Breaking Barriers by Biking
For most of my life, movement was how I understood myself.
I was the kid who always needed to be outside, always needed to be moving. Sports weren’t something I did after school; they were how I identified myself. In elementary school, I raced the boys at recess because I wanted to be the fastest, strongest, and most capable kid on the playground. In middle school, I spent my free block taking P.E. twice, begging teachers to let me retake fitness tests just so I could beat my previous scores and compete against my classmates. I needed to be the last one still running in the pacers, complete the most crunches, and run the fastest mile. I loved pushing myself, seeing what my body was capable of, and finding out where my limits were, then figuring out how to break them.
For years, I thought that part of me would always be there.
Then my legs started taking it away.
I have lived with compartment syndrome for nearly eight years. At first, it was something I could push through. Then it became something I planned around. Eventually, it became something that controlled my life. Running hurt. Hiking hurt. Sports hurt. Everything I loved came with a cost, and every year the cost got higher.
I was a starting varsity athlete in soccer, basketball, and track since my freshman year in high school. I was a captain. I was recognized as one of Vermont’s All Star athletes. I had opportunities to continue competing in college. But while everyone else saw accomplishments, I was quietly watching my body fail.
I tried everything. Doctors. Physical therapists. Specialists. Different treatments. Different explanations. Different opinions. Some warned me that continuing to exercise could cause permanent damage. Some worried about nerve damage. Others warned about dead tissue buildup. No one could promise a solution.
Eventually I chose surgery.
It wasn’t really a choice. It was my only possible option towards recovery.
I underwent bilateral compartment release surgery on both legs. Six incisions. Years of accumulated pain. No guarantee it would work.
The surgery helped, but it didn’t give me my old life back.
I still can’t run.
I can’t play basketball.
I can’t play soccer.
And perhaps hardest of all, I can’t ski the way I used to.
For the past five years, I have worked on a ski mountain. It’s one of my favorite places in the world. Growing up in Vermont taught me to love every kind of skiing: groomers, ice, powder, tight eastern woods. When I moved to Montana, I dreamed about bigger mountains and deeper snow.
For a brief moment after surgery, it felt like that dream was coming true.
My first winter in Montana I skied constantly. Solo days during the week. Long weekends with friends. Open-to-close days where my legs finally felt capable again.
Then everything started unraveling.
This past winter I couldn’t even make it through a few ski days before my legs completely shut down. They stayed swollen for months. Bruising appeared. The pain became impossible to ignore. I kept trying to push through it because that was what I had always done.
But eventually I had to face a reality I hated.
I was only twenty years old.
I couldn’t spend the rest of my life destroying my body for a few more days on the mountain.
So I stopped.
Or at least, I stopped doing the things I thought made me who I was.
Every day I drove up to the mountain for work. I tuned skis. Helped people get fitted for gear. Watched them head out into conditions I would have done anything to experience myself.
Then after work, I went to the gym and rode a stationary bike and lifted weights.
At first it was survival. I needed something to keep me sane.
I had always enjoyed spin classes and mountain biking. I loved riding Vermont’s dirt roads when I was younger. But biking had never been my thing. It was never a sport I cared about.
It was simply the thing that didn’t hurt. The thing I had to do during practice on the sidelines while I watched my teammates work hard on the court together.
While everything else was being taken away, cycling was the one door that remained open.
So I kept showing up.
Every day.
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When the snow melted, my friend Tilly and I started mountain biking several times a week. Twenty-mile rides became thirty-mile rides. My fitness returned. My confidence started to return too.
Then one weekend I borrowed my roommate’s road bike and drove to Glacier National Park.
This was already a questionable decision…. My roommate is about five feet tall; I am not. I had never ridden a road bike before, and I had decided my first ride would be Going-to-the-Sun Road.
When I arrived, I quickly realized I had absolutely no idea how to shift gears.
Where the hell were the shifters?
Eventually I flagged down another cyclist. A couple bike patrol volunteers took pity on me, showed me how everything worked, adjusted the seat, and then asked what exactly I thought I was doing.
I explained that I planned to ride up the road. On a bike that was too small. A bike I had never ridden. Toward nearly 4,000 feet of elevation gain.
They looked at me like I was insane, but sent me on my way.
Within the first mile, I was hooked! The speed. The rhythm. The feeling of climbing under my own power. The way the landscape unfolded around every corner.
I rode forty miles that day.
Then I woke up the next morning and did it again.
Somewhere on that road, something shifted.
For years, my story had been about loss. Another sport I couldn’t play. Another activity I couldn’t do. Another reminder of what my body used to be. But that weekend wasn’t about what I had lost. It was about what I had found.
When I got back to Missoula, I couldn’t stop riding.
I rode until my legs were tired. I rode until my schedule was full. I rode until sitting on a bike seat became genuinely too painful to even ride down the street to grab ice cream from the grocery store.
And somewhere in all those miles, I discovered that I liked mountain biking, but I loved it for the climb.
I loved the effort. I loved the challenge. I loved spending hours grinding my way up a mountain under my own power.
Half the time, reaching the summit felt like an inconvenience because it meant I had to turn around and go back down.
Soon I was building gravel routes around Missoula. Thirty miles around Sunflower Peak. Thirty more around Sentinel. Rides in the Rattlesnake, up to Snowbowl, and Blue Mountain. Any road that climbed, I wanted to explore it.
When I returned home to Vermont that summer, I pulled my mom’s dusty road bike out of storage.
She had bought it years ago and barely touched it.
That week, I rode almost every day.
Along dirt roads. Past rivers. Through farms. Around lakes. Across rolling green hills that I had driven past hundreds of times.
The strange thing about cycling is how it changes your relationship with a place. Roads I had known my entire life suddenly felt new. Distances became tangible and landscapes slowed down. And for the first time in years, I felt strong again.
Not the same strong. A different strong.
The kind that comes from adaptation and rebuilding. From accepting that your life may never look the way you imagined and deciding to keep moving anyway.
My compartment syndrome took a lot from me. Some days I still grieve that.
I miss running. I miss basketball. I miss soccer. I miss skiing more than I know how to explain.
But biking gave me something back.
It gave me a way to explore. To compete. To actually trust my body again.
For eight years, my body kept closing doors.
Cycling was the first thing that opened one back up.
And now, for the first time in a long time, I’m excited about where that road might lead.
