Fast & Fabulous: Biking the Wheelchair Marathon

This article is about how four Fast and Fab cyclists volunteered to escort the wheelchair marathoners in the New York City Marathon on Nov. 6, 2005. Yes, we were on our bikes, and our job was to keep pedestrians from walking out on the course and getting creamed, and to help the wheelchair guys if they tipped over or popped a tire. So don’t be misled – none of us RAN the marathon, we BIKED it.

Kurt Fearnley Geez, Bob, how’d you guys get such a plum assignment? Fast and Fab has become known in the New York biking community as THE queer club, and when the guy who organizes the bike support crew for the marathon decided it was time to reach out to demonstrate the diversity of the bike community, we wuz reached out to. Other clubs representing the many-colored bicycling spectrum included the New York Cycle Club, the Five Boro Bike Club, Time’s Up!, the New York City Bike Messengers Association and the Major Taylor Cycling Club, the latter an African-American club named for a champion cyclist of the late 19th century.

So on Nov. 6, about 60 cyclists from the above groups gathered at the Brooklyn side of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, ate doughnuts and awaited the arrival of about 60 wheelchair marathoners sometime just after 9 a.m. The runners wouldn’t start until after 10. We were paired up with cyclists of different clubs, since the organizer of the bike brigade, a NYCC leader by the name of Richard Rosenthal, persisted in his idea that by recruiting members of different clubs to work together, he would somehow create a united front of cyclists to pursue better bike amenities in the city.

In spite of my skepticism, I have to say it was nice to meet people from some of the other clubs. The Major Taylor guys were pretty hunky and had great jerseys. I was approached by Herb Dershowitz, a longtime 5BBC member, who asked me to pass along regards to his good friend Debbie Bell, the woman who founded Fast and Fab with me back in the halcyon days of 1994. And one of the bikers was Harold Varmus, the president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work in cancer. I walked up, introduced myself and told him how important his work was, to what I imagine must have been his utter amazement, since nobody else there was paying any attention to this skinny, nerdy old guy. I told him I used to write science articles for Columbia University, which is how I knew who he was. Maybe there will come a day when Nobel Prize winners, not movie actors, have to fight off the paparazzi.

Somehow me and my ride partner, a British guy with a wife and kids who biked with NYCC, ended up among the first dozen or so bikers lined up and ready to jump into the race. Gerry Oxford, another Fast and Fab volunteer, was immediately in front of me, and Marten den Boer and Stephen Crowe were somewhere far behind. Sure enough, at about 9:15 a.m., several police cars, an ambulance and several cops on motorcycles came flying around the corner, followed by half a dozen wheelchairs racing down 92nd St. “Go! Go! GO!” one of the bikers yelled, and off we went, sprinting to catch the wheelchairs as they rounded the corner onto Fourth Avenue. The route would take them – and us – past the Williamsburg Bank Building in downtown Brooklyn, the tallest building in the borough and a beacon for marathoners, looming in front of us for the better part of eight miles.

The wheelchair racers were not doing your grandmother’s marathon. These guys really moved, and it was sometimes all we bikers could do to keep up. As escorts we’d been instructed to ride both to the inside and outside of the wheelchairs, but everyone ahead of me was riding on the curb side. Fourth Avenue has a median strip down the middle with two lanes in each direction, so I positioned myself on the strip side. Since there was no other biker riding in front on that side, I rode up to the front, just behind the motorcycle cops, to warn anyone who looked like they might be trying to cross Fourth Ave. Sirens wailed ahead of me, the whole pack of wheelchairs was behind me, and I got the biggest rush of adrenaline I’ve had in a very long time.

Maybe a bit too much adrenaline, in retrospect. I took it upon myself to keep pedestrians off the roadway, instructing parents to watch their young children and riding so close to the median that spectators had no choice but to jump back. To be honest, I didn’t really think there was any chance a spectator would be hit by one of the wheelchair participants – until after the race, when I searched the internet and found an article describing how a 7-year-old girl ran out into the street during the 2003 Boston Marathon and was struck, but not seriously injured, by Krige Schabort, a veteran wheelchair racer from South Africa who was favored to win in New York.

The wheelchair athletes race the way bikers race, tucking in behind the leader to minimize the wind resistance. Occasionally the leaders would slow down, and I recalled from my brief bike racing days this being a signal for one of the other racers to take the lead.

Though these were experienced racers, one in the lead group hit a pothole and tipped over in Williamsburg. A couple of the Major Taylor guys peeled off to give him a hand.

I noticed that the top five guys all had the same jersey on, and mentioned this to one of the Major Taylor cyclists I was riding with. He was puzzled, too, because in the bike world, that means you are on the same team! It turns out the top guys are all sponsored by the same company, Invacare, a maker of medical equipment, including high-tech carbon fiber racing wheelchairs. I guess the opportunities for finding sponsorship in this sport are not huge.

