Bike Month For Every Cape Codder

May is National Bike Month, and at the McGraw Center in Nickerson State Park, biking can be done by everybody – regardless if the pedals are operated with feet or hands. Adaptive biking season has officially started.

What is National Bike Month?

National bike month has been promoted for almost seven decades to encourage more Americans to try biking. According to the League of American Bicyclists, 600,000 Americans used a bike to get to work in 2021. For Meg Hull in Dennis, happiness counts as a transportation metric. Every season she visits the McGraw Center in Brewster where Spaulding Rehabilitation Adaptive Sports Center is offering adaptive biking. May 14th was opening day.

What is a recumbent bike?

The fleet of bikes at the McGraw Center consists of hand cycles, leg cycles, delta cycles with one wheel in the front and two in the back and tadpole cycles with two wheels in the front and one in the back. This way there aren't any diagnosis or injury that the bikes cannot be adapted to. On any given season there are 500 athlete visits enjoying paddle boarding, kayaking, yoga, yard games and adaptive biking and mountain biking.

What is adaptive biking?

Meg Hull had a stroke and is opting for a leg-operated delta bike. The delta gives her freedom of movement, allows her to have eye contact with children and dogs as she swooshes by. She says biking through Brewster's woods on the delta makes her feel normal, though a word she does not like to use, she says the delta makes her feel like she is not a disabled person.

"I feel like a normal Joe going out to do my activites," she says.