Internationally known athletic trainer Andy Pruitt, founder of the University of Colorado Sports Medicine and Performance Center, always says, “Even if you can’t walk or hobble, you can still ride a bike.” And that’s true…for the most part.

There are certainly times when injury and/or illness can also make it hard to pedal in a way that allows you to ride meaningful distances or with your usual friends, or to even pedal much at all.

That’s where e-bikes can be a godsend—a word people often use when they’ve been sidelined from riding their regular bikes and e-bikes give them the opportunity to finally get back with the pack. For some of these riders, the e-bike is a transition back to non-motorized riding. They use the progressive assist most e-bikes offer to gradually build back strength, starting in turbo (or the highest power-assist setting) and working their way to eco (or the lowest power-assist setting).

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For others, e-bikes provide their new “normal” riding. The e-bike is an end in itself and the beginning of reclaiming the joy of riding.

We interviewed five riders who hopped on e-bikes to get back in the saddle, back to their community, and back to their happy place after life tossed them off.

pedal assist e bikes helping injured athletes ride again, andrew bernstein
Nicole Esplin

Andrew Bernstein, 36, Boulder, Colorado

E-bike: Specialized Turbo Creo

Andrew Bernstein has been racing bikes since high school. Throughout his life, he rode most days and raced many different bikes, especially road and track. He helped run and promote bike events, worked for eight years at Bicycling magazine, and he still works in the bike industry as a senior account director at the public relations and marketing company True Communications.

In 2019, a driver of a van plowed into him from behind on a wide, nearly empty road at full speed, smashing his bike and sending him airborne into a roadside ditch, where he would have died were it not for a passerby who happened to see him. The damage was massive: every rib broken, shattered left shoulder and left ankle, broken sternum, collapsed lungs, broken tibia and fibula, snapped femur, crushed pelvis, fractured vertebrae, a damaged spinal cord, and severe internal bleeding.

For a long time, Bernstein wasn't sure he would ever ride again—or if he even wanted to. His left leg was so impaired, pedaling seemed impossible. But eventually, with the help of physical therapy, he got there and in January of 2020 started pedaling a stationary bike. Those first sparks of muscle memory reignited a sense of hope.

By early summer, Bernstein had ventured outside to some easy bike paths. A thrilling achievement given his present circumstances, but one that soon became boring given the rider he’d once been. So, he headed to the hills—specifically an 800-foot climb in his neighborhood, which would have been the type of hill he’d do three laps of at lunch. It didn’t go well.

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“I made it about a third of the way up and was super bummed. I was like fuck, if I can’t make it up this little climb, I don’t know if I even want to ride a bike,” he says. “I basically stopped riding outdoors after that.”

That is, until June of 2021. Bernstein had been riding his road bike on Kickr a couple of times a week and the weather was getting nice, so he ventured outdoors and eventually headed back to tackle that climb. This time, he crested, but ended up feeling more deflated than vindicated. Sure, he’d made it up on his own power, but it had taken all his power.

That’s when the lightbulb went off that if he needed more push, he should just go get more. So Bernstein bought a Specialized Creo e-bike. At $5,500, it was an investment, but one he now only wishes he'd made sooner.

“It has let me get back to the kind of riding that is actually fun and has unlocked terrain—gravel roads and hills—that I would not be able to access on my own power,” he says. “I can do group rides now and know that I can keep up. It lets me be part of the peloton.”

He’s even setting race goals again. “Steamboat Gravel has an e-bike category, and my 2022 goal would be to race that event,” he says.

Thanks to the assist he gets from the e-bike, Bernstein believes he’ll eventually be able to ride more under his own power. “My glutes and quads are getting stronger all the time and it’s noticeable. I can envision a day when I don’t need the e-bike all the time," he says. "For now, I’m grateful that it’s let me get back to so many things that I love.”

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pedal assist e bikes helping injured athletes ride again, laura crawford
Russ Roca

Laura Crawford, 42, Missoula, Montana

E-bike: Niner RLT E9 RDO

Crawford’s life is bike exploration. Over a decade ago, she and her partner Russ Roca launched the website Path Less Pedaled, then sold everything and traveled the world for three years telling stories from the saddle. Then, they moved to Portland, Oregon where they launched a YouTube channel of the same name and eventually settled in Missoula, Montana.

For more than 15 years, Crawford hadn’t gone more than a couple of days without riding—until October 2020 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She underwent five months of chemotherapy and a bilateral mastectomy.

“That all does a considerable amount of damage to your body. And that winter was the longest chunk of time I had ever gone without riding,” she says.

It’s not that she couldn’t pedal at all. It was that she couldn’t manage the type of riding that brought her joy: riding gravel through the mountains surrounding their Montana home. The crushing residual fatigue from chemo and healing from surgery left her too exhausted for anything but the flat rail trails around town. She had no interest. “It would have been bittersweet,” she says.

