After only 20 minutes of being in Heber City, Dr. Gregory Maassen made just as many friends. 

The Dutch cyclist threw himself into endless conversations with strangers at the Wasatch County Library on the sunny afternoon in mid June. He quizzed one woman outside by asking her which famous actor from the 1960s he was named after — Gregory Peck — and joked with some senior citizens by calling them patrons of the county’s “junior center.” The smile permanently etched on Maassen’s face attracted attention as much as his orange safety vest.

But the biggest conversation starter was Maassen’s e-bike, which had yellow clogs affixed to the back — his “marketing device” — and was outfitted with everything Maassen needed to survive his cross-country trek across the United States. 

Maassen, who lives in Washington, D.C., after immigrating from the Netherlands, began his 5,800-mile journey in West Palm Beach, Florida, in March. He’s headed to Los Angeles, on track to arrive in about five weeks. He made a pit stop in Wasatch County on June 11 after pedaling from Duchesne County on Thursday morning.

“I went through Tabiona Valley, which is beautiful, but I forgot about the serious incline at the end. That is 4,000 feet,” he laughed. 

That’s where his e-bike comes in handy, reaching speeds up to 28 mph. Maassen’s still certainly getting a workout in, burning an average of 2,500 calories per day. His e-bike, meanwhile, consumes four batteries a day and gives him a boost — one comparable to half the power of a Tour de France cyclist.

“When people say that e-biking is cheating, maybe it is, but it’s very good exercise,” Maassen said.

For some, like Maassen, e-biking is an accessible gateway into exercising. It served as a way for him to treat his peripheral neuropathy, an umbrella term for conditions that affect nerves outside of the brain or spinal cord. Maassen is biking across the country to raise awareness about these conditions.

There are many types of peripheral neuropathy and about 30 million Americans live with it, explained Dr. Ahmet Hoke, director of the Merkin Peripheral Neuropathy Research Laboratory at John Hopkins Medicine. 

Some causes of peripheral neuropathy include diabetes, chemotherapy, vitamin deficiency, chronic alcohol use and some antibiotics and medications. 

In Maassen’s case, he was on a hike in South Africa in 2017 when he ran into a nest of ticks and was “inundated” with larvae.

“They were so microscopic, so small, those things that were on my skin, including my derriere,” he said. “My wife had to become a surgeon. I think we counted more than 80.”

Some time after the ticks were removed, Maassen’s body began to burn all over as if he had severe sunburns. His vocal cords began to hurt and it became difficult to speak. He was pushed from doctor to doctor who could not explain his condition. Some chalked it up to mental illness.

“Because of all the neurological stuff that was happening to me, I got those sensations for free. I became very depressed, and I became very anxious about the fact that no one could help me. There you are, this very active, healthy person, and for all I know, I could have been institutionalized,” he said.

Maassen was “bedridden” by the time he was finally referred to Dr. Hoke in 2019, who diagnosed him with peripheral neuropathy. That’s when Hoke told Maassen his condition could be treated with exercise. 

“Gregory had an unusual type of neuropathy. His was that his own immune system literally attacked his nerves after an infection. But that doesn’t continue. It’s not a progressive type of neuropathy. So, once the damage was done, the immune system resets itself, and then, it’s going to take some time for the nerves to regenerate,” Hoke said. “One thing we knew was that if the patients exercise during that time, their recovery is faster and more complete, and that’s what Gregory took to heart.”

Maassen started e-biking. His quality of life was so changed by the exercise that he later came up with the idea to partner with John Hopkins Medicine on a cross-country e-biking tour to raise awareness about peripheral neuropathy, making stops at universities, speaking to the media or simply striking up conversation with strangers.

The hope is that increased awareness leads to increased government funding for peripheral neuropathy research, which Hoke said is “extremely limited” despite the prevalence of the conditions.

Hoke said diabetic peripheral neuropathy is most common, followed by peripheral neuropathies with unknown causes. These idiopathic conditions make up 30% of all peripheral neuropathies.

“We suspect the majority of them have complex genetic mechanisms, either unknown new genes or perhaps subtle mutations in two or three genes that bring it out, so we’ve just started sequencing the whole genome of these patients,” Hoke said.

Sequencing the genome of one patient costs several thousand dollars, he added.

“The diseases that kill people get a lot of attention, and there’s often good advocates for these diseases like Alzheimer’s, ALS, Parkinson’s,” Hoke said. “Peripheral neuropathy doesn’t kill, but it makes people’s lives miserable.”

Maassen did his first e-bike cross-country tour for peripheral neuropathy in 2022. 

He stopped in Wasatch County then, too, eating at Cafe Galleria in Midway, riding the Heber Creeper and biking on U.S. 40 all the way to Sundance and back, just for fun.

This tour, however, he spent much of his weekend biking to Salt Lake City and back to appear on a podcast.

Surprisingly, Maassen has not gotten into traffic accidents or even close calls on either tour. 

This year, his biggest fiascos were in Pueblo, Colorado, where someone tried to steal his bike, and he had a late-night campsite run-in with a skunk hungry for scraps of his chicken dinner.

“When a skunk visits you in the tent, you stay very silent. You don’t move. But it was very cold, and I urgently needed to address the pressure of my bladder,” Maassen said, gravely. “So, there I am. The skunk is chewing on my stuff. I cannot move, and I urgently need to go to the toilet. I was stuck.”

There have also been many cockroaches and “exploding toilets” on the trip. If Maassen cannot find a campground with electricity to charge his e-bike batteries, he spends the night at a motel, preferably cheap, whose owners won’t make a fuss if he brings an e-bike into his room.

He stayed at Mac’s Motel in Heber City over the weekend, a three-star motel that exceeded his low standards.

What has kept Maassen going on this trip has been the prospect of coming to Utah. He called Wasatch County “cycling paradise” on Thursday and was looking forward to taking in the views on a stretch of U.S. 50, “The Loneliest Highway,” between Delta — which he biked to on Monday — and Baker, Nevada.

Beyond the views, the most gratifying part of both tours has been meeting others with peripheral neuropathy and reassuring them that they are not alone. 

“My idea is to inject a lot of humor and hope into this program,” he said. “If you are afflicted with a condition like mine, it’s not always easy to be optimistic.”

Learn more about Maassen’s journey, follow the route and donate to peripheral neuropathy research at ebiketour.org.

The post Cross-country cyclist stops in Wasatch County to raise awareness of peripheral neuropathy appeared first on Park Record.

Kenneth Acklin and his father were on a birding trip in rural Pennsylvania in 1972 when the weather decided to ruin their plans.

The 11-year-old Acklin found himself ducking into a bicycle shop owned by one of his father’s friends instead of catching a glimpse of great blue herons during nesting season. It was pouring rain, and Acklin’s dad went into the office to talk to the owner, leaving his young son alone in the bicycle shop.

So, Acklin did what every preteen boy would do: he let the air out of every single tire in the store.

“We got home, and there were no answering machines, and our phone was ringing. It was the owner of the bike shop,” Acklin said. “I distinctly remember hearing my father say, ‘No, I don’t think he would have done something like that, but let me ask him.’ He asked me, and I said, ‘Oh yeah, I did that.’ My punishment was I had to go to the shop every Saturday for a full month and air up the tires.”

And the rest was history.

Since that fateful day 53 years ago, bicycles have not only become a passion for Acklin but his life’s work. He’s been in the industry ever since, owning his own bicycle shop, servicing pro cycling teams and helping enthusiasts design and customize their rides.

“It was really cool because I got to hang out with real mechanics and listen to grown people swear and yell at bikes. It was a coming of age thing for me,” Acklin remembered about his so-called punishment. “I was building wheels by the time I was 13. I realized I had the mechanical aptitude for it, and I was hired on by the shop.”

Acklin decided he wanted to be an engineer and was accepted to Carnegie Mellon University, but his father wanted him to become a doctor and attend the University of Pittsburgh. Teenage Acklin ultimately decided to pick neither option and moved to Price, where one of his siblings worked at Utah State University Eastern.

There, he obtained his “associate’s degree in nothing” and had a brief stint working in a field other than bicycle mechanics. He quickly realized he was miserable, though.

“I decided that I would rather be happy than wealthy and made the conscious decision in my mid-20s that I was done trying for the American Dream and just wanted to go be happy,” Acklin said.

Acklin worked in bike shops all over the country, including Colorado, California and, of course, Salt Lake City, before landing his current job as the head of Park City Bike & Demo’s service department. Now, he helps Park City’s avid cycling community fix and modify their bikes for Summit County’s summer season, when locals and tourists alike trade in their skis for wheels.

“We met about three years ago at a bike shop, and I knew right away he was definitely the smartest and most experienced man I’ve ever met in the cycling industry,” said the store’s general manager Ian Rugaber. “He’s my biggest mentor in the cycling industry. His experience is unmatched. He is willing and wanting to teach you everything he knows and wants you to pass it on, which I think is a beautiful and super inspiring thing.”

Beau Frentheway, lead technician for Park City Bike & Demo, first met Acklin five years ago when he was working as a pizza cook. Frentheway’s brother worked at the same bike shop as Acklin and suggested he join them.

“I don’t think I could have gotten someone better to teach me what I know,” Frentheway said. “He’s very patient. Instead of just teaching you, he teaches you and then he’ll take the bike apart and make you do what he just taught you. He has a very good way of speaking to people.”

Frentheway called Acklin a role model, both in the cycling industry and in his personal life.

“If we have a problem, he’s opened my mind to be able to see how to fix that problem instead of trying to find a part and ordering it,” Frentheway added. “We can just make a tool that fits it. He’s taught me basically everything I know.”

Rugaber similarly said Acklin was a “genius on a bicycle,” especially when it comes to teaching coworkers and younger generations how to repair and troubleshoot mechanical issues.

“His words are very well calculated, and he knows how to explain things really, really well, and that’s from decades of experience and going through the hard parts and learning the hard way,” he said.

Acklin described bike mechanics as “engineers without the degree,” emphasizing the importance of ingenuity.

“We have to be able to go from a concept to a working prototype in an amount of time that would make most people’s heads spin,” Acklin said. “We have to modify tools to make them work in situations that come up that aren’t covered by what manufacturers anticipate. We have to take designs that were, quite frankly, pretty terrible and make them work. Problem solving is the key to all of this.”

And, of course, Acklin imbues life lessons along the way, often by telling stories about his own life. He has a plethora of bicycle-related memories to share, from getting lost in Wyoming and biking 210 miles on his own to working as a “domestique” or helper for a professional Dutch team to servicing famed Olympian Peter Sagan’s bike when he visited Utah a few years ago.

But his favorite memories, Acklin said, will always involve the camaraderie of working alongside his fellow mechanics.

“There’s absolutely no way I can do what I do in this shop without Beau, Ian and Tomas,” Acklin said, also referring to technician and salesman Tomas Parra-Gomez. “This is truly a very unique situation in this shop. We have insightful and supportive owners, and the skill in the shop is mindboggling. Beau is a younger technician, but he is so far ahead of where I was when I was his age, and Tomas is the same way. If you even watch these guys ride, I feel inadequate. They’re so good, but it’s about how we all work together. It’s more than just our individual talents in the shop. It’s how we work together that makes us really special.”

The post Kenneth Acklin serves Park City with more than 50 years of bike mechanic experience appeared first on Park Record.

The Larry H. Miller Tour of Utah finished up their week-long race in Park City again, hosting Stage 7 at the top of Main Street Sunday afternoon, August 7, 2016. The 78 mile stage featured 7,883 feet of elevation, crossing Empire Pass, with the leading finisher completing the course in just over three hours. (Photos by Tanzi Propst/Park Record and Grayson West)

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