HAMILTON – Looking at Frank Choltco-Devlin today, you wouldn’t know that the long distance biker had overcome a debilitating accident that left him with limited use of his arm, smashed knees, a cracked vertebrae and a number of other injuries. But Devlin has done just that, and he said, if not for the accident, he may have never taken the steps to fulfill his healthy lifestyle.
In January of 1993, Frank was driving home when he had some car trouble. He got out of his car and started looking under the hood when another car slammed into the rear of his, causing major injuries. “I was pretty banged up,” Frank said. “I couldn’t do anything for some time.” Frank explained that his injuries included a bad head injury, a broken collar bone, cracked vertebrae in his neck, knee injuries and a partial loss of use of his left arm.
Frank was hospitalized for a few weeks. “It was a serious accident. The doctors didn’t know what was going to happen or what I would be able to do after the accident. I was really pretty lucky,” he said.
After about eight months of physical therapy, Frank began to recover from the incident. It was then that he decided to take up some form of physical activity. “I took up bicycling, which I hadn’t done in some time,” Frank remembered. “I started out just pedaling the back roads in Madison County, and I’ve been doing it ever since.”
“I had always been involved in real physical jobs, and when I couldn’t do that, I lost a lot of muscle mass,” Frank recalled. “I lost all physical tone, and I thought it would be good to get it back.”
When Frank started out, he said he would travel for five or six miles at a time. “The more I did, the better I felt.” It wasn’t long before Devlin was biking farther and farther. The activity was fun, he said and reminded him of being a kid again.
As Frank became more involved in biking, he decided to start taking part in biking events and activities. The first event he participated in was a fundraiser for leukemia in 2004. The event, held in Lake Tahoe, included a 100-mile ride around the lake. To gear up for the 100-mile event, Frank began training in January, taking regular spinning classes until the weather was nice enough to begin riding outside. The event was held in early June.
