[00:00:00] Hello, friends. Welcome to the Champions Moto podcast. And I can't wait to welcome my co-host, Maria Parker. Hey, Maria. Hi, Kelly. How are you today? [00:00:10][10.3] [00:00:11] Just doing great. And Maria, as you know, we are in for a real treat today as our guest is a world record holding endurance cyclist. He was never a competitive swimmer, though. Recently he has added swimming to his workouts. I can't wait for our listeners to hear his amazing story about a full recovery from a broken neck. He has also got quite a resumé, which includes having been a visiting lecturer at Oxford. He's an author of multiple books, including two books of poetry and a renowned expert on doing business in the digital age. Our guest, Geoffrey Rehder, has worked at the U.N. and has testified before Congress. But Maria, before we bring in your fellow endurance cycling champion, can you tell us a little bit more about chess? [00:01:02][50.9] [00:01:03] Sure. Kelly, I'm so delighted that my friend Jeffrey Ritter is coming on the show today. He's the current overall world endurance recumbent cycling champion at the twenty nineteen Borrego Springs, twelve hour world time trial cycling championships. Jeffrey completed one hundred and eighty one miles and twelve hours. Jefferys overcome enormous odds to live out his dream of becoming a champion cyclist. His currently living what he calls Life 2.0. But we'll let him tell us more about that. Jeffrey, so glad to have you on Champions much. Welcome. [00:01:36][32.9] [00:01:37] Well, thank you very much. I'm looking forward to spending some time with both of you. [00:01:39][2.7] [00:01:40] Yes. Welcome, Jeffrey. So, Jeffrey. Yeah. Tell us about what is life to point out mean? What's the story behind that? [00:01:48][8.4] [00:01:50] Well, back in the early part of this decade, 2011, 2013, I made two trips to the French Alps to fulfill lifetime dreams, you know, to ride in the French Alps, to put your wheels on the same roads for those names of legends have been painted and to conquer the mountains there. And coming back home after the second trip where I had actually written the full stage of the tour solo that, well, what's left was winning podiums in state and regional time trial champions for my age group. Well, what can we do to really up my game? I decided, inspired by those people that have raced the race across America, that I would try to qualify. After all, I was now 60 years old. And so we focused on a race qualifier that was out in Ohio where I grew up. And it was really cool to contemplate racing on the same roads that I had learned how to love cycling. [00:02:46][56.7] [00:02:48] We got out there to do a training run, get familiar with the road and 18 miles out. Well, LifePoint 1.0 came to an end. We don't really know what happened, but I was riding solo. My wife and so experienced sag supporting me behind me in a car that she'd stopped to get the day's waters. And when I came to, I had somehow fallen off a bridge nearly twenty three feet. We think that probably I just hit a gap between the tarmac and the concrete of the bridge was out in the country. So there was a low guardrail and somehow I must have lost control and gone over the guardrail looking up. It was like, what is this rusty underside of a bridge? I was riding my bicycle was it turned out that was the beginning of Life 2.0. I survived, but my sternum had been broken in half on the boulder. A couple of ribs were broken. But the real injury was that my head had whiplashed and broken over half the length of my neck. C five. C six, seven, two one. T to all of them required attention over the ensuing days of surgery. Well, as I sat there on the gurney the next morning, having not almost made it through the night, the doctor asked before the first surgery, Do I have any questions? I looked up at him and I said, Yeah. Will I be able to fly to the University of Oxford to teach for the first time? And he had that kind of a look that we would use an acronym of W.T.. It looked at my wife and her eyebrows go up and he said, when would you be going? Because he hadn't even done the surgery yet. I said, well, eight weeks from today, squeeze my hands at let's make that your your goal. And indeed, eight weeks later, neck brace still on suitcase and one arm laps top in the other. I insisted that I could get on the airplane, fly to London and teach. [00:04:55][127.1] [00:04:56] Wow. Wow. [00:04:57][0.9] [00:04:57] Can you give us the. A little tighter timeline. What year was this? What month was it? And what like when you actually saw the underside of the Rusty Bridge? [00:05:09][11.4] [00:05:09] Did you have feeling in your limbs? Were you in pain? Can you guess? [00:05:15][5.6] [00:05:16] Yeah, I yeah. I'd like to hear that, too. How did you get help? Because you were invisible. [00:05:20][3.6] [00:05:21] I'll try to to that. August one, 2014, approximately nine 16 a.m., according to my Garmin, which actually recorded both my elevation over the guardrail and the descent after birth to be graphic, I we calculated that I hit the boulder with my Sterman is at a physical speed of 26 miles per hour. And when I came to, I heard vehicles on the bridge and realized they couldn't see me. [00:05:51][30.2] [00:05:52] How would I get help before I die? Guy could tell I was broken. So the pain was intense, particularly on the left side. And I felt my cell phone in my back pocket. It was on my exposed right hip. And I said, well, OK, clearly something's broken. I could puncture a lung, I could sever an artery, but I have to get my hand down my side, pull the cell phone out and try to call my wife. Otherwise, she won't find me. She could drive right past me. She may have already done so. And very slowly, I pulled the cell phone back up, look at it, and realized I'd lost my glasses. [00:06:28][36.1] [00:06:31] So I squinted, extended and eventually found the way to redial. [00:06:35][4.3] [00:06:36] And that was one of the things that was so fascinating was here's this phone, 20 feet under a bridge in Ohio, connecting to a network that connected back to our home in Virginia and then reconnected back to my wife, who was, in fact, just four miles away in the car. [00:06:49][13.3] [00:06:51] And I said, I'm down. It's bad. I'm under a bridge. She had to find the bridge. [00:06:57][6.0] [00:06:59] So as it turned out, they put me on a gurney, put me on a backboard, put me in a neck brace and took me up to the road. [00:07:11][11.4] [00:07:11] The helicopter came in, took me to the hospital. And, you know, of course, the first thing they do is they in trauma, they cut all your clothes off. So here I am, an agile 60 year old with a neck brace on in front of twenty five doctors and nurses running around my body. [00:07:25][13.6] [00:07:25] And the doc next to me has the helmet that I had. And he says to the recording, he says, helmet inspection has occurred. There is no evidence of visible impact on the helmet. But wow, this is a nice helmet. It's the same one I have got. [00:07:42][16.4] [00:07:44] So you're you're pretty with it because you remember these details. Oh, yeah. And I said, oh, do you ride, you know, just for fun or do you race like I do. And I said, oh, I just ride for fun. What about you? And I said, well, I was training to race across America. And at that point, there was this wash in the room and they realized they didn't have a weekend cyclist. They had a hard ass athlete. [00:08:06][22.0] [00:08:07] And I think it changed the quality of the care that I received from that moment on. [00:08:10][3.6] [00:08:13] Tell us about that. What do you think being a hard ass athlete did for you in the circumstances? [00:08:18][5.1] [00:08:21] It perhaps made me realize that I was a hard ass athlete.