Originally, the suffering and courage of others inspired Susan Silberman to participate in the six-day, 500-mile AIDS Ride from the Twin Cities to Chicago.
It was 1996 and Silberman was a 28-year-old fitness instructor living in the Lakeview neighborhood. She didn’t personally know anyone with HIV or AIDS, but the combination of the challenge and the cause captured her imagination as it does for tens of thousands of other participants in what is now five such events held nationwide.
Even fitness instructors have to train for the particular demands of the ride, and on June 2 of that year she headed out with a group for one of the regular 40-mile prep rides. She was northbound on Elston Avenue when a drunken driver in a pickup truck over-steered turning from Irving Park Road and crashed hard into her.
She was hospitalized in an intensive care unit for five weeks and underwent eight surgeries, including the amputation of the lower half of her shattered, gangrenous left leg. From her recovery bed she wrote a letter of encouragement to riders to be read at the opening ceremonies; at the closing ceremonies, leaders announced to the group that Silberman just had made the unlikely vow to ride with them the following year.
Several months later, fitted with a prosthesis, she took her first tentative steps in rehab and nearly passed out from the pain, she said. She wasn’t able to get on a bicycle again until May 1997, when she took her first slow ride around the neighborhood in Wilmette where she had gone to live with an aunt and uncle while she recuperated.
She then moved to San Diego to train full time, grinding out 200-mile weeks. And on July 7, she rode out of Minneapolis in a pack of more than 1,600 participants, her suffering and courage now the inspiration to others.
A measure of how difficult this really was is that she ended up in a hospital after the first day of the ride, her damaged leg severely swollen. Doctors wouldn’t let her back on her bike for two days, so she helped out the crew that drives ahead of the pack to set up tent cities, water stations and the other support facilities.
These multiday charity rides began in California in 1994. They require participants to raise substantial pledges–$2,300 is the minimum for this year’s Twin Cities to Chicago ride July 6-11–to cover costs and a donation to agencies that provide HIV/AIDS-related services.
And though gay organizations have criticized several AIDS Rides elsewhere for excessive overhead, the local ride (call 773-880-8812 for details) has “an excellent reputation and is highly respected,” according to gay activist Rick Garcia, director of the Illinois Federation of Human Rights.
“Susan’s spirit and determination kept people pedaling when they felt they couldn’t ride any further,” said local recruitment manager John Haley. Silberman spoke from a campground stage on the last night of the 1997 ride. “She was crying and so was every rider and crew member present,” Haley said. “She challenged everyone to keep doing something to fight against AIDS.”
She swore then that in 1998 she would not only complete Twin Cities to Chicago–thus finishing the project so cruelly interrupted by the drunken driver–but she would also complete the four other AIDS Rides. This will require her to cover 2,255 miles in 27 days of cycling, a veritable Tour de USA.
She has since been training more or less full time, living off savings and insurance, and will begin the first segment of her odyssey Sunday when she rolls out of San Francisco on a 575-mile route to Los Angeles.
The drunken driver “took my leg from me and took my time from me,” she said. “I lost a lot. But, as odd as it sounds, I’ve gained much more.”
An opportunity, for one thing, to use her indomitable will to call attention to the continued necessity of funding care for those living with HIV and AIDS, a number of whom she now counts as friends. And a chance to demonstrate, as she put it, that “disabled does not mean unable.”
“There’s nothing I cannot do because I wear a prosthetic leg,” she said. “I will continue to prove that.”
Break a spoke, Susan.
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MORE ON THE INTERNET: Speaking of physical challenges, find up-to-date marathon-training progress reports on me and other members of the For Once In Our Lives Society (including a 1998 AIDS Rider) at chicago.tribune.com/go/fools
