A ceremony in Parsippany welcomed a father who dedicated months to cycling across the country to raise awareness for a rare disease.

Robb Freed’s son Drake was born without skin on his fingers, and was quickly diagnosed with an ultra-rare genetic disease for which there is no cure.

Freed has been riding 100 miles a day, six days a week for months raising awareness of the disease, for a total of 8,000 miles.

Freed said, “It almost started as a joke with my friends, maybe you should go across the country and try to raise money, to raise awareness, you should try to do this, you should try to do that, and as the joke became more and more serious, we added across the country and back, because that makes it more of a bigger thing, so it kind of started from that and that has turned into what it is now.”