Parallel Lines: Eric Wang

Author's note: Parallel Lines is a series about adaptive athletes focused on gear, opportunities and access. Throughout the series, I’ll be using both the phrases "para athlete" and "adaptive athlete," largely based on how the rider refers to themselves, though there IS a difference between the two.

It’s a bit of a square-rectangle situation: all adaptive athletes are para athletes, but not all para athletes are adaptive athletes. For example, someone with cerebral palsy may use the same gear as an able-bodied rider, even as their neurological disorder might prevent them from pedaling all day or from tackling high-exertion terrain on a summer day due to their body’s heat intolerance.

As a prefix, “para," means "beside / alongside of / beyond," which is exactly how each of the riders featured in this series exist: beside, along with, and often beyond their able-bodied counterparts, as this series will show.

Eric Wang is a seasoned cyclist. “I started bike touring between seventh and eighth grade,” he says of his start to long-distance riding. “But my biggest racing discipline was criteriums. I was the guy that would either go a hundred miles or a hundred yards at a sprint.” Wang also dabbled in mountain biking, racing cross-country through events hosted by the then-titled National Off Road Bicycle Association, or NORBA, because, well, why not?

As his daughter got into rock climbing, however, Wang decided to join her in pursuing the sport as a new adventure. “I hung up the bike and didn’t go back for ten years,” Wang says. “I got hooked; and I wanted to get good enough at climbing that I could really have fun.”

But when the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic hit, Wang got back in the saddle. “In Nevada, lockdowns are actually great because you just don’t go indoors. So I spent the whole pandemic rock climbing, and got back into cycling and into gravel riding.”

Then, two years ago, after most pandemic restrictions were lifted and Wang felt life slowly returning to some semblance of normal, he took a fifty-foot fall while climbing that changed everything. “I’m a T12 spinal cord injury, so paralyzed from the belly button down.” Wang explains. “I’m what’s called an incomplete paraplegic. I can’t stand or walk but I can move my legs - and I have full core, which is lucky, because I can do a lot of sports that require sitting upright.”

Wang says that, mentally and emotionally, his recovery was tough. “I was very depressed. When you go through these injuries, you go from being super able bodied to disabled in an instant. It's not a slow decline: you just wake up one day and can't do anything. Everything you are, your whole rock climbing community, your whole cycling community, it’s all gone. All your friends are gone. I mean, they're still coming by to say hello, but you can't do anything with them.”

Ten weeks into his physical recovery, however, someone at Wang’s hospital told him about a community day that the City of Reno and the nonprofit High Fives Foundation were co-hosting at Sky Tavern , a volunteer-run ski resort and mountain bike park on the Mt. Rose Highway. There would be a whole host of adaptive equipment to demo and different adaptive sports to try out, and they encouraged Wang to give it a go.

Wang agreed to show up, but wasn’t necessarily invested. “When you’re that close out from your injury, your focus is ‘I’m going to beat the odds.’ Your doctors tell you one percent chance of walking again, so you’re like, ‘That’s not zero,’ and you go to physical therapy four days a week and spend all your time trying to learn to walk again.”

It wasn’t until Wang arrived at the event and saw another paraplegic drive himself up, get himself out of his own van, pull his mountain bike out by himself, and head to the trails, solo, that Wang says things really clicked. “I had never interacted with a quadriplegic or paraplegic in my life,” he admits, “And just seeing this quadriplegic do all this stuff was amazing. I couldn’t believe it was possible.”

And while it took Wang some time to fully let go of his focus on walking, in favor of leaning into adaptive sports, the rest of that day at Sky Tavern did leave a lasting impact. “I tried one or two different bikes, I did the whole adaptive trail top to bottom, and loved it.” Wang says he remembers thinking: “Wow. Life isn’t over.”

His introduction to the High Fives Foundation that day also ended up being pivotal: “I did a second bike day, a third bike day, and it just snowballed from there.” Wang said through the High Fives Foundation, he tried his first Bowhead adaptive bike, the Reach - though he quickly decided he couldn’t let himself get one: “It’s a very nice bike, but it’s got so much power - it’s like a 3,000 watt motor - that I was like ‘I’m going to kill myself. I don’t have enough skill to control this thing.’”

So Wang started hunting for a bike more suited to his riding style. “I tried the Bowhead Rogue. I rented it for months, but I found that I just don’t like the front wheel drive, because if you go up steep hills, it just spins out.” Wang says the wider wheelbase, at 36 inches, also made it impossible to take on some singletrack trails.

That led Wang to his current rig, the Bowhead RX, which he says he acquired with support from the High Fives foundation. “I’ve put a thousand miles on it since last August,” Wang says, proof that its rear-wheel drive and narrower wheel base of 29 inches have indeed been game-changers. “That’s the same as a mountain bike handlebar,” Wang offers as a comparison. “So if your handlebars fit, my bike will go.”

Of course, trail width is only a part of the equation; walk-arounds, rock features, and bridges (or the lack thereof) also pose problems for Wang and his adaptive bike, though that hasn’t stopped him from exploring. “I’m a bit of a risk-taker, in some ways,” Wang laughs. “I ride by myself a lot, which is unusual, but I’ve learned to independently load and unload my bike. And I literally carry knee pads and a rope because, you know, if I fall off the trail, I have to be able to drag this ninety pound bike back up, or or, if I get to any hike-a-bike sections, I’ll get out and crawl and pull the bike up behind.”

Wang acknowledges that some folks think that sort of behavior and attitude is a bit nuts. “But I don’t mind - I’m doing a ride where I have to get out for, what? Ten feet of the whole thing?” He says that having the pads and rope allow him to continue teasing out trails that work for him and his rig, and that he’d rather be able to continue doing so than not. “The bike allows me access to the places I want to go, to do the things I love: mountain biking, sure, but also just hanging out with friends, going hiking with friends - able-bodied friends.”

And in that way, Wang says his bike has helped him stay connected to the community he was so worried he would lose after injury. “I tell everybody it’s a great time to be disabled. If I got injured ten years ago, it would be totally different. I got injured two years ago and all these things, all these bikes, already existed. Having these e-bikes? This Bowhead? It’s unbelievable.”

Wang explains that the articulation of the bikes is particularly notable when it comes to the gear advances made in recent years. “They’re so narrow because they lean. That’s the hardest part to get used to, but once you do, you’ll never go back. You fall over a lot at the beginning because it’s unstable but unstable just means fast-reacting at speed. It’s agile.”

As a long-time gear nerd, Wang has also made certain upgrades to his bike. “I’ve got carbon tubeless wheels, and I have two sets of wheels - one for gravel, one for mountain biking.” Wang laughs. “I actually have a third set coming that are a bigger diameter. They won’t sell them this way, but I bought a 29” rear that barely fits, because I want to do long gravel races.”

Because he’s interested in pushing his battery’s range to its maximum, which is currently sixty miles a charge, Wang also put a SRAM transmission on his bike. “I just want to make it perfect to be faster, so I think I was the second adaptive bike ever to have the SRAM drivetrain. And it’s great. You can shift under power, which is a big thing for me because I’m constantly in the wrong gear.”

His bike’s capabilities mean Wang is now tackling trails he’s not sure any adaptive rider in the Reno-Tahoe area have tried before. “I’ve been dying to do this very famous trail called the Flume Trail. I’ve ridden it many times when able-bodied, but no adaptive mountain bike has done it. There’s a pinch point that nobody knows whether it’ll go.” Wang says a staircase down at the beginning of the trail means he knows he can’t come back up if he’s forced to turn around. So he’s planning to start from the end of the trail and work his way backwards to see if the pinch - a narrow section between boulders (and on the edge of a cliff with no go-around) - goes.

“I’m also thinking of trying to do the Downieville Downhil l. Which, again, we don’t know if it goes yet. There are two sections I’m worried about. So now I’m telling all my friends that when they do it this year, take notes, you know?” Wang says he knows there’s already an adaptive course at Downieville, but he wants to revisit the trail he loved as a two-wheeled cyclist, for the same reason he wants to tackle the Flume trail: “I don’t want them to be altered. I just want to know if I can do it, you know, the classics.”

Wang’s goals extend well beyond tech and technique.“High Five emphasizes your ‘Alive Day,’ the day you got injured. My second Alive Day was this year and I wanted to see if I could do a century. But I ended up going 112 miles, so now, my sights are on 200.” Wang says achieving his distance goals has a lot to do with strategy and battery management: he has two bikes now, a pedal bike and a hand bike, so he chose a route that looped, allowing him to swap bikes so one could charge while he rode the other.

“Now I’m trying to find a gravel course to do 200 miles, all arms.” Wang says that his ideal loop would be about fifty miles. “That’s about the range I could do safely, full speed, come back, swap batteries, do another. I thought I’d found it, but I did one lap and got killed. It was the hardest fifty miles I’ve ever done. I was like ‘I cannot do that four times!’” he laughs. “So I’m still looking.”

Wang is also heading to multiple distance gravel events this season including SBT Gravel , Rebecca’s Private Idaho , Lassen Gravel Adventure ride and Mammoth Tuff . “I’m a bit worried,” he admits, especially of the SBT race “Going 60 miles is doable, but going 60 miles with 6,000 feet of climbing?” Wang says he’s still deciding how he’ll go about managing batteries and if and how to carry extras.

But the thing that Wang says stays the same between his various types of rides and bike setups? Acceptance and finding common ground. “When you’re in a wheelchair, it’s like you have this infectious disease. Nobody wants to be near you in public. It’s weird. I mean, people are very nice: they open doors for you and get things off shelves, but in general, they don’t want to approach you, they don’t look at you - I mean, little kids stare, but when you say ‘Hello’ their mom’s pull them away. But on your bike? Everybody stops to talk to you. ‘What’s that? Where’d you get it? Is it custom made? How much does it cost?’ The bike somehow breaks down that barrier, or at least offers something to talk about that doesn’t feel as intrusive as just walking up to someone in a wheelchair and saying ‘Why are you in a wheelchair?’”

To follow Wang as he tries for his 200 mile Alive Day challenge, races gravel, and tackles more technical singletrack, you can find him on Instagram at @anothercyclist.