Chicago Tribune - July 29, 2002
Joshua Howes, Tribune staff reporter

"Bill told me before he went into the coma, 'I'm not a gambling man, if it's less than 50 percent, don't do anything heroic,' " Lenig said last week, recounting his tale from a tent in Westfield, Wis., site of Night Three on the six-day Minneapolis-to-Chicago Heartland AIDS Ride. "We were nowhere near 50-50. I knew I had to let him go."

Bill's death was an end for Lenig, biting, piteous and tragic, but also a beginning, for in the winter of his grief he discovered the Heartland Ride, which would be the sprig of his renewal.

"I've never felt so healthy as I do now," Lenig said, 287 miles of heat, wind and road behind him, 244 miles yet to go. "I started training in October, and I've lost 40 pounds, I've quit smoking, I've gone from 12 to 8 percent body fat. My HIV viral count is undetectable. This ride has changed my life."

Muscle-cramping. Foot-massaging. Life-changing. They're the common sights and sentiment attending this bicycle journey, which finished at Montrose Harbor on Saturday, a day after the announcement that the ride will not be staged next year.

Also spotted along the route were ice packs, medivacs and bike tracks; riders in drag, staffers in heels, and onlookers in togas; old women wiping their brows, young women feeding IVs to older men, and some very hot young thangs clothed neck-to-ankle in red-and-silver sequin dresses, riding bikes in the 95-degree heat.

Welcome to the Mobile City, population: 1,500, location: Chicago or bust. In the parking lot you'll find the vans that sweep up distressed riders; each one bears a slogan, ranging from the inspiring ("Keep Yo Booty Movin'!") to punful ("Spokewomen Rock!") to somewhat bewildering ("Superduck says Drink and Pee!"). The kitchen is well-stocked: 7,839 Power Bars, 15,000 gallons of Gatorade and 784 Port-a-Potties for those who heed Superduck's instructions. There is a hospital of three tents, with 30 medical personnel, 15 massage therapists and 3,260 bottles of aspirin. For entertainment there is a band, a talent show, and on Night Five a chain-link fence on concrete over which some staff are playing volleyball ("prison ball," they call it, given the paucity of their court).

The Mobile City exists because 1,190 riders, ages 17 to 73, have each raised at least $2,500 to put their bodies through 531 miles of torture. The sense of spirit is staggering.

"Everybody supports everybody. Everybody is so positive, so nice, so courteous. Even when they're struggling up the hills or in the wind, there's always a smile on somebody's face," said Nathan Statz, who is riding with his brother Nick for their mother, who contracted HIV from a blood transfusion in 1983.

Birth of an advocate

Nick said that growing up in Braynard, Minn., where in 1993 his mother became one of the first heterosexual women in Crow Wing County to acknowledge being HIV-positive, he found himself ostracized and belittled. He received phone calls from anonymous fellow students at his high school saying things like, "We know about your Mom, and you're not gonna have any friends." The attacks prompted his mother to give a speech at Nick's high school, after which fellow students embraced and supported him. That speech began his mother's career as an AIDS awareness advocate in the central Minnesota area, work she still continues today between AIDS-related hospital stays and periods of illness.

And when the Mobile City moves, it brings its spirit with it. In the tiny Wisconsin hamlet of Strum, population 1,000, residents set an unofficial record for impromptu support by staging 14 lemonade stands in as many city blocks.

Tony Cline, a 67-year-old professor of sociology making his second AIDS Ride, compared the experience to a medieval Christian pilgrimage or the modern Muslim hajj to Mecca. "There is the destination, the communality of purpose, the commitment to a cause, and the same rapid emergence of a community," he said. "It would make a fascinating sociological study."

Without that sense of community, many riders said they would never make it. Reports, in the Tribune and elsewhere, that the AIDS Rides are little more than roving charity balls for do-gooders to feel good about themselves, ignore just how gosh-darn difficult the trek really is.

"Even for an experienced rider like myself," said Nathan Statz, an avid cyclist, "doing a century [100 miles in a day] is so hard, that if it wasn't for the crew, I don't know if I'd make it."

But these are dedicated folk. Some riders displayed dizzying levels of devotion. Kevin Casey flew in from Salt Lake City, was struck by a car on the first day, broke his collarbone, and stuck around on crew unloading packages, begging doctors to let him ride again (they refused). Brian Solomon became a living legend around the Mobile City for pulling behind his bike a 25-pound baby carriage (for comparison, the average mountain bike weights about 20 pounds). Solomon said the carriage was a reminder of AIDS orphans in Africa.

Another rider whom everybody in Mobile City seemed to know is Gigi Tolson, a soft-spoken African-American woman who wore on her helmet photographs of the many friends she has lost to AIDS. She said the photos served both to help her over the highest hills -- literal and figurative -- and to raise awareness of the blight that HIV has cast on the African-American community.

"It's hard, it's so hard, where I come from the people don't really understand the disease," Tolson said, crouched in the shade of a semi-trailer in Elkhorn Wis., tears filling her eyes. "They wait too long to be tested, until it's too late."

Protect her son

Tolson lived most of her life on the South Side of Chicago. In the early 1990s she watched AIDS invade her community and take away three of her closest friends. She said she left Chicago for Libertyville in 1995 to protect her teenage son from gangs and the spread of HIV.

Tolson said that raising money for the Heartland Ride only made her more painfully aware of how many African-Americans refuse to acknowledge the problem of AIDS. Of her 30 pledges, only three were African-American.

"People change the subject, literally," Tolson said of African-Americans she asked for donations. Beginning to cry again, she said she hoped to organize AIDS riders to participate in next year's Bud Billiken parade, to galvanize the community and encourage others to make the Heartland Ride next year.

"Everybody should experience something like this, human kindness to this degree," she said.

The pity is that Tolson's mission may be moot, because the Heartland event's promoter and beneficiaries announced late Friday night that this year's Heartland AIDS Ride will be the last. The beneficiaries cited lagging participation and diminishing financial returns as determinative in their decision.

At the Mobile City's dining pavilion, the announcement elicited a groan and more than a few tears, even from some of the decision-makers.

"Personally I'm as saddened as anybody," said Gretchen Harris, a rider in this year's event as well as the co-chair of the Board of Directors at Hope House of St. Croix Valley, a Minnesota beneficiary. "But as a board member, it was an economic decision we had to make."

Already on Saturday at the closing ceremonies, Courtney Reid, the president of AIDS Cycle Inc., an umbrella organization for the seven Illinois charities involved in this year's Heartland Ride, was floating a proposal to stage a 3- or 4-day one-state ride near Chicago next year.

"All I know is, I hope they can work it out," said Dale Lenig about the uncertainty. "Because I want to ride the route again."

He then reiterated some of the good things that have come to him with the Heartland Ride, alongside his better health -- new friends, more self-confidence, the sympathy of co-workers who found out for the first time that he was HIV-positive, and a new companion, who he spotted wearing an AIDS Ride T-shirt in an online photo.

Lenig sighed. "None of the things that make up my life today would be possible without this ride."

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