“You’ll wear a helmet, right?”

My new bike commuting plans concerned my oncology nurse, and I knew she wouldn’t be the only one. I hadn’t yet summoned the courage to tell my wife, close friends, or the Boston surgeon who’d soon be operating on me. Absolutely, I promised her, I’d wear a helmet.

Frankly I was amused at how thrilling it felt to climb aboard a Hubway bike share bike a few days later at Boston’s North Station. It was early October. There would’ve been a time I’d have considered the 40-pound-plus Hubway clunky and slow. But that was before a doctor’s visit in late summer, the discovery of an advanced tumor residing in and outside my lower spine, and the waiver release I signed for a radical treatment plan involving three types of radiation and multiday surgery. The bike share bike—extra forgiving with balloon tires and a wide, soft seat, step-thru framed for grannies and grade-schoolers, and no more aesthetically appealing than an evening tray of hospital food—was my beautiful savior.

The ride-to-radiation plan, as I conceived it, would be a unique multimodal commute. I’d take the suburban train for the 20-or-so mile leg from my home in Beverly, then use the bike to shuttle between the station and Massachusetts General Hospital’s Francis H. Burr Proton Beam Therapy Center. It was short and sweet but it wasn’t necessarily without complication in my condition. I was learning that my spine was even more fragile than it felt. Doctors said the part of the tumor lodged in my L3 vertebra was pressing against spinal nerves. For months, especially after long rides, I’d been experiencing the symptoms—shooting pain and numbness in my legs—but it could get much worse. Honestly, they said, in reviewing scans they weren’t sure why it hadn’t already. If it did, they’d need to abort radiation for emergency surgery. My five weeks of daily radiation, they emphasized, were crucial to a successful outcome.

So riding the jarring, unprotected streets of Boston was by any measure a ridiculous risk. Mine would be the world’s dumbest commute (which explains why I had kept the idea largely to myself). And yet the feeling that overtook me in contemplating the ride was undeniable. Biking has long been central to my physical and spiritual well-being. From the time I was 3 and learned to ride by sitting on the rear fender to reach the pedals, the bike was both a companion and a crucible. My experiences through adulthood—as competitor, adventurer, and advocate—deepened the bond. I’d tested myself against the Mt. Washington Auto Road Bicycle Hillclimb, the 24 Hours of Moab, and long off-road trails from the Andes to the Continental Divide. Lately I’d pushed in another direction, helping to launch a city bike committee and teaching an urban biking class to middle schoolers in which the final test was to ride through Boston.

Not many things felt right in the weeks after my cancer diagnosis. Riding a bike did.

The First Ride

That first day's trial ride revealed a few miscalculations. My route wasn’t a popular one. I’d expected the bonhomie of the brethren given all the commuters in the area, but evidently they’d already gotten to where they were going at my late afternoon treatment time. The route along Causeway Street, past the TD Garden, the flying Bobby Orr statue, and the Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. Federal Building was frenetically automotive, full of cars, trucks, taxis, and even tour buses. Leaving the safety of the bike share dock felt like kayaking into a busy shipping lane. I was on the exuberantly silver and green bike share bike that many nativist motorists continue to hold in grumpy contempt. A little unsteady and a lot vulnerable, I thought about wearing a high-viz bib next time with a hand-scrawled message on the back. “Got Spine Tumor,” it would say. “Pleeeease Share the Road.”

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I avoided the hordes of antsy pedestrians bound for subway connections and slid past a lively egress from one of the city’s largest underground parking garages. The crux was a five-way intersection at the base of a hill and the transition preceding it that required cutting right to left across two inner lanes into the main flow of Causeway Street traffic. This is the kind of lethal road merge that makes Boston streets infamous and riders creative.

But I got through the intersection and up the steep Staniford Street hill without incident to securely dock my bike at Cambridge and Joy streets. I was as pleased with myself as any time in my five decades of cycling life. I’d traveled a kilometer. When I walked into the treatment waiting room I let my helmet dangle on the outside of my messenger bag like I wouldn’t mind someone noticing. I couldn’t wait for the ride home.

