Growing up, my father cycled most days, including in the winter. When he got home, he took his bike computer to his rolltop desk, pulled out a legal pad, and recorded his ride.
I started riding distances with him around age 12. It took me until my early 30s to beat him on the hills; the flats came later. We first rode the New England Parkinson’s Ride together in 2015. I road behind as my father, age 67, passed people half his age. He seemed an avid cyclist supporting the cause. But at the rest stop, you’d know otherwise. The fingers on his right hand curled unnaturally backward and he walked with a slightly wide, rocking gait. Being on his bike transformed him.
The New England Parkinson’s Ride was one of his favorite days of the year. It was the one day cycling and Parkinson’s were not at odds. In 2019, my husband and daughter joined us and we rode 30 miles.
My daughter, age 8, powered up the hill on her seven-speed; my father rode behind, encouraging her. Other cyclists smiled at them. I rode and watched with a mix of joy and sadness.
My father and daughter were on very different trajectories. She was going longer and faster, he shorter and slower.
After my father died in 2022, my mother and I were rifling through papers looking for the deed to his car. Instead I found three thick file folders containing my father’s bike logs. I opened them and started reading. The handwriting was scratchy but familiar. I flipped through the pages, stapled by year. For 36 years, my father documented every ride including distance, speed, route, weather, wind speed and direction, and who joined him. I asked my mother if I could keep them; she nodded yes. He loved those, she said, walking away.
All those years I thought he was keeping a bike log he was keeping a diary. For the next few months when I was emotional, which was often, I went on a bike ride and told myself stories about him. I also spent a lot of time reading his bike logs. The pages were yellowing at the edges and starting to fray, so I put each year’s log in its own clear plastic sheet inside a 3-inch binder. One day, needing a deeper distraction, I did the math. He had logged 104,575.29 miles of cycling, equal to over 4,000 miles during his best years.
A scientist, he excelled with details. But he also included qualitative data, as any good scientist does. And that was my favorite part.
In 1988, when I was 12 and rode 17 or 19 miles with him (bad handwriting, not recordkeeping, leads to the uncertainty), there were dashes in place of the speed. The note just said, w/Erika. One day in 2002, he rode 28 miles and averaged 18.6 miles per hour. The note, Rehoboth, talking ramble w/Al, made me smile. In 2004, he rode with me in New Hampshire and explained the route as Bloody Cat Hill, a name I used after a bad fall there. In 2005, during an unusual five-day break in September, he wrote, Erika wedding. At the end of 2006 a note said, Barbara, 3 knee surgeries.
Starting in 2017, his notes got bleaker and documented how Parkinson’s was affecting his riding. He wrote about shortness of breath, sore shoulders, and exhaustion. By 2018, riding gaps weren’t explained and by 2019, his riding was sporadic. There were good days, with notes like no shoulder or joint pain, or stops helped. He and my daughter biked together many times in 2019, and one note said: w/Charlotte, GOOD, 2 Stops.
The last two years of his log are sparse (not even two pages total) and are very hard to read. By then, the shaking and nerve pain were intense. His last entry, in August 2021, which I think says 7 miles, reads hand tingling last 3 miles. There was no log for his last year.
I think about my father all the time. Each July, around his birthday, my husband and I bike his age at death, 73. At some point we will switch to kilometers, but we will never stop. The day my father loved most, The New England Parkinson’s Ride, is my hardest day of the year. Luckily my father taught me early to wear sunglasses to protect my eyes, so nobody sees my tears. After seven years of riding with my father, I, we, ride in his honor. Just like for him, cycling is about so much more than riding a bike.
Erika’s 2025 Fundraising Page
By Erika Alison Cohen
Erika Alison Cohen is a long-time ride participant who lost a close family member to Parkinson’s Disease. She works as a ghostwriter and book editor, with a specialty in financial writing and business memoirs. Besides cycling, she is an avid runner and co-wrote Stories from the Starting Line, a book about running in New Hampshire that came out in 2023. You can learn more about her at eacohen.com.
