Biking across America ‘experience of a lifetime’
Thursday, April 24, 2003
By CRAIG HANSEN
Sentinel Reporter, craig@burnettcountysentinel.com

GRANTSBURG—Ron Burzese had always loved biking.

The problem was that with each passing year, his vision got worse and worse until he finally had to come to a difficult admission; he was legally blind.

“I tried to ignore and deny it for the longest time,” Burzese, 34, told a group of bicycling enthusiasts last Thursday evening at the Grantsburg American Legion Hall. “But when I finally admitted it, I was freed up to be exactly the person my Creator intended.”

With only 10 percent vision available to him, Burzese came to admit he was no longer safe to go bike-riding alone. So he joined a bike club in Minneapolis and began looking for biking partners.

“One women agreed to go biking with me,” Burzese said. “When she did, another woman saw us biking together and decided if that woman could do it, so could she. That second woman was a friend of Mike’s, and when we started biking together, that’s how I met Mike.”

“Mike” is Mike Beadles, 45, another biking enthusiast. Soon he was biking with Burzese, too, and the pair hit if off.

“The only way I can bike is on a tandem,” Burzese said. “I sit in the back and pedal while the person in front, like Mike, navigates.”

Not long after becoming biking buddies, Beadles began to get a vision.

The vision was to take part in a month-long, Los Angeles to Boston bike trek. The intense pace meant traveling between 100 to 300 miles a day most days under nearly all conditions, including a stretch through the Arizona desert during 125 degree days that would whither the soul of even the heartiest bikers.

And Beadles wanted Burzese as his partner on the journey.

“I didn’t really take him seriously for the first month or so,” Burzese said. “But then I began to think about what an accomplishment it would be, especially as someone who is legally blind.”

Burzese, who works in the Twin Cities for a group called Blind, Inc., that works to enable the blind to live as independently as possible, knew that if he took part in the expedition, it would be inspirational for hundreds of blind folks he worked with directly, as well as hundreds of thousands nationwide.

Once they’d both committed to the concept, Burzese and Beadles had a lot of training to do.

“The company sponsoring the event wanted us to complete a minimum of 1,000 miles of training in about four months, to make sure we were up to the challenge,” Beadles said. “Most of it was during the harsh Minnesota winter months. We barely made it.”

But make it they did. Beadles and Burzese talked about the challenges they faced at length, one of the most common of which was blowing out the tires on their bike.

“Finally,” Burzese said, “we found a way of putting two tires on a single rim, a smaller tire fitting almost perfectly inside a larger one. Once we did that, we stopped have as many blown tires.”

Once their journey was over, both men had to deal with the post-trek letdown.

“I lost track of how many times I called Mike at work,” Burzese said, “just to say, ‘Man, I’m really feeling down.’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, I know. Me, too.’”

Still, both men will never forget their arduous journey.

“That was three years ago,” Beadles said, “and it’s still the most thrilling experience of my life.”

Beadles and Burzese spoke at the Bike Forum in Grantsburg, at the American Legion Hall, an event sponsored by the Grantsburg Fitness Center and hosted by John Priessing. Earlier in the evening, Chad Soja of RiverBend Bike and Ski in Spooner held an informational seminar on the latest models and equipment for biking enthusiasts.