Because riding has been good to me.
I’m 56 years old and started riding seriously about 6 years ago. I learned to ride as a kid and put a lot of miles on my ten-speed Schwinn Continental in high school and college. Somewhere after that I lost track of the bike as I got married and moved away. I have a memory of the bike in my parent’s garage but I didn’t take it with me.
Life moved through graduate school, high-tech jobs on both coasts, and finally a move to India with my family to serve as a volunteer biomedical engineer in an association of rural hospitals across North India and Nepal. My job was to implement the new Indian Bio-Medical Waste (Management and Handling) Rules in about 20 hospitals, teach hospital staff safety and infection control, and help manage the technical side of the hospitals that requested help. This job put me in contact with really nasty stuff and after about 7 years I started to get sick and none of the doctors could figure out exactly why. We were able to confirm I had not contracted HIV or anything identifiable but I kept getting sicker and was living off more and stronger steroids and other medications.