Pedaler with Parkinson’s says doing good makes him healthier

Alf Todd is 65 and has lived with Parkinson’s disease for a decade. Ask him why he plans to cycle the length of Vancouver Island, and he replies with a hard truth: “I’m not getting any better.”

That’s the reality of the degenerative disorder. There’s no cure.

Here’s another truth, though: Riding with Parky’s Pedalers, doing good for others, makes the Victoria man healthier. “I feel best, physically, when I’m helping someone else.”

He means that literally, not figuratively. Doing good promotes the flow of a brain chemical called dopamine, he says. It’s the absence of dopamine that causes the problems people with Parkinson’s have with movement.

So, yes, on Monday morning, Todd and the rest of the pedalers will saddle up in Port Hardy for Shakin’ The Rock, a five-day ride to Victoria. It’s a fundraiser for two agencies, the Parkinson’s Society of B.C. and Headway, the Victoria Epilepsy and Parkinson’s Centre.

“There are 14 riders, including six with Parkinson’s, which I think is awesome,” he says. His 11-yearold grandson is riding, too.

Todd acknowledges that Parkinson’s complicates what is already a difficult ride. “You’ve got to manage your meds very cautiously.” They’ll take it fairly easy, he says, the longest leg of the journey being around 120 kilometres. (Pause to consider whether you would think a hilly 120-km ride to be “fairly easy” at any age and at the peak of your health.)

Long-distance cycling is not new to Todd. He rode from Victoria to San Francisco with his 10year-old son in 1987, repeated the journey with another son four years later, then did the same trip with daughter in 2001.

That was before Parkinson’s, though. It was in 2007 that he noticed something was wrong. “My body was getting stiff. I couldn’t figure out what was going on.”

It was a hard diagnosis for an active man. It meant an end to his job at Island Farms, where he had worked for more than 30 years. Yet staying active and having a positive attitude are the best way of dealing with it, he says. “We can sit around and feel sorry for ourselves, have a pity party, or we can get off our duffs.”

Which is what he did: In 2012, Alf led yet another 1,600-kilometre San Francisco ride, this one for Parky’s Pedalers.

“Cycling is one of the best things for Parkinson’s,” he says. “There are many days where I can barely walk, but I can still get on my bike.”

On Thursday, Todd spoke to Headway’s golf tournament at Olympic View. He was funny and disarming, making jokes about the carpets and shoe leather he shuffles through, and about going to a convention of shaking Parkies (his term) that measured 4.3 on the Richter scale.

The things is, there was no disguising the fact that Parkinson’s is hard, that climbing on a bike to ride the Island is hard, that choosing to be positive in such circumstances takes inner strength.

A strong Christian, Todd quotes Proverbs: “A merry heart does good, like medicine/But a broken spirit dries the bones.”

For more, go to shakintherock.org.

Three years ago, I wrote about Lt. Col. Paul Paone, the oldest Canadian soldier in Afghanistan, as he prepared to fly home to Victoria.

Today, he’s back overseas — on two wheels. Now 62 and retired from the military, Paone is among 144 cyclists, including close to 20 from Vancouver Island, who were to set out this morning on a 580-kilometre ride from London, England, to the Canadian memorial at Vimy, France.

The battlefields ride is a fundraiser for Wounded Warriors Canada, a veterans’ charity that began after an Afghan suicide bomber on — here’s irony — a bicycle killed four Canadian soldiers and injured several other people, military and civilians alike, in 2006. Today, Wounded Warriors focuses on mental health, and benefits first responders as well as veterans.

Paone will ride with his wife, Dr. Margaret Sherwood. Also in the group is Shari Lukens, a former Colwood councillor and the Conservative candidate in Esquimalt-Saanich-Sooke in the 2015 federal election.

Their ride will take them through what reads like a Canadian history book — Ypres, Passchendaele, the Somme — before concluding at Vimy Ridge on June 16.

Why do it? Paone quotes an old army buddy: “Because it’s a damn fine good thing to do.”

More info at woundedwarriors.ca.