The glue that has been missing to keep people contributing of their time has been money. If it hadn’t been for the example of pertinacity that my car wreck and subsequent rehabilitation taught me, I would’ve thought it was a great idea and just let it fizzle away after a few years as well. Overcoming the helplessness caused by a two month coma, clinical death and right side paralysis didn’t happen overnight, in a few days or a few weeks, even a few years. It took well over a decade before people stopped wondering what was wrong with me. It took almost 2 decades before people started seeing me as one of the healthier people they know.

 

 

 

 

From the days when my every move was fraught with tremor and uncertainty as I drooled on myself and  couldn’t put on a pair of socks, tie my shoes, fasten buttons, or be trusted to feed myself with a fork, I had a virtual mountain of nonstop challenge between myself and the person I wanted to be. As my long torturous rehabilitation progressed, like a toddler and then a young child, I had to learn how to go to the bathroom by myself, step over curbs, open doors with a key, sign my own name (on checks since that was how most people used to buy things) and for my stuttering to be heard above a whisper.

While people seemed happy to accept me in a wheelchair, I could not accept myself in that way. All the many self-improvement books that I surrounded myself with convinced me that if I kept making little improvements every day there would be the large reward of optimal health at the end. Unbeknownst to me, the road to such wellness, a road that has no end, was a very, very long one.

As the unending road that it is, it taught me that to reach any goal, one must be consistent and work towards its attainment each and every day. And that is the approach I have taken with the National Bicycle Greenway. As volunteers come and go, I just keep working it. It is for that reason that the story of the NBG is really the story of Martin Krieg as embarrassing as that is to say.. The above said, here is the story I run at BikeRoute.com.

I am Martin Krieg, a business school graduate of Cal State University Hayward and former accountant. I have crossed the country twice on a bicycle after first rehabilitating myself from paralysis, clinical death and a seven week coma as a result of a car wreck.

In 1979, I rode across America on a standard upright bicycle. On my second trip across America in 1986 I rode a recumbent bike and organized media events, public speaking and fund raising for the National Head Injury Foundation. That ride reached 40 million people amongst my newspaper, public speaking and TV and radio appearances. Upon its completion, to spread the word for the interconnected network of safe bikeable roads and paths called the National Bicycle Greenway (NBG) (which became a nonprofit in 1993) I foresaw after my ride ended in Boston, from 1987 to 1994, I published 60,000 Cycle America Regional Directories in four different parts of California.

Then, in 1994, WRS Publishing published the book I had written and rewritten for 14 years. Called Awake Again (the book is highly regarded as a story and as a literary work, of which  there are many testimonials – here are a few – sample or buy the E-Book HERE), it shows how I turned my long rehabilitation and subsequent bike rides, into the same game I am playing now to make the NBG real.

For the next five years, I alternated between traveling the country to promote my book and learning the excitement of the all new World Wide Web as I built the first web sites for well over a hundred small and large bike companies. In 1997, I began a campaign to send hundreds of cyclists to Washington, DC. It started in Santa Cruz, CA with two Swing for NBG events and a Lighthouse Party send off.

All of which ended in the Nation’s Capitol with a widely known bike celebration called Cycle America 2000. We brought that excitement back to the West Coast with two huge cross country relay rides both of which ended in the Surf City with enormous Festivals in 2002 and in 2003. During this time, I also personally inspired, coached and consulted on over a dozen other successful transcontinental bikes  rides.

From Palo Alto, CA, starting in 2003, we began producing the annual National Mayors’ Ride and I began the Mountain Movers Podcast series. In addition, I also finished How to Bike America and began working on a business plan for the NBG as well as what would amount to the sequel for “Awake Again’ called “How America can Bike and Grow Rich, The National Bicycle Greenway Manifesto”.

I took the 2007 Mayors’ Ride season off to devise a fully interactive Google mapping system that runs like a game while building community to let users calculate, request, plan, utilize, store, display and vote on bike routes. Complications with my internet service provider in 2009, however, forced me to regroup after the scores of on-line maps users had placed at BikeRoute.com vanished. Testimonials and more info about this mapping API.

NBG Accomplishments
1987-2013

Martin Krieg’s
National Bicycle Greenway
Media Journey
1986-2012

By the time I discovered that my ISP was not going to be able to deliver the mapping product my small team and I had devised, and Google then introduced bike mapping, I was too far along with the TransAm ride I was building to promote our new maps – I was unable to turn around. In the summer of 2009, then, with the economy crashing all around me as a plethora of sponsorships I had worked to develop all dried up, I did a scaled down version in which I only rode 1000 miles before I had to end the ride. In what now amounts to a test run because of all the unprecedented, horrific weather, I rode the Eagle HiWheel, the only one like it in active use in the world,  from San Francisco to Salt Lake City.

 

In 2010, my next attempt to cross the USA on the amazing Eagle was put on hold by a car that turned left in front of me.

 

After a 16-month foray into the world of internal combustion (I remained Car-Free) looking for ways to get the 15-person Busycle towed across America as part of my ride (this difficult period is explained in “The Oil in our Food and Everything Else”) – I married an Irish woman, and went to Ireland where we had a boy named Cayo. From there, I staged the 2011, 2013 and 2014 Mayors’ Rides, met with the president of Ireland and finished my book, “How America Can Bike and Grow Rich, the National Bicycle Greenway in Action“.

Here I am with outgoing Dublin, IRL Mayor, Andrew Montague and Councilor Ciarán Cuffe, a fellow TransAm cycling vet who, along with Andrew, read and much enjoyed my book, “Awake Again, all the Way Back from Head Injury“. When I interviewed Andrew, he was arguably the most powerful, results getting activist in the world per this podcast. HERE is the Tour of Dublin I did on the  HiWheel Eagle with Andrew and Ciaran

In 2014, the Google mapping platform matured enough for us to be able to apply the decade of Mayors’ Ride research our NBG Scouts had supplied to create the coast-to-coast route that will, in time, give way to the perfect world  National Bicycle Greenway we have long foreseen.

In the Fall of 2017, I moved to Indianapolis, the Greenway Capital of America, FOR THIS REASON – where I wrote:  “How Indianapolis Built America, and, How it will rebuild it with the National Bicycle Greenway”. Besides immersing myself in the amazing history of this city as I wrote this book, I also created this 5-minute video Virtual Tour of the Indianapolis Cultural Trail. HERE, also, is the podcast I did with its amazing CEO, Karen Haley!

Here is our plan:

To Buy it at Amazon

Follow my Progress

at Substack

Here are the Bike books I have written-