WITH ONE LEG AND AN IRON WILL
With one leg and an iron will, Brett Wolfe sets himself apart from biking pack
by Kristin Dizon, Seattle Post Intelligence
SQUAMISH B.C. — Coated with a thin layer of dust and a trickle of blood and sweat, rider No. 326 crosses the finish line.
His time of 4 hours, 6 minutes, 50 seconds puts him far behind the leaders at the Test of Metal, a mountain-biking race. But cheers erupt when Brett Wolfe rolls under the banner.
For 45 miles, Wolfe pedaled these steep mountain trails, climbing more than 4,000 feet, dropping down staircase ladders, bombing around hairpin turns. He passed many riders, was passed by others and crashed three times.
He has excellent technique, cardiovascular fitness and focus. He has a rigorous training schedule and a healthy diet.
He has one leg.
He uses no prosthesis.
Wherever he goes, the word “amazing” echoes in his wake.
As Wolfe tears down a steep, 5-foot-wide trail of rocks and loose dirt under a canopy of tall evergreens, a spectator murmurs, “Right on. Right on.”
Then it hits the watcher. “Oh my God,” Gordon Hall says in awe. “That was amazing.”
The woman to his left, Karen Sedgwick of Whistler, shakes her head, puzzled. “Did he just have one leg?” she asks, stupefied.
Wolfe, 32, didn’t start competing in mountain-bike races — including ultra-endurance, 24-hour competitions — to gladden hearts or inspire others. But every time he mounts a bike, he’s a message on wheels.
Brett Wolfe is all about the art of the possible.
Last year he climbed 20,000 vertical feet in the 100-mile Cascade Cream Puff near Eugene, Ore., in 12 hours and 45 minutes. At a 24-hour race in West Virginia, he fell so many times in the thick mud that he lost count, and cracked his helmet during one of the spills.
“It’s even mind-blowing to me sometimes,” Wolfe says. “I sit back and say, ‘I did what?!”
It’s hard to make excuses around Wolfe. My knee hurts. … He has one leg. I have a sprained ankle. … He has ONE leg. Biking shorts chafe my legs. … HE HAS ONE LEG!
“Everybody gets caught up in, ‘I don’t have this. I don’t have that.’ Well, what do I have?” he says. “It’s funny how people limit themselves.”
Wolfe is a breed all to himself; a lone wolf howling at the pack. He’s never faced another “one-legger” in any race, but he pushes himself to go farther and faster every time he rides.
The fringe
At an early age it was clear that Wolfe, who grew up in New Mexico and Alaska, was different. Family legend has it that he started riding a bike before he turned 4.
A constant blur in motion as a child, he gravitated toward adrenaline-laced, stunt-filled sports — ski racing and BMX bike riding.
When he was 11 or 12, his mother sat him down one day. A friend had broken his leg after following Wolfe down a big mound of dirt on his BMX bike.
She said: “Brett, not everybody can do what you do. DON’T … Kill … Your … Friends … Off!”
He dropped out of the University of Washington to focus on becoming a freestyle skiing pro. Several times a week, he biked in the woods and the mountains, where he felt a part of the environment. After he lost his right leg in a 1990 road accident, Wolfe earned a degree in industrial design from Western Washington University. In addition to riding 12 to 15 hours a week, he works as a free-lance product designer and at REI’s bike department.
A prosthetic leg has been gathering dust in a closet for years. Wolfe often gets around on forearm crutches or rolls the floor at REI in a wheelchair.
Two years after becoming an above-knee amputee, he entered a short mountain-bike race in Bellingham. He came in dead last. It was discouraging until he learned that 40 percent of the riders hadn’t finished at all. He was hooked.
Wolfe became an endurance mountain biker in 1995, competing in his first 24-hour team race that year. His first solo, round-the-clock event was in 1999.
In the mountain-biking world, 24-hour solo racers are at the fringe. It’s rare for more than 50 competitors to enter a race.
No one pays Wolfe to do this.
It takes a special human being to enjoy this kind of punishment.
The pleasure and pain
Those in the know, such as John Stamstad , say pedaling up and down rocks, dirt, tree roots, sand and mud “is one of the hardest ways to spend 24 hours.”