Webb Chappell

Back in August, after I’d gone to get an MRI for what I thought was a ruptured disc, the doctor printed out my scan and showed me the massive lobed form spread across my lower back—a bone cancer called chordoma. There were approximately 300 cases annually in the US. I was literally one in a million. The doc told me I’d freak out when I got home and that I should call him any time. “When you leave this office, you’re going to think of all the questions you should’ve asked,” he said correctly. Question No. 1 struck me before I left the parking lot: How do you tell your wife you’re one in a million? No. 2: Would I be able to ride again?

Things moved quickly. One of the leading chordoma teams in the country was in Boston at MGH, the doctor had told me, promising to call them and get me right in. Three days later I was meeting with the chief of orthopedic oncology and his chordoma team. They outlined a plan of daily radiation treatments for five weeks in the fall, followed by a short recuperation period, then surgery. In the interim they’d do a biopsy and scans to determine the chordoma type and whether it had metastasized.

It’s probably human nature to retreat when facing serious illness. Shortly after my Boston visit I’d stopped cycling and even cancelled an easy travel-writing assignment to catch first light on a Maine mountaintop. I thought I needed to reserve my strength for the upcoming treatments and nothing else. But the uplift I got the first time I rode to my treatment six weeks later made me realize something counterintuitive: I needed to be on my bike more, not less.

So the commute became part of a two-pronged attack. The second part was less about defiance and more about reestablishing normalcy. My doctors might not have been thrilled about me mixing it up in Boston traffic but they seemed to understand the therapeutic value of my riding habit and gave cautious blessing to cycling in the largely controlled environment of a gym, or a smooth, low-traffic road. “Just don’t crash,” they warned.

Through October and November—my two radiation months—I rode almost every day prior to going in for treatment, sometimes outdoors, but mostly in the gym. In the beginning I pedaled about 30 minutes for nine or so miles. As I progressed deeper into the proton radiation treatments and in the weeks afterward, I rode longer and harder. Even though the gains were modest they were still gains. At different points I rode with everyone in my family: my wife, Patty, and our college-aged children, Celia and Henry. My son’s friend, on an adjacent spin bike one day at the gym, looked at me happily thundering away and wondered whether we could find a way to roll a bike into the OR.

On December 8th, the day before I went into surgery, I had my best gym workout in two months—50 minutes, with totals of 16.2 miles and 573 calories burned. Earlier that same week I had ridden a favorite road circuit along the coast.

I couldn’t explain the pain-free, sometimes euphoric feeling I had in turning pedals over, and my doctors couldn’t either. The radiation treatments had stained my lower back a dull brown, its large, irregular shape mirroring the cauliflower-sized tumor. Riding intensely shouldn’t have been an option with pinched spinal nerves and crumpled vertebral bodies in the small of my back. Did it work simply because I refused for it not to? I knew my totals like a mantra before my surgery—602 miles spinning alone. They were a therapeutic bulwark but it wasn’t the totals that made the biggest difference for me­—it was how I felt in the best moments. I felt like me. Strong.

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The city bike commutes were physically more difficult, especially the post-treatment return trip. My spine felt brittle and I concentrated on being as light and smooth as possible as I moved, like someone crossing thin pond ice. The vibrations from yanking the heavy Hubway from its locking mount caused a sharp spasm of pain at the tumor site. The slight spinal twist of mounting a bike on an uphill grade with a forceful pedal stroke was beyond me. Most days I walked the bike to the nearest downhill for a helpful gravity assist.

If anyone had asked I would’ve had a hard time explaining what I was doing. Cancer-riddled, radiated, semicrippled…and yet each successful commute was a milestone, a new hardest ride. Maybe I was howling against cancer, maybe I simply adored doing a 6/10th of a mile I couldn’t think of anyone else caring to do. The best day was the next to last ride—the final mile as it were. I was walking the bike up the slight hill to Staniford Street for my easy coast down toward North Station when I heard my name called and turned to see Ibrahim, the stepfather of my son’s best friend. He’d heard I was sick but that’s not why he was hailing me down. He wanted me to take the phone from his hand and prove to his wife it was me. “She doesn’t believe me, Todd. She says you’re sick with cancer. She says, ‘You fool, Todd can’t be riding a bike!’”

Surgery Day

In the hours before surgery on December 9, my wife handed me an email with a poem my daughter had written for me:

Just hold tight

To the people who love you

To the legs and body that won’t fail you.

Hunched over on that bike up Mount Washington is harder

Bent over at your dad’s funeral is worse.

A road awaits you,

Just another road to take your bike out on

Pedal on, and just know

It’s only another road.

And you aren’t afraid of its course.

Of course I was afraid of its course. The rehab would take months and there was no guarantee what I’d be like on the other side. I’d have to hope they got the cancer and that my spine could be rebuilt without permanent nerve damage. I’d be losing my right fibula (a calf bone), which would be “harvested” to replace the diseased vertebrae, and much of my right psoas muscle, one of the muscles connecting the spine to the legs. With those last powerful pedal strokes in the days before, I was extra conscious of how that big muscle felt, pleased I’d been using the crap out of it in the intervening weeks, but angry too at what I was needing to give up. In some yoga traditions the psoas is referred to as the seat of the soul. In my head was what the doctors told me when I asked about my cycling future. “It won’t be the same,” they warned. “It’ll take time. First you need to learn how to walk again.”

The previous night, my wife and older brother, Tom, had come up with a proposal they thought might improve my odds. “As some of you know,” they wrote in an email to friends, “Todd will face two major surgeries this week for spinal cancer. The road and recovery ahead is challenging. Over the past many years, Todd has come to believe deeply in the power of the bicycle to be more than simply a form of recreation or travel. He has come to see the bicycle as a defining value of an individual, a family, a city, and a culture. In fact, over the course of his radiation treatment, his daily spinning sessions have grounded him, affirmed a daily ritual and belief, and provided a space in which he can both process the issues and clear his head. Many of you have asked how you can help and we have an idea. This week, and Thursday in particular, we would ask that everyone that has access to a bicycle—on the road, in the city, in the woods, or at the gym—find some time to ride. We can’t think of anything in this universe that would be more meaningful and supportive of Todd than this simple act and the powerful belief that riding a bicycle makes a difference.”

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Many people rode that day—my daughter and son with their friends at the University at Albany and Boston College, respectively; my wife, Patty, who in the midst of a terrifying day snuck into the hospital’s gym with her sister and a best friend, all of whom were dressed in office wear (and in her sister’s case in dress shoes); my grade school friend Kip, a Brookline pastor, rolled into the waiting room on his mountain bike soaking wet from one of the day’s downpours. My lifelong friend Jackie, a neophyte rider, could only get hold of a neighbor’s road bike with clipless pedals. At the first stop sign she forgot she was locked in and keeled right over.

The Beginning of Something Better

It has been two years. They got the cancer but a surgical complication caused a spinal cord injury.

During many weeks of using wheelchairs and walkers, I grappled with what had happened and why. Paraplegia was probably the last outcome I’d expected or was prepared to deal with. My legs defined me.

The beginning of something better happened about a year ago when I contacted a bike shop friend who got me a Kalkhoff e-bike loaner to experiment with. It had a step-thru frame to allow for the limited height I could raise my leg. The assisting motor would help with the strength my legs couldn’t provide. Nobody thought it was a great idea for me to ride since I’d have to clip my legs in and might have trouble getting one or both out. And yet, on my 462nd day post-op, launched by Celia and Henry running alongside me, I rode a bicycle again. The profound look of joy on my face, captured in a jittery phone video, is something I’d never seen before. I went a kilometer.

That was last March and since then I’ve ridden about 2,000 kilometers on that bike. I’ve crashed twice, once into a giant orange road cone I failed to see as I buried myself in an attempt to better one of my Strava times. The second crash came in a wash of sand on a seaside road. Both episodes are favorite stories to tell cycling friends. I’ve shared neither with my wife or my medical team. They needn’t worry though. I wear a helmet.!

This story originally appeared in the March 2017 issue of Bicycling. Subscribe today!

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