Uphill seemed to be tougher for the wheelchairs than for the bikes, as I was easily able to keep the pace going up the Pulaski or Queensboro bridges, some of the steepest parts of the marathon. But they dive-bombed the downhills – one of the bikers estimated they were doing at least 40 mph coming off the Queensboro into Manhattan, slinging around the curve at the bottom of the bridge and onto First Ave. at top speed. None of us was going to take that curve like that, so it took us a half-mile or so to catch our charges. I’ve done the New York City Marathon four times the old-fashioned way, and I have to say I liked biking it a lot more than I ever did running it. Guys, this is the way to do the marathon!

Coming up First Ave., there was an old guy lumbering across at about 103rd. He was going slowly enough that the wheelchair guys just split and zipped around him, some in front of him, some in back, and I’m sure he had no idea what had happened. Then we wheeled through the Bronx, crossing the borough in about a minute and a half, and then the wheelchairs charged across the Madison Avenue bridge back into Manhattan. There was a steep downhill coming off the bridge, and I heard a loud pop, a sound all too familiar – one of the racers had a blowout. Two of the bike escorts stopped to help the guy, who it turned out was the favorite, Schabort. He had no need whatever of any help – he had that tire changed and was back on the course in less than two minutes. Still, it was enough of a delay to put him out of contention for first place.

As we zoomed up Fifth Ave., the whole experience seemed unreal, finishing the marathon in less than half the time I would normally have taken to do it on foot. It was so exciting for me to be doing this race, one I’d given up hope of ever doing again! But I pulled out of my self-obsession and took a good look at these guys. It struck me that I’d been thinking of the wheelchair racers as, well, sort of objects – robots on wheels, if you will. I wasn’t thinking about what kind of experience they were having, that it was a humid day with temperatures in the high 60s or that they had to struggle with the uphill sections on the bridges more than runners might.

And I looked, really looked, at the man I was riding next to and discovered that he was handsome – very handsome, in fact – and that he was making a bid to take the race, pulling out from behind the two leaders as they rode uphill, the same strategy a bike racer would have used – surprise them by sprinting on the uphill. Unfortunately, he didn’t succeed in his bid. The leaders were too strong or too experienced, or he was too fatigued, but I marked in my mind how he looked and the fact that he was pushing with more than two miles to go to the finish.

The bikers had been instructed not to accompany the wheelchair racers into Central Park, so we stopped to reconnoiter at the 90th St. entrance to the park. One of the guys who had stopped to help Schabort when he flatted had picked up the tire and showed it to a bunch of us – tubular, not clincher. They have to be nuts to use that on New York City streets!

Let me say that the wheelchair marathon was spectacular, and it is also something that I have never cared very much about, and should have. These people became disabled by many different routes, yet here they were all together doing marathons. The guy who won, Ernst van Dyk, was born without legs from the knees down, and the top woman and defending champion, Edith Hunkeler, was severely injured in a 1994 car accident that left her legs paralyzed. The guy who had been favored to win, Krige Schabort, is a former South African soldier whose legs were blown off in an artillery accident. He won New York in 2002 and 2003, and also surfboards. Surfboards!

The fact that people with severe disabilities can function at such a high level was an inspiration to me, not only because I am a physical therapist who might be called upon to treat someone with the same sort of condition, but also because these individuals exhibit an incredible determination to do something positive with lives that many of us would consider shattered.

An internet search found details about the handsome racer who had been making a bid coming up the Fifth Ave. hill. He was Kurt Fearnley, a 24-year-old kid from Australia who was born with tiny, atrophied legs that he tucks under his torso when in a wheelchair. Fearnley was born with lumbosacral agenesis, in which the lower spine fails to develop properly. So his lower body had never fully developed, and he had no motor or sensory function below the waist.

But Fearnley went on to take third place, behind van Dyk, who set a wheelchair course record in 1:31:11, and a Mexican athlete, Aaron Gordian Mintz. Schabort took fourth. Fearnley has won marathons in Sydney and Los Angeles, and has taken plenty of silver and bronze medals. He’s the guy in the center of the photo at the top of this page.

Apparently the top wheelchair athletes all make their living racing wheelchairs. The winner in New York got $3,500, which was $2000 for winning and $1500 for setting the record – not a bad day's work. Given the limited number of opportunities to bring home that kind of money, though, they must have to do a lot of racing to make a living at it!

About a month after this event, I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, which means I stop breathing for short periods while I sleep, the result of having a narrow airway. The treatment for it is to use a continuous positive airway pressure machine, essentially a nose mask connected to a pump that increases the air pressure in the windpipe enough to keep it clear. I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of doing this, but it improved my daytime wakefulness so much it was worth the effort. Leafing through the manuals that came with the machine, which my health insurance covered, was the name of the company that made the face mask: Invacare.

That’s probably my only link to Kurt Fearnley, aside from biking next to him as he made his move to take the lead of the 2005 New York City Marathon. But he’s made me aware of what a disabled person can do – and how!