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Roca suggested an e-bike, something Crawford admits she may not have considered herself. “I used to be one of those people who was like, ‘Riding an e-bike is cheating,'” Crawford says. "But I realized I needed this to rebuild my physical and mental health after being so sick.”

She got a Niner gravel e-bike, which transformed her riding and changed her mind. “My perception of e-bikes was they were heavy cargo bikes for carrying your kids or stripped-down mass-market bikes that wouldn’t be very fun to ride. This was neither of those,” she says.

“It rides gravel beautifully and is similar in geometry to the custom acoustic gravel bike I normally ride,” she says. “With the pedal assist I can just bump up the power when the hill is too much for me. I can get on the bike and do a 20-mile gravel ride. I’ve been able to enjoy my summer and do some exploring instead of being confined to flat routes that wouldn’t make my heart sing.”

Though her physical therapist assures her that she’ll be back to where she was and beyond, Crawford knows that’s going to take time.

“One of the challenges of going through chemo is that you think when you get to the last round, you’ll be done, and you’ll bounce back and it’s all over. But that’s totally not the case,” she says. “My long goal is to use the e-bike to rebuild strength and fitness to get back on my non-e-bike. But that’s not at least until next year.”

Crawford is also happy to see the tide of public sentiment about e-bikes positively shifting and she hopes that continues. “I’ve come to realize you get a good workout pedaling it even in sport or tour mode,” she says. “You still have to pedal. You still have to work. It really isn’t cheating at all.”

pedal assist e bikes helping injured athletes ride again, john pacharis
John Pacharis

John Pacharis, 47, of Saint Lawrence, Pennsylvania

E-bikes: Trek Rail 7 Mountain Bike and Giant Revolt E+ Gravel Bike

John Pacharis is a steward of the sport. A longtime member of Berks Area Mountain Bike Association, Pacharis leads Tuesday night rides, spearheads trail maintenance and advocacy, and visits schools to bring kids into cycling.

When a motorcycle crash in 2012 left him unable to pedal, he got on an off-road handcycle. “It wasn’t the same, but it got me out in the woods, and I could keep leading rides,” he says.

In his crash, Pacharis tore three of the four ligaments in his leg, a severe injury that required two surgeries and left him with a leg that has never returned to the full range of motion needed to turn the crank of a bike. “I can only bend my knee about 70 degrees and that’s not enough for a pedal revolution,” he says. After trying an adaptive crank that left his more depressed than happy, Pacharis resigned to handcycling.

Until one day he saw videos on Facebook of a physical therapist friend working out on an Arc Trainer (similar to an elliptical) to rehab from hip surgery. It piqued Parcharis’ interest. “You don’t have to bend your knees a lot so it seemed like something I could do over the winter to work my legs and build strength and fitness,” he says. He found a gym with an Arc Trainer and worked up to 30 minutes on it without any pain.

When Spring came around, Pacharis started to see more riders in his community spinning around on mountain e-bikes. He wondered if two wheels could be in his future again.

“I thought if I can ride this piece of gym equipment with no rest or coasting for a half hour, I might be able to ride an e-bike,” he says.

He dug out his adaptive crank and hit the local bike shop, where they outfitted a gravel e-bike for him to try. “I cruised down the road and was like, ‘I’m riding again!’” Pacharis says. “I pedal with my heel to get the right range of motion without pain, but I’m pedaling.”

Pacharis figured he might still need to give his leg a break and handcycle some of the time, but he rode the gravel e-bike for a month while his handcycle sat in the garage. “Now I ride five or six days a week, no issue. If my leg starts hurting on the ride, I turn the motor up a little bit. It’s awesome,” he says.

Confident in his riding, Pacharis later bought a mountain e-bike to accompany his gravel one. “I got a Trek Rail 7. I can ride almost anything anyone else can ride. I’m just careful so I don’t fall and injure the leg any further,” he says.

E-bikes are still a touchy subject for some in the mountain bike community, but Pacharis is unphased. “Most people know what I’ve been through. When someone says, ‘Oh you’re on an e-bike, this climb is easy for you!’ I just say, ‘I’ll gladly trade legs with you!’" he says. “And really, why question anyone if they’re riding an e-bike? If it makes it more enjoyable for someone to be on a bicycle, I’m all for it!”

pedal assist e bikes helping injured athletes ride again, ann gentle
Ann Gentle

Ann Gentle, 51, of Omaha, Nebraska

E-bike: Blix

Ann Gentle will ride for tacos. Actually, she rides for pretty much everything. She commutes, does group rides with friends (often for tacos), joins 30,000 of her fellow bike lovers to ride across Iowa for the event, RAGBRAI, and these days tackles a lot of gravel events like Mid South and Unbound. For her, cycling is synonymous with community. That’s why Gentle bought an e-bike…twice.

