Jason Bryn Olympic Cyclist Newspaper Article

Challenges? Bring ‘em on!

Tucsonan Jason Bryn continues to test his limits as the world around him grows ever darker.

By Tom Beal Arizona Daily Star Tucson, Arizona | Published: 08/29/2004

Jason Bryn clearly sees a cinematic version of his life story. In the first scene, his parents have brought their 2-year-old son from tiny Hagerstown, Ind., to the state’s school for the blind in Indianapolis. The experts tell them that young Jason’s congenital eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa, sentences him to an inactive life spent indoors.

They leave in a huff, saying, “Not our son.”

In scene two, Bryn and his boyhood buddy, Bob Nellis, are in the yard of the Bryn family farm on a dark night.

It is 1980, and the 12-year-old boys are steeped in “Star Wars.” “I have the force,” Bryn tells Nellis and blindfolds himself to convince his friend that he really can’t see at all at night. He begins to jog, then sprint across the lawn, “feeling” the trees, dodging at the last minute.

The force is still with him in the imagined climax to this real-life drama. Bryn is the “stoker” on a tandem bicycle piloted by Glenn Bunselmeyer. They’ve managed to outfox the favored three-tandem team from Spain to remain in contention in the Paralympic road race. Now they have to out-power them.

Both men are up off their seats, sprinting at speeds unreachable by all but a few world-class cyclists. The crowd cheers as they cross the finish line in Athens.

In a few weeks, we’ll know if Bryn’s actual accomplishments will continue to match his dreams. Bryn’s first race in the Paralympic Games, at which he and Bunselmeyer will compete in three events against the world’s fastest teams of sighted pilots and blind stokers, is Sept. 18.

Jason Bryn, Eagle Scout, high school and college basketball star, lawyer and advocate for the blind, began this journey to Athens 36 years ago, refusing to slow down as the world around him has grown increasingly dark.

Mom showed the way

Bryn’s mother, Kathy, was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa (RP) just before she and Bruce Bryn married and settled in the small Indiana town where she had lived her entire life. They had two children, Heather and Jason, and Kathy imagined a quiet life at the farmhouse, holding her babies, unable to work or clean or cook as her eyesight deteriorated.

By 1970, her night blindness, one of the disease’s earliest symptoms, was total. She and Bruce had taken the kids shopping, it was getting late and dark, and all were hungry, so Kathy held out two cookies to the kids in the back seat. One was snatched by a tiny hand.

“Who didn’t get their cookie?” she asked.

“Jason,” replied 3-year-old Heather.

“I knew right then,” Kathy said.

When they arrived home, Kathy sat in the darkened living room as Bruce told Jason to “go to Mommy.” Jason didn’t move. “Finally,” said Kathy, “I couldn’t stand it and said: ‘Jason, come to me.’ ” He ran right to her.

Kathy remembers that evening as a turning point in her life. “When I knew Jason had RP, I went through this huge mental decision to not cop out on my life.”

Today, Kathy’s blindness is nearly total. She has raised two children, Heather, the West Point graduate and U.S. Army major, and Jason, the scholar-athlete, University of Arizona law school grad and specialist in disability law.

When her vision became too poor to keep her job as a dental hygienist, she developed and wrote curricula for a dental-health program in schools and continued to do all her farm chores.

“She went horseback riding and whitewater rafting,” said Jason. “She’s an adventurous woman.”

One summer, the family toured the West in a camper. They were hiking in Utah’s Bryce Canyon, as pavement turned to path to “footpath, then half a footpath with a chain on the side where the cliff fell off.”

Kathy suggested they turn back.

“There are a few times where you reach a limit,” she said, “but not too many.”

It’s a lesson her son has had to learn for himself, sometimes painfully.

It’s a lesson that Jason and wife Donna knew they might have to teach their own children. Little was known about RP when Jason was first diagnosed, but when he and Donna had Megan, now 8, Thomas, 6, and Ellie, 4, they knew there was a 50–50 chance each time of passing on the disease.

A shrinking tunnel

Retinitis pigmentosa is the name given to a group of inherited eye diseases. It causes the degeneration of photoreceptor cells, the rods and the cones in the retina. The legal definition of blindness is when the vision in your better eye reaches 20/200, when you can see at 20 feet what a normally sighted person can see at 200 feet.

