By Stephen Allen (Hist’06)

Riding a bicycle around the world to fight epilepsy. This has been my dream for the past year and a half, my plan for the past year and my reality on the road for the past four months. I am now in Marseilles, France, writing this article for CU Voices from the sketchiest hotel room so far in the tour, in what has to be one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen.

I am riding east to promote the Seize The World Foundation, an organization whose board of directors is composed of mostly CU alumni. Our mission is to fight epilepsy by promoting the idea that people with epilepsy can lead active lifestyles and to provide funding for research to cure epilepsy altogether.

Our first project is to get one bicyclist, who is himself epileptic, around the world on a bicycle. That’s me. The route is a circle, beginning and ending in Telluride, Colo. It passes through Charleston, S.C., Lisbon, Portugal and various European countries and cities along the Mediterranean coast en route to Turkey. From there, the circle moves to the Middle East for a short tour through Egypt, Jordan and Israel.

Next, the plan is to tackle mainland Asia, using the path of least resistance through India and China and over to Japan. Finally, a flight to Seattle, where I have a feeling travel will be ridiculously easy compared to Asia. Then, hammer every day on the road back to my home Rocky Mountains. Occasionally I wonder about how I will look and how my bike will look at that point. Who will I meet? Will there have been many seizures?

I have had epilepsy ever since my first seizure occurred as I was walking down a hallway in my high school at age 15. Since then, I have had a seizure, on average, every six months. They are triggered by lack of sleep and by lack of energy, usually from not eating or from being sick. When a seizure occurs, I will be unconscious for one to five minutes while I am seizing, and then gradually come back to my senses over the course of about 15 minutes as I regain memory, alertness and energy.

They are scary to watch, although in my case the seizures do not produce a tremendous amount of physical harm in their own right. They do produce minor injuries: scrapes, bruises, etc. For some reason I usually come close to dislocating my left shoulder during each seizure. The right shoulder is not a problem.

Each time a seizure occurs, it is traumatic for my brain, and a neurologist has told me that each seizure makes subsequent seizures more likely. However, I don’t understand the chemistry. In my case, the only thing that people need to do to treat my seizures is to move things out of the way as I am seizing, turn me on my side if I throw up and cradle – not hold – my head. No spoons in the mouth, no holding me down. Simple: just let the seizure run its course and prevent me from hurting myself.

All things considered, I’m extremely lucky because, for the most part, I can control the seizures with medicine and by getting sleep every single night. I am about 90% in control, but I can never avoid an occasional seizure, or a monthly fiasco with a pharmacy or a screwed up prescription, or something like that, to remind me that epilepsy will always be with me, to a degree. This is part of why I am passionate about this project – the idea that maybe it doesn’t have to be there forever. Perhaps. Maybe we can take a bite out of it. I can ride my bike around the world, thanks to Seize The World.

I have met fabulous people along the way. A farmer in New Mexico, an arborist in Georgia, a policeman in Spain, even family members I barely knew I had in Seville. They always have questions: “Don’t you get cold? What do you eat? Wouldn’t you rather have someone else riding with you?” There is one question that always makes me happy though: “How did you come up with the idea of doing this?”

I usually begin my answer in Boulder, which is where my dream of traveling around the world began. When I was in school at CU as a history major, I wrote research papers about Francis Drake, the Spanish Armada and British voyages to the East Indies. This spurred my interest in traveