By Tim Hintze
Herald Writer
I was riding for my life in a driving rain on a busy two-lane road between Pori and Rauma on the west coast of Finland on a cold, wind-swept day in June of 2015, when at the worst possible time the worst possible thing happened.
A Minion showed up.
No, it wasn’t Norbert.
He’s an idiot.
And no, it wasn’t Kevin, Stuart or Dave. I believe they were busy making plans to attend the banana festival in Sacramento.
No, it was Carl … and his megaphone.
BEE-DO! BEE-DO! BEE-DO!
Carl and his incessant alarm were not signaling I was on fire, but that I was on system overload.
My body was shutting down.
BEE-DO! BEE-DO! BEE-DO!
I was in the initial phase of what is known in endurance sports as hitting the wall or bonking, the condition where the depletion of glycogen stores in the liver and muscles manifests itself by sudden fatigue and loss of energy.
In other words, the lights were going out.
Not a good thing when you are riding a bicycle loaded with panniers and camping gear on a road with no shoulder where semis, log trucks and other big rigs are roaring by a couple of feet away at 60-plus miles per hour, creating a turbulent storm that threatened to blow me off the road into the tree line or into a truck and under its wheels.
This is definitely not something any of you will encounter in a spinning class at the gym.
Because of what I do — which is ride a bike — I’ve been known to say I don’t expect to die of old age, I expect to be hit by a truck. In an urban environment, the danger is a tractor-trailer rig making a right turn — what is known as a “right hook” — and there is a collision between the truck and cyclist, and the cyclist falls and is crushed under the 18-wheeler. Some trucks, but not all, have side guards, which are safety devices designed to keep pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists from being swept under the truck and run over by the rear wheels.
But the danger on the open road is the turbulence created by the trucks as they fly by. Three years before, on my first visit to Finland, I had a close encounter with a truck going 70-plus miles per hour on a narrow two-lane road where the speed limit was 80 kilometers (50 miles) per hour. I have never been that close to something that big going that fast. Think of a parking lot. The car next to yours is so close to the driver-side door, you can’t open the door to get into your car. That was how close that truck was to me. The turbulence was incredible. The bike was shaking so violently, it felt like it was falling apart. It was 10 to 15 seconds of pure terror.
But on this day the circumstances were different. The trucks were close — they were right on top of me — but it was the sheer volume of truck traffic that was different. For three hours in that cold, driving rain, with a crosswind coming off the Baltic blowing right to left, trying to force me towards the middle of the road, I was sharing it with the big rigs, because, as is often the case, it was the only road.
The truck drivers didn’t have a problem with me. There were no blaring horns. We were both just doing our job. The truck driver’s job was to stay on schedule and make the deliveries on time. My job was to stay out of the truck’s way. But it is intense, and the intensity chews up your energy and wears you down. For me, the danger isn’t that I will be hit by the truck, but that the turbulence will blow me into it.
What increased the danger that day was the Finnish version of a rubble strip — brick-size indentations, about a quarter- to a half-inch deep, cut/stamped into the pavement — designed to wake up a sleepy driver before he/she goes off the road and into the trees. If the turbulence blew me into the rubble strip, I could lose control of the bike and swerve off the road or into a truck.
So, as Carl continued to sound the alarm and my brain dissipation light started to go into overdrive, I glanced in my mirror and looked back through the rain at the next wave of approaching trucks.
And not for the first time that day I wondered if today was the day, the day I go down, the day I don’t get back up.
BEE-DO! BEE-DO! BEE-DO!
■ ■ ■
The surgeon had a quizzical expression on his face, looking at me as if I was as dumb as a box of hammers.
“And you do this why?” the doctor asked.
It was a good question. Why do I put myself in harm’s way? Why do I play in traffic here at home in the greater Puget Sound region, riding on roads that are becoming increasingly dangerous. Why do I take my bicycle to Europe and travel in less than ideal weather conditions and on roads that at times locals describe as “not safe.”
Why do I do this?
I knew I didn’t have to respond to the doctor’s question, because it was rhetorical in nature. The surgeon’s specialty is sports medicine and he was used to dealing with people like me. Unlike so many others, he gets it. He may not have known what my ‘it’ is, but he understood the variables that drive people like me, and why we sometimes end up in his office.
I was in the surgeon’s office because — while I had survived my experience with Carl and his megaphone — I had been injured while on the road in Finland, an injury that not only impacted my trip but also my life.
The doctor studied the images of the injured area of my body on his computer screen. He put me through tests to determine the range of motion and strength in the afflicted area. And then the surgeon made his diagnosis and told me what needed to be done to make me whole again.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “we’ll get you back on your bike.”
As I am wont to do when something interests or amuses me, I cocked my head to the left, looked at the surgeon, smiled and said, “I never got off.”
■ ■ ■
Therein lies the rub. Before that cold, wet, windy day in Finland of trucks, trucks and more trucks, I had been through a lot of miserable days — all the while blowing snot bubbles — in the previous three and a half weeks. It was Murphy’s Law. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. And it did.
Starting with this.
On the morning of my second day on the road, as I was about to set out from Porvoo, while wearing my cycling shoes with pedal cleats, I slipped as I walked down a wet, wooden staircase. Suddenly I was Dumbo. I was flying. And while I was able, through an athletic contortion of my body, to keep from landing on those steps and avoid injuring my head, neck or back, I did so at the expense of my right arm and shoulder.
Which was now toast.
I didn’t know it then, but as a I learned in that surgeon’s office after I returned from Finland, I had what is known as a frozen shoulder from acute injury.
Never heard of it? Neither had I.
Essentially I now had an alligator arm, whose range of motion was severely limited. Painful? Well, yeah. If I moved my arm one millimeter beyond its limited range it lit me up like a Christmas tree. And because I was constantly moving my arm outside its comfort zone, I felt like a Christmas tree with flashing lights, constantly going on and off. My shoulder sounded like a bowl of Rice Krispies. There was a lot of snap, crackle and pop.
But while it affected me, the injury didn’t stop me. It simply increased the degree of difficulty. Since I was able to ride, load and unload the gear on my bike, set up my tent and camp, I was able to continue the trip.
The biggest factor I had to deal with from the injury was it drastically affected my ability to sleep. Sleep is when the body restores and repairs itself. But because lying down in any position increased the pain levels, I wasn’t getting much sleep. My body wasn’t fully recovering from the physical and mental demands I was imposing on it. There were a lot of days on the road in Finland when I felt like I was running on empty.
It would be six months before my sleep patterns returned to normal. A year later, as I write this while preparing to set off on another bike tour in Europe, my arm and shoulder are still not 100 percent and functioning properly. It takes time and a lot of stretching to heal this injury. My range of motion has increased dramatically, but I still have a ways to go.
But what I am dealing with now is nothing compared to what I was coping with in Finland.
■ ■ ■
My injury was only one of the obstacles I had to overcome when I was on the road. Adversity, as it is in life, is part of every bike tour. I first started doing this in 1976 when I was 23. I was a couple of months shy of my 63rd birthday when I was in Finland on my ninth tour in Europe.
There were times last summer, when I was in the midst of all this turmoil, when I thought, “Who was the idiot who came up with this idea?” And just it had every other time that question popped into my head in the previous eight tours, the answer was always the same. The idiot was me.
You see, for me — and this is part of the answer as to why I do this — the road is the one place where equality exists. There is no bias, prejudice or favoritism. The road is fair, it treats us all the same. After completing this summer’s tour in Sweden and in the Aland Islands, I’ve spent about 19 months of my life on the road traveling on a bike. And the one thing that has remained a constant is the road don’t care. Now I know that is not grammatically correct, but it is how I’ve always thought of and described it since my first tour in ’76.
The road, like life, makes it pretty simple. Deal with it. Or get off.
And road, I haven’t gotten off yet, and I’m coming back.
Whatcha got next time?
(Apparently the road doesn’t like to be provoked. After I wrote those words a few days before I left for Sweden at the end of June this year in what would be a month-long, 1,300-mile tour, I knew I was asking for it. And I got it. An incident at the beginning of the trip left my lower right leg — from my knee to my heel, from my shin all across my calf — a solid blotch of yellow, purple and blue. Among other things, it was quite colorful. It was as if the road were saying to me, ‘OK smartass, deal with this.’ And so I did. But that’s another story.)
■ ■ ■
So, what else did I have to deal with in Finland?
Let’s start with the weather.
Remember this was June, but the best way to describe the weather would be to think of winter in the greater Puget Sound region — with an Arctic wind. It was cold, wet and miserable, and the wind chill made it worse.
No, the weather wasn’t as bad as the time in Ireland when I had to chip a sheet of ice off the rainfly on my tent, where snow was flying and packed in piles on the side of the road in the Wicklow Mountains.
But the weather in Finland was no day at the beach either. The days were mostly gray and gloomy, with occasional sun breaks. When the sun is shining, with big, puffy white clouds lazily moving across the brilliant blue sky, Finland is gorgeous. The greens of the trees in the forest are more vibrant, the blues of the water in the lakes more vivid.
But when it’s cloudy and gray? Not so much.
The Finns I spoke to were always apologizing for the weather, telling me it was the worst June in 25 years, or the worst in 50 years. When I rode out of the forest into civilization, there were times the people were dressed for cold weather, wearing heavy coats, gloves and mufflers. I was not. And while I had not brought my winter cycling gear, I had prepared for the possibility of bad weather, so I was able, for the most part, to stay reasonably warm and dry.
Back home, it was the warmest June on record in the Seattle area, with temperatures in the 80s and 90s. In Finland? The daytime temperature ranged from the mid to upper 40s to the mid 50s. At night it would drop into the low 40s and 30s. The rain would come and go, and the wind never stopped blowing, so, as I previously mentioned, windchill was a big factor.
It was not until my 30th day in Finland, four days before I was to fly home, that I experienced a warm, sunny summer day, with temperatures in the upper 60s.
Better late than never.
■ ■ ■
So the weather was lousy and I was damaged goods.
What else did I have to deal with?
There was the terrain.
A lot people in Finland, the same as people in Denmark, will tell you it is flat. But as a wise old Norwegian once told me, “Denmark isn’t flat.”
Neither is a lot of Finland. Like Denmark, the land rolls. But in Finland the troughs are deeper, making the descents faster and colder, the climbs longer and steeper. And when you are riding a bike loaded with gear, all that climbing increases the workload.
No, it was not as difficult as as climbing up out of the Rhine Valley in southern Germany, on a vertical road that resembled a corkscrew, into the Schwarzwald (Black Forest). Or climbing a road in Switzerland, looking up at the Alps, and reconsidering riding to Italy. Been there and done both of those things.
But when you factor in the cold, rain, wind and my injury, it made for a tough ride in Finland.
And then there were the mosquitoes, which pounced on me in a feeding frenzy whenever I was off the bike. The mosquitoes came in swarms, and I needed to get my insect repellent on fast when I was done riding for the day, or risk being eaten alive. And if I missed a spot? The skeets would find it. If my clothing wasn’t thick enough, the mosquitoes would bite right through it. I donated a lot of blood in Finland, none of it voluntarily.
Now, I had one other significant obstacle to overcome on this trip.
In the middle of nowhere, miles from anything, the axle on my rear wheel broke. By this time, so much had gone wrong on this bike tour, I could only laugh.
But this where you will learn another part of the answer as to why I do this.
Because when the axle broke, I received, as I did throughout this memorable trip in Finland, a little help from my friends.
■ ■ ■
I was about 75 miles from my destination, Tampere, a city with a population of about 223,000 people, when the axle broke. I was on my way to visit my friends Katariina and Serge, who I had met in the Aland Islands on my first trip to Finland in 2012.
Part of the flange on the axle had disintegrated (a bike mechanic speculated it was a manufacturing defect, since it was on the inside of the axle), and three spokes were flopping lose. The bike was still rideable, so I didn’t have to walk and push it. (My personal record is 21 miles in Wales in 1976 when the rear tire blew, leaving a gaping hole in the sidewall. I pushed the bike to to the small town of Newtown and caught a train to London, where I was able to find a new tire.)
I was worried about the integrity of the wheel as I rode on into the early evening, covering about 37 miles in the rain — up and down in the hills — on busy, traffic-filled roads. The Finns were moving at high speeds on their way to various destinations to celebrate midsummer, a national holiday in Finland, where at noon the next day (Friday) most of the country would shut down, and not start up again until Monday morning.
I made it to a cemetery in a small town, where I would meet Katariina, who insisted on picking me up in her car after work.
After I unloaded my bike and leaned it and my gear up against the wall of the small chapel in the cemetery, and while I waited for Katariina, an old woman — yes, even older than me — who was visiting a gravesite, approached me. She was quite angry. She was small with a funny-looking hat and wore glasses that were broken, with only one lens, covering her left eye. She didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak Finnish, but I could tell she thought I was planning on camping in the cemetery. It was quite comical as I tried to reassure her I had no plans to sleep with the dead.
Katariina had made some calls, and after she picked me up and drove back to Tampere, she took me to a shop, where I was able to replace my rear wheel.
Katariina and Serge, as did my friends Annu and Esko in Hekinski, and Annu’s brother Markku, who had a summer cottage on a small island on a lake near Varkaus, all treated me as if I were one of their own. They gave me a place to sleep, fed me, took me to places and showed me sights and parts of Finnish life I would not have found on my own. We had long conversations, in which I learned about life, history and culture in Finland.
Combined, my friends provided me with a place to stay for 10 nights. And none of these experiences would have taken place without the bike, which took me to the places where I met these incredible people.
But for all my friends in Finland did for me, the one person who had the most impact, the one who I relied on every day, was a young man who I spoke to for all of 15 minutes.
His name was Aki.
■ ■ ■
I first saw Aki on the road east of Loviisa early on a cold, crisp, sunny morning two days after I was injured. He was pushing himself in a black wheelchair — with a third wheel (a bike tire) attached to the front — down a path on the side of the road as I rode by. There was no one else out there. No cars, no other people. Just us. He waved, I waved back. A few minutes later, after I stopped on a bridge and was listening to the peal of church bells from a nearby village, Aki pushed himself onto the bridge and stopped to say hello.
Aki had blonde hair, cropped close to his skull, and was dressed all in white, with a Suomi (Finnish for Finland) hoodie, with the sleeves pulled up so I could see his heavily muscled forearms, He was wearing gloves, to protect his hands, as he propelled himself down the road in the wheelchair.
After we went through the dance where he speaks to me in Finnish, and I say I don’t speak his language, he switched to English and I learned his story.
Aki was 33 years old and he has Multiple Sclerosis. He has had MS for 10 years and he told me he had been in the wheelchair for the past two years.
Multiple Sclerosis is not a fatal disease, but there is no cure. For those who have MS, the nerve damage disrupts communication between the brain and the body. It’s chronic: it can last for years or be lifelong.
Before MS entered his life, Aki was an athlete. He played soccer and hockey. He said he liked to push things to the limit. He’s still pushing it. At the time, he tried to push himself 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) every day in the wheelchair. But not in the rain. He doesn’t like to get wet. He said he hoped to work up to 7 kilometers (4.35 miles) over the next three months.
Aki doesn’t know his prognosis. No one does. But he’s not giving in. He’s going to keep pushing the limits.
Aki is a better man than I am. And I told him that.
What Aki doesn’t know is he became my shepherd, my guiding light, my compass. It was Aki who I turned to, to get myself centered, whenever I let my injury, the weather or the myriad of other things that went wrong, start to get inside my head during my journey in Finland. Every day, sometimes several times a day, I would think of Aki, and what he was going through. And I would remind myself how easy I had it, how insignificant what I was dealing with was compared to his life.
I knew I would get through it, but Aki, his obstacles would be much more difficult. But I knew nothing would stop him from trying to overcome them.
So how could I let my trivial, insignificant issues stop me?
■ ■ ■
So, in answer to the surgeon’s question: “And you do this why?”
It’s really quite simple.
It explains why Katariina, when I was in the midst of all this turmoil, said to me: “You’re always so happy. You’re always so optimistic.”
Why is that?
Because the bike and the road mean two things.
It’s freedom.
To be me.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
