Adapting By Bicycle

I have never ridden a recumbent bicycle.  Perhaps I will one day.  My major concern with them is visibility, especially as I do much of my riding in heavily-trafficked urban areas.

I do, however, see the value of them.  Some claim they are more efficient and comfortable.  Certainly, I can see the value of them for some people with physical ailments and disabilities.

That point became clearer to me after an article I read about a ride to raise funds for disabled veterans.  

On Sunday, normally-abled cyclists joined their disabled peers on the Two Top Adaptive Sports Foundation's inaugural Bike for Disabled Vets fundraiser.  Among them were Igor and Olga Titovets of North Potomac, Maryland.  They pedaled along the Western Maryland Rail Trail--she with her legs, he with her arms.

His legs are in braces.  This means that, while he can use a foot-powered recumbent bicycle, it is difficult for him to climb hills with it.  Instead, he rides a model powered by his arms.

Igor Titovets

Titovets' participation in the event is emblematic of the ride's purpose, and Two Top's work.  The non-profit Foundation, based in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, provides disabled veterans and their families lessons in adaptive sports like cycling, skiing and water skiing. The lessons are by reservation, and the group has a fleet of 22 bicycles.

They are, of course, recumbent, because that is pretty much the only kind of bike that can be adapted to hand power.  Plus, it can be adapted in other configurations to accommodate people with a wide variety of disabilities.

  

David and Jo Ann Bachand

The Titovets' participation--and that of another couple, David and Jo Ann Bachand--underscores another important point:  that adaptive bicycles can help disabled veterans--whose population has grown with the ongoing war in Afghanistan and the Iraq invasion--cope with their disabilities.  By extension, cycling and other adaptive sports can also help them cope with their post-military lives:  Some of them had been in uniform practically from the day they left school.

From A Eugenicist To A Bicycle Advocate: A School Is Renamed

During the past few years, all sorts of things have happened that I never thought I'd see in my lifetime.  

Here's another:  a middle school named after a bike advocate.

Really.  That school was commemorated yesterday at the ninth annual Bike Palo Alto.  

The school's namesake, Ellen Fletcher, served for many years as a councilwoman in the San Francisco Bay Area city.  Her advocacy is widely credited for making Palo Alto one of the most "welcoming" American cities for cyclists:  She campaigned, successfully, for safer bike paths and bridges in a community where over 40 percent of middle schoolers choose to pedal to school.

Ellen Fletcher, at the dedication of the bike boulevard bearing her name, in 2002.

With a role model like her, how could they not?  She owned a car--a 1964 Plymouth Valiant--but almost never used it.  In fact, she continued riding, both for transportation and recreation,until a year before she succumbed to lung cancer at age 83 in 2012.

Born in Berlin, she lived in a series of Jewish orphanages after her parents divorced. When the Nazis came to power, she and her father were deported because he was a Polish citizen.  They were slated to go to his native land, but was able to get to London through the Kindertransport program.  

A year before she died, she recalled seeing "everyone" biking in England.  She shared the enthusiasm the Brits had for cycling at that time and brought it with her to New York, where she emigrated--at age 17-- in 1946 and enrolled in Hunter College. There, she said, she was "the only one who had a bike on campus" and rode it year-round.

Shortly after graduating, she moved to the Bay Area and continued riding in one of the few areas of the US with a measurable number of adult cyclists.    Almost from the beginning, she was determined to put the bicycle on the radar of policy makers who, as she aptly noted, "were almost exclusively focused on cars." 

One of the early fruits of her labor came in 1982, when Bryant Street opened as the "Bike Boulevard."  It was renamed in her honor two decades later.

Palo Alto Bike, fittingly, followed Ellen Fletcher Bicycle Boulevard.  I don't know which Bryant was honored with the street, but the school renamed for her originally bore the name of Lewis Terman.  While his studies on giftedness and how intelligence influences health outcomes and other kinds of success made real contributions to psychology, his legacy is tainted for his advocacy of eugenics. 

Although there can be no justice for the Holocaust, I think there is some small measure of cosmic recompense in seeing a school named for him renamed for someone who might have fallen victim to beliefs he advocated.  

Why Can't I Teach Them?

I am a cyclist.  I am also an educator.

Ergo, I should be able to teach someone how to ride a bike.  Right?

Well, I've tried and I've tried. But I just can't get Marlee on the saddle. I also couldn't get Max, Candice, Charlie I, Charlie II or Caterina. There was always some issue:  Their legs couldn't reach the pedals. Or the top tube (or stem) was too short.  Or they worried, despite my assurances to the contrary, that dogs would chase them.

Tell me:  Where have I failed?