Stamstad, a man who biked alone for 2,568 miles on the Continental Divide from Montana to New Mexico in 18 days, is sometimes called the “father of ultra mountain biking.” Now living in Seattle and retired from pro racing, Stamstad coaches other riders.
Yet leg for leg, Wolfe beats him every time.
When Stamstad, who recently retired to teach mountain biking, first met Wolfe, he did a double take.
“I said, ‘Brett, where’s your other leg?'” said Stamstad, one of the few riders who has made a living on this fringe. “I was absolutely blown away by his ability to ride a mountain bike … He’s just as good on any level, compared to anyone.”
People wonder how Wolfe does it.
Mountain biking requires good balance and leg power. Other riders can unclip one leg and drag it on the ground on tight curves so they don’t spill. Wolfe doesn’t have that option.
When people ask, he boils it down to the basics. “How do you balance with one leg? Pick up your leg,” he tells them. “You just do it and you figure it out.”
He relies more on the “granny” or lower gears to maximize his momentum, but he says a key to his success is serious cardiovascular conditioning.
Even with his training, it still takes him days or even weeks to recover from a 24-hour race. Wolfe has finished five of the nine he has entered.
Usually, racers ride a 10- to 15-mile loop course, completing as many laps as possible.
Scenes from a 24-hour race: Bone-jarring vibrations … bleary-eyed laps in the dark with just head and bike lamps guiding the way … mud so thick it locks the drive train, turning the course into a hike-a-bike … a few minutes between laps to change clothes, bolt down a few morsels, get kissed by a girlfriend.
The hardest, loneliest stretch is 2 to 5 a.m., when thoughts of quitting flit through a rider’s head.
“You feel like a knucklehead,” Wolfe says. “You don’t feel like the brightest person in the world.”
At other times, when everything clicks and nothing goes wrong, Wolfe feels the pleasure of 24-hour races.
“It’s an amazing feeling. It’s very calming,” he says. “Your brain is going 100 miles an hour, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like the world slows down. You see the obstacles long before you ever hit them; you see the challenges and problems.”
The accident
No one ever knows when the next bend in the road will be just another curve or a seminal, life-changing moment.
August 1990. Juneau, Alaska. A main road. 6 a.m. Sunny skies.
Brett Wolfe, then 21, was speeding down a highway on his sport motorcycle. “I’d always had a desire to be on two wheels, going fast.”
He knew the risks and accepted them: “I had a clear picture of what it could do to me and the physical damage I could accept, but I don’t think you know what it can do to your family.”
He doesn’t like to talk about the details, summing it up as “youth stupidity and a motorcycle.” Simply put, he lost control on a curve and slammed into a guardrail.
He was knocked unconscious, his body flung into the ocean below. His right leg was amputated just above the knee by the force of the collision. His bones were broken in 13 places.
Flown by helicopter to Harborview Medical Center’s trauma unit in Seattle, Wolfe fluttered between life and death. At least twice, his heart was shocked back into ticking.
Doctors didn’t expect him to walk again. Fine, Wolfe thought, I’ll just take up off-road wheelchairing.
“If I had to drag myself with my teeth, I think I would,” he says.
“I was pretty happy to be alive. They kept sending in a shrink, who said, ‘Brett, you’re going to go through some depression with your leg and some trauma.’ And I was like, ‘Doc, I’m doing just fine. This is pretty cool. Trust me, the other options I had were pretty bad.'”
He is grateful to have escaped those outcomes: paralysis, brain damage, death.
“People kept saying that I looked bad, but I didn’t feel bad.”
The body
Sometimes, the airport X-ray machines beep in protest when Brett Wolfe hops through them.
Wolfe is packing metal — a titanium rod in his left thigh where the bone was shattered. He used to have no feeling in the front of his remaining leg and foot; now he can distinguish hot or cold there.
An 11-hour surgery put his body — a body used to falls, concussions and close calls — back together.
He was in the hospital for a month, followed by two months of daily physical therapy. Five months after the accident, he stood for the first time.
The next spring, back home in Alaska, he tried pedaling his bike around the block. It was the single most excruciating ride of his life. But, like a newborn who’s learning to walk, he kept at it. Within two months, he was mountain biking in the woods.
Wolfe’s body, which he calls “a tool,” has been punished plenty as he pushes his limits.
Perhaps that’s why he often speaks of it in the third person, like a separate entity. As in, “I know the body can do it,” or “We’ll have to see how the body is feeling.”
The body is not imposing. Wolfe is a thin, 140-pound man with sharp blue eyes, thinning chestnut brown hair and rosy cheeks framed by a tailored beard. His left quad muscle, which you might expect to be massive, is quite ordinary looking.
Two nearly identical pink scars run like rivers down the inside of his forearms from the elbow to the wrist, more marks from The Accident. He peers up from his wheelchair, looking gentle and diminutive.
The attitude
Looks can fool.
Mountain-biking colleagues call Wolfe one of the toughest competitors around.
Wolfe takes pleasure in routinely beating more than a third of the riders in any race.
“I try to do my best to knock out as many of the two-leggers as I can,” he says.
Wolfe is not shy about his abilities. He doesn’t use words like handicapped or disabled to describe himself. Neither do others.
“He’s not in it to beat other people,” says Craig Undem, a cycling coach and former member of the U.S. national road-biking team. “His ego’s not invested in being the first-place guy. He’s toiled for years, finishing behind the elite racers. He knows he’d be up there (on the podium) if he had another leg.”
One reason he’s so good is that Wolfe loves solving problems.
“Brett looks at it like a puzzle or a challenge and he’s just consumed with cracking it,” Undem says.
The two became friends during a local mountain-bike race. Undem’s pedal fell off on one side and he could use only one leg to ride the last two miles.
“Even the slightest incline was incredibly difficult to ride up. Yet Brett came flying by me,” Undem recalls.
Besides his gritty drive and analytical approach, Wolfe has his own brand of humor, often poking fun at his bodily misfortunes.
During a mountain-bike race in 1997, he was hit by a Jeep traveling the wrong way on a gravel road. Wolfe’s helmet cracked open like a nutshell, his body flew 30 feet into a ditch, and both shoulders and an elbow were broken.
Wolfe, naturally, thought it wasn’t so bad. He’d just get up, walk it off and continue the race. The medical personnel thought otherwise; they choppered him to Harborview, again.
He bantered with one of the attendants on board: “I said, ‘Airlift Northwest? You’re the same guys who flew me out of Alaska when I lost my leg.’
“And she said, ‘Oh, I’m glad we could be of service again.’ So I said, ‘Do I get frequent-flier miles?’ And she was rolling.”
The records
June 3. 9:15 a.m.
Brett Wolfe is on track for his goal — logging 200 miles in a 24-hour mountain-bike race. He’s having a good race after 21 1/2 hours, despite sniffles from a cold and a 45-minute break to fix his bike. There are only 14 other solo riders in this race, Round the Clock, at Spokane’s Riverside park.
Wolfe switches bikes at the end of a lap. With just 2 1/2 hours to go, he has violent muscle spasms in his knee. Try as he might, he can’t go on, quitting the race after 15 laps totaling 172 miles. That’s 18 miles short of his goal, but still a record for him.
He is disappointed and frustrated.
“I may hang up the shingle on the solo races,” he says. “You really do them just to kind of prove a point. The fun factor isn’t there.”
If another one-legged cyclist surpasses 172 miles, he might be tempted to one-up him. In the meantime, he’s lined up plenty of other challenges.
He’ll do a three-day race in the tropical rain forest of Costa Rica in November. Next year, he plans an eight-day stage race through the Alps.
And he has another goal: to set the world speed record in a one-hour track ride for a one-legged cyclist. He’s discussing the details with an international cycling group, but figures that he has to bike about 23 miles in 60 minutes.
The goal is all the more remarkable since serious cyclists rarely cross over from one discipline to another. You’re either a road racer or an off-roader.
“Each time you go out and break a speed record or you go further than what you thought was possible, then you just opened your eyes to the possibilities for what’s next,” Wolfe says.
“In the industry, it’s never happened. It’s not a shift that anybody’s ever seen. It shatters perceptions.”