Jason’s central vision is currently 20/400, and it’s a narrowing tunnel. His peripheral vision is 3 degrees; normal range is 140 to 180 degrees.

He reads on a big-screen computer with large font, using glasses and sometimes a magnifying glass. By mid-afternoon, his eyes tired and bloodshot, he switches to a voice synthesizer. This is the same routine he used to get through law school’s several hundred pages of reading a day.

He does a pretty good imitation of a guy without a disability.

When you meet him, he walks toward you with an athlete’s grace, extends his hand, looks you right in the eye, smiles and says hello.

He strides confidently down the corridors of his law office or through the rooms of his home, where everything is in place, although with three kids there is always an opportunity for what Jason calls “the Mr. Magoo lifestyle.”

When the dishwasher door was left down one time, he hit it so hard he ripped it out of the cabinet. His shins are perpetually bruised, but it hasn’t slowed him. The kids have gotten really good about not being underfoot.

One of the reasons he uses a cane is simply to warn people that this guy barreling toward them might not see them in time to stop. Slow is not his style.

Before he discovered tandem cycling, he would enter 10K runs, but he had a tendency to run into people. Donna made signs with big letters that said “vision-impaired runner.” Jason hated it and started looking for a different way to satisfy his competitive urge.

On the tandem, his blindness is not a handicap. Jason is freed to simply power the bike with his 6-foot-8, 190-pound frame. He and his pilot ride downhill in a blur, about 400 pounds of dense muscle and lightweight metal, reaching speeds of 60 mph and more.

In time trials, he and Bunselmeyer, his sighted pilot, keep a steady cadence of 90–93 revolutions per minute in the tough gears, hearts pumping at 185–190 beats per minute. Jason’s head is down; his eyes closed. They don’t sprint at the finish because they’ve been, in effect, sprinting the whole time. When the ride is done, Jason often throws up, and his legs always shake uncontrollably. “If they’re not,” he said, “you haven’t gone hard enough.”

He and Bunselmeyer both say they will need the rides of their lives to medal in Athens. They did it in May in Frisco, Texas, to make the team, beating the nearest tandem’s time on a 20-kilometer course by more than two minutes, averaging just over 30 mph.

Jason figures they’ll need to average 32 mph in Athens to win the time trial. They’ve been up to 33 mph with the help of the wind, and their training is designed to peak in September. For comparison, U.S. cyclist Tyler Hamilton took a gold medal on a single bike in Athens this month by averaging 31.2 mph in the time trial.

In the road race, a mix of speed, endurance and strategy, Jason is relying on their strong legs and Bunselmeyer’s experience. “He’s won races 100 different ways,” Jason said.

“Anything can happen,” said Bunselmeyer, 46, a cyclist from the state of Washington who’s been winning national road races for nearly three decades. “We are the underdogs for good reason. The Spanish team has three tandems in the race. It’s like playing basketball one-on-three. We’re going to have to be in the right place at the right time and be somewhat lucky.”

Jason pushes his limits…

…always has, but hitting them has been inevitable.

Early on, it was baseball. Playing on his Little League All Star team, he took a fly ball on the chin as his team played into the twilight.

“He had a huge welt, and one more game coming up,” said his father. “That night he said, ’I wonder if I should play.’ We told him: ’Jason, we don’t know. You have to decide.’ ”

He played, but it was his last baseball game. “I decided I needed a sport with bigger balls,” Jason said.

In high school, he was a receiver on the junior varsity football team, but varsity played its games at night.

Basketball became his game. He was tall and he was quick, said boyhood friend Nellis — a center who could run with the guards.

He played well enough to attract the attention of college scouts and settled on Lake Forest College, a small, private school in Illinois where he could start as a freshman, just in case his playing years were limited. He didn’t tell his coach or his teammates about his RP.

Then, in his junior year, he ran over an opponent — a small kid wearing a jersey the same color as the hardwood floor. Invisible. The young man’s head was split open.

“I went downstairs to the locker room. I’m so upset. Nobody else knew, but I knew what happened was I just didn’t see him. My eyes are getting worse. I punched out two or three lockers.”

He finished the season but that summer wrote a letter to his teammates and his coach, telling them about his eyesight.

“I needed to come to grips with what was going on,” Jason admitted to himself. “If I’m hurting myself and other people, I need to back down.”

