It's not every day you wake up to a cow mooing in your hotel lobby. Or snuggle into your sleeping bag beside a herd of wild camels. Or drift off to sleep in a birch forest under the watchful eyes of three former agents of the KGB.
But when participating on World Ride '95, a 13,000-mile cycling expedition, you come to expect the unexpected. Just ask David Cornelsen of Huntington Beach.
Cornelsen, a 43-year-old social worker, is one of six core riders--four men and two women, all Americans--participating in World Ride '95, which began March 17 in Atlanta and--after circumnavigating the globe--is scheduled to finish Nov. 18 in Washington, D.C.
Participants, most of whom are physically disabled, ride an average of 55 miles per day, from dawn to dusk, for eight months. Along with the core riders, nearly 200 able-bodied and disabled athletes have taken part in various stages of the route, which winds through the United States, Ireland, England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Poland, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China and Japan.
The riders, who arrive via jetliner in Los Angeles on Thursday after 10 days in Japan, seek to promote the abilities of disabled people around the world. A bevy of international sponsors have put up a total of $4 million in expense money to see that that happens.
Cornelsen, a paraplegic who rides a three-wheeled, hand-powered cycle, says he was initially attracted to World Ride because "I thought it would be an amazing adventure." As his diary shows, it has become that and more.
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Day 171. Gobi Desert: Another exhausting day. Crossing the Gobi is the hardest cycling I've ever done. Several stage riders have gotten sick. All the men are looking haggard now with six days of growth on our faces, most of it gray . . .
Eight years ago, Cornelsen was a doctoral candidate in social work at the University of Pennsylvania. He had just accepted a teaching position at USC and, ever the athlete, was making plans to backpack the John Muir Trail through the eastern Sierra.
His girlfriend at the time invited him to a Fourth of July party in Baja California. Just outside Mexicali, the driver of the car they were in tried to overtake another vehicle but crashed into the median. Cornelsen, who was sitting in the back seat and wearing a safety belt, jackknifed, breaking his back. He didn't receive medical attention for 19 hours.
His parents, who were vacationing in London, rushed to the San Diego hospital where Cornelsen had been airlifted. He hadn't suffered a single scratch or bruise but was paralyzed from the waist down.
He completed his dissertation on a hospital gurney, flew to Pennsylvania, received his doctorate on schedule and made the phone call his parents will never forget: Mom, Dad? Hi. This is your son, Dr. Cornelsen, calling . . .
He kept pace athletically too, winning the wheelchair division at the 1991 San Francisco Marathon and setting records for speed (30.5 m.p.h.) and distance (236 miles in one day) in hand-powered cycling contests. He once cycled across the United States in a little more than 18 days.
World Ride '95 seemed to be Cornelsen's calling. The event, developed by the same people who helped 12 mentally disabled athletes ascend Africa's highest peak five years ago in the Mt. Kilimanjaro Confidence Climb, promised to be grueling, perhaps even dangerous considering the political instability and remoteness of parts of the route. But the lure of adventure--and the prospect of a passport filled with stamps from exotic places--wasn't something he wanted to let slip by.
"I like traveling, but in a wheelchair, there's a lot more to consider," Cornelsen said in a telephone interview last week from Omiyacho, Japan. "With this, [race organizers] planned the whole thing. All I had to do was get in and ride."
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Day 175. \o7 Jingjiang, China. Perhaps our most frustrating and discouraging day of World Ride for me. Slept in our tents to new depths of unconsciousness. Cycling back to our mud village, the breakfast we ate was as bad as the roads. I ate a half-dozen hard-boiled eggs and passed on the pickled stuff, whatever it was . . . \f7
World Ride '95 started smoothly enough. Honorary chairman Greg LeMond, three-time champion of the Tour de France, was in Atlanta to kick off the journey in March. Participants battled spring storms as they rolled north to Washington, D.C., then on to Boston, where they boarded a flight to Ireland.
In what would be the first of many meetings with dignitaries, riders were invited to dine with U.S. ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith. The ride through Western Europe became almost cushy. Cornelsen gained several pounds thanks to the abundance of French pastries and fine cuisine.
But as World Ride rolled east, conditions became progressively harsher--and infinitely more interesting.