The first was after a car crash. About 10 years ago, someone t-boned her in an intersection and she ended up with a separated shoulder and torn rotator cuff that needed surgery, along with a neck injury that meant she couldn’t put too much pressure on her upper torso or even pull on bike handlebars.

At that time, e-bikes weren’t really a thing yet, but she’d heard her friend Sarah, then owner of the Omaha Bicycle Company, talking about them. So, she went online and found one. “It looked like a touring bike but was very large. It didn’t have any indication of battery power, you just had to guess. But it did exactly what it needed to do—got me to and from work and out on the taco ride. It was great,” she says.

When its service was no longer needed, she sold that e-bike to another woman who was trying to get back into cycling while nursing an injury. “I thought, ‘Done! I’m recovered. I’ll never need an e-bike again!” she says.

Then, in 2016, she was diagnosed with cancer and after finishing chemo, she was left with bouts of bone-crushing fatigue. “I bought another e-bike, a Blix from the shop since Sarah was selling them by this point. It was still heavy—54 pounds—but it had gears and a screen that shows battery and speed, as well as a basket and a rack on the back,” she says.

She used it to ride with all three of her kids at the Pedaler’s Jamboree, a bicycle and music festival in Missouri and realized what an equalizer it was. “We could all ride together. It was really fun,” Gentle says.

These days she’s back on her regular Niner, but she hung onto the e-bike. “Since then, a girlfriend borrowed it after breaking her arm. And now my sister rides it—she hasn’t ridden bikes since she was a little kid and she’s out of shape and has bad ankles and knees, but the two of us can go 20 miles together. She knew how much I loved biking and now she can be part of that,” Gentle says.

“E-bikes are equalizers. All my friends ride bikes, so injury or illness may keep us from each other. But e-bikes bring us back,” she says. “E-bikes are about community.”

pedal assist e bikes helping injured athletes ride again, charlie hegedus
Charlie Hegedus

Charlie Hegedus, 65, of Allentown, Pennsylvania

E-bike: Specialized Turbo Creo

Charlie Hegedus was a 4:20 miler in high school. But chronic Achilles tendonitis sidelined his competitive dreams by the time he was 19. So, he followed the footsteps of many a hobbled runner and bought a bike.

“The thing that amazed me about cycling at the time is you could go out and do a good training session and ride long and hard and not kill your joints,” Hegedus says.

And train hard and go long he did. He rode across the country in his 20s, conquered competitive group rides in his 30s and 40s, and in his 50s took on a duathlon challenge at the prompting of his also competitive 25-year-old son.

“Tony [my son] was a really good runner. I had not been running, but was having a good year on the bike, so I figured I could train the run conservatively,” he says. “I ran the first 5K in 21 [minutes], did really well on the bike, but my Achilles seized up—then eventually blew up to the side of softballs—so I could barely walk, but got through the second run. Even with all that, my overall time was the same as my son’s and I came in third or fourth in my age group. It sparked the competitive side of me.”

In 2010, Hegedus got elective Achilles release surgery. It didn’t go well. He never regained the ability to rise up on the balls of his feet and he walks with a limp. He can still ride, though, and with persistence was able to hang on in the fast group lunch rides and longer weekend rides after about a year and a half.

Then, six years ago, a new job with a two-hour daily commute hamstrung his riding, leaving him to an hour on the trainer in the evenings. When he recently retired and had the time to rejoin his friends, he found himself getting dropped. His friends said they didn’t mind. But he did.

Now in his mid-60s, Hegedus wasn’t confident there’d be a comeback. But he started thinking about an e-bike and with the encouragement of some friends, tried them out, eventually landing on the Specialized Turbo Creo.

“I test rode it up the steep hills in Manayunk [home of the infamous “wall”] and was like, ‘This is the one.’ I’m a frugal person and putting out that money [most start at $6,000] was a bit of a shock, but one of the big things I love about riding is socializing—70 to 80 percent of my friends are cyclists and 90 percent of the socializing we do is on bike. I knew this bike would enable that for me,” he says.

That proved to be true. He rides with friends two to three days a week. He just adjusts the power output according to how hard he wants, or is able to, work. He’ll even join the uber competitive Sunday Derby outside of Trexlertown, Pennsylvania near his home—he just won’t get in the rotation at the front.

“The people at the front are there to race, so someone with an e-bike could possibly change that dynamic and I don’t want to intrude on that,” he says. “But otherwise, now when my fast friends want to go on a ride, I have no concerns at all.”

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Selene Yeager
“The Fit Chick”
Selene Yeager is a top-selling professional health and fitness writer who lives what she writes as a NASM certified personal trainer, USA Cycling certified coach, Pn1 certified nutrition coach, pro licensed off road racer, and All-American Ironman triathlete.