His coach persuaded him to stay on the basketball team, taking himself out when the lighting at away games made it difficult to play.

He had already found someone on campus to confide in about his vision. In May, he had begun dating Donna Krapa, a Tucson girl who had selected Lake Forest at the urging of a family friend.

On their first real date at a restaurant, it grew dark, and Jason had to ask Donna to drive back to campus. When Donna served dinner by candlelight, he asked her to turn on the lights so he could see her and his food, and he began explaining his declining vision.

It didn’t faze Donna. She called her mother in Tucson and told her all about Jason — the man she had decided she was going to marry. “You know, honey,” her mother said, “marriage is difficult even without something like that.”

Love, of course, is blind to any such difficulty.

After graduation, Donna moved to Chicago to begin her teaching career and start planning a wedding. Jason went to Kansas City, where he had landed a job as transportation manager for a medical-supply company. They married the next year and settled in Kansas City, where Jason’s decreasing vision had caused him to stop driving and was now causing problems at work. Paperwork was backing up.

He sought out information on the kind of assistive devices he uses today, but his employer, despite recent passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, refused to accommodate him.

“They put him on temporary leave,” said Donna. “He filed for disability, and they totally fought that. It was painful.”

Jason researched the law and filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He lost, which planted the seed for his law career.

At that point, nothing was keeping the couple in Kansas City.

Donna, feeling the need for a wider support group, came to Tucson, and researched bus routes, handicapped transportation and other services for the blind. She persuaded Jason that her home town, where her parents lived, would be a good place to make a new start.

Jason went to law school, often riding the bus with a pack that held their first child, Megan, born in 1995.

The decision to have children, knowing the 50–50 odds of passing on RP, was not difficult, Donna said.

“I actually never really thought twice. I felt like it was something we could deal with. Jason did it. His mom did it. Jason is much more of a person as a result of having to deal with his disease.”

Megan, a pianist, soccer player and third-grade student, does not have RP.

Her brother, Thomas, does.

“I always had this feeling if we had a boy he’d probably have it. When I was pregnant with Thomas, at the time when it said his eyes were developing, I said all these extra prayers,” said Donna.

Shortly after Thomas was weaned, Donna was feeding him a bottle in a darkened room. “He had no clue where the bottle was. I knew. It was like, ’Oh gosh.’ It was hard.” Jason and Donna began to reconsider their plan to have three or four children, but by then she was already pregnant with Ellie, now 4.

Ellie was a clumsy toddler. Just the other day, she ran into the piano and a table, but it’s apparently just exuberance. Her night vision is fine.

Jason, meanwhile, works to make sure that Thomas lives in a more accommodating world. After losing his first real job, he thought about going into counseling or training in blind services but said he didn’t feel cut out for it. He had his own bouts of depression and insecurity.

“I can’t be too close. I can’t figure out my own issues,” he said.

He decided to combine law and advocacy. He came to law school, said one of his professors, Rose Daly-Rooney, with a business plan.

It’s the one he uses today: In addition to plaintiff work, Jason conducts training for companies in disability law, to help them avoid becoming defendants in discrimination lawsuits, to help them recognize the worth of their disabled workers.

“Disabled employees are very loyal,” Jason said, “and if they’re able to work despite their disabilities, you’ve got a win-win situation.”

If law school was especially tough for Jason, it didn’t show, said Daly-Rooney, managing attorney of the employment unit at the Arizona Center for Disability Law in Tucson. He was always prepared for class.

The workload in law school did get to him, said Donna. Everybody loses work in a computer crash now and then, but when something like that happened to Jason it meant extra hours of reconstruction. He was so overwhelmed that he took a month off in his final year, postponing graduation by a semester. He then passed the bar on his first try.

“Law school was, without doubt, the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Jason said.

Jason has always taken on tough tasks and made them look easy, his old friend Nellis said. When he and Jason were kids, Nellis didn’t understand why his friend had a touring bike with three front rings because he never used anything but the toughest gear.

It’s the same attitude that drives his training today.

For the past three years, Jason has been riding hard six mornings a week with his platoon of pilots, a revolving group of accomplished Tucson cyclists who help him train. Then he heads off to his law office, coming home to cook or help with dinner, play with the kids and spend an hour or so with Donna before mounting his backyard trainer to pedal until midnight, leaving about five hours for sleep.

