,” Thomas
countered. “I think biking 30 hours is a lot harder than running 30 miles.”
cross-country journey
68 days // Te time it took Briggs and Tomas to bike across the country
(Continued from Page 5)
mental retardation — now called “intellectual and cognitive disabilities” — were treated. We did a lot of work with the [D.C. City] Council, got legislation developed, changed a number of laws in the city, and became only the second jurisdiction in America to be institution-free. It was one of the most exciting things I ever did in my life. It made you realize that if you
ANSWER Volta Laboratory and Bureau
6 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | may 30, 2010
really have a vision for what you want to do, you can use the legislative and regulatory process to effectuate that vision. Taking that job was a risk, and
certainly going into political life was a risk — running [first] against a three-time incumbent in Ward 7, running the council chair’s race against someone really formidable, and I’m in another one now. You’ve got to do your own soul-searching, but I think if you believe that you can really do
something different and better, you need to make the decision to step up. I had an experience in life once where I was a really good baseball player in high school — I mean, really good — and I had a tryout with a couple major-league teams. But I just stopped after a point, didn’t pursue it any further. And it’s really kind of plagued me all my life. You almost want to have failed rather than to have walked away from something because you didn’t make the commitment to really try.
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