Jason credits Nellis with getting him into the sport after his childhood buddy moved to Tucson in the mid-’90s.

“He had a vision, and he invited me,” said Nellis. “I didn’t have it in me to go that far athletically. I’m a good enthusiast but not a pro rider.”

That began a search for riders with increasing ability and strength that culminated with Bunselmeyer less than a year ago.

Bunselmeyer said he doesn’t regard Jason as a blind rider, partly because his abilities are as good as, or better than, those of other tandem partners he’s had, and partly because Jason doesn’t just shut up and pedal.

“If he doesn’t like something I’m doing, he complains, ’Why are we doing that? Why aren’t we attacking?’ Sometimes I say, ’Look, if you want to drive, you can drive. I’ll get off. It’s all yours.’

“We’re like a married couple sometimes.”

Marriage is a good term to describe the relationship between pilot and stoker. One of Jason’s almost ended tragically.

Andy Duvall, local cycling legend, was Jason’s first partner in Paralympic competition. They did well nationally but found the competition much tougher at the International Paralympic Championships in 2002 at Altenstadt, Germany. They placed 17th in the time trials and were hoping to improve in the road race, held in a blinding rainstorm.

In the middle of a steep descent, their tires hit a manhole cover and the bike went down. Duvall was thrown from the bike and went sliding toward a guardrail head first. He put his hand down, ripping skin but successfully reorienting himself so that his legs took the brunt.

Jason, his shoes still clipped in, went spinning across the tarmac with the bike. The chain whipped his leg and something ripped into his foot down to the bone. He doesn’t remember the impact, but he hit his head somewhere. His helmet came off in four pieces.

Jason was out of the hospital in a week and walking in two weeks. Duvall’s right leg was broken in three places and took a year to fully recover. He now teams with another Tucson blind tandem rider, Scott Smith. That’s the tandem that came in second to Jason and Bunselmeyer in Texas.

After the accident, Jason considered giving up. “I couldn’t see myself continuing with the hell Andy was going through; it was just so traumatic to see him go through that for me.”

He was also feeling pressure in his business and at home from the time he spent on training, not to mention the expense of traveling to events and equipping his bikes. Adding to that, he later found his bike frame had cracked in the crash in Germany. It would cost nearly $10,000 to replace.

But the quest had become too important. Jason had found a role in a sport where his disability didn’t matter, where it couldn’t prevent him from becoming the best in the world.

“It’s about being me, my spiritual, physical and mental health. It’s an outlet, a release, a way to deal with my loss.”

Jason found sponsors for a new bike. Tucson frame-builder Andy Gilmour told Jason he should call Bunselmeyer, another big guy for whom he had built a tandem, to discuss the bike’s features.

Last November, while Bunselmeyer was in town to ride tandem in El Tour de Tucson, they rode together for the first time, but they had already talked about teaming up. Jason had done his research.

“I’d say, for a guy who can’t see, he’s pretty well read. He knew more about me than I know,” said Bunselmeyer.

They’ve put in a lot of miles the past year, but most of Jason’s training has been done locally, with a rotating crew of pilots.

“My whole life is about independence,” said Jason, “but I can’t do anything without a support system around me. Over the years, I’ve had a dozen pilots who train and ride with me. They’re an integral part, even though they’re not going to end up with a medal.”

Rupert Laumann said Jason’s pilots won’t feel left out. “I ride with Jason because he is a pleasure to be around, pretty inspirational and always positive. It’s just neat to be part of an effort that’s building toward something so special.”

Another of his pilots, Dan McGehee of Mesa, is also an optometrist who recognizes in Jason the attitude needed to deal with his disability.

“He has a severe visual loss, and he’s learned to adapt. He’s accepted it and integrated it into his life. That’s one of the reasons he’s a good athlete. He doesn’t focus on his problems.”

“For Jason,” said Bunselmeyer, “the tandem is the great equalizer.”

At left is what a person with normal vision would see from the back of a tandem bicycle. At right is an approximation of what Bryn actually sees. Photographer David Sanders, following Bryn’s directions, taped a paper cone over the lens of his camera to narrow the field of vision, then further blurred the image on the computer. Bryn’s peripheral vision is a 3-degree tunnel, and the image he sees is blurred and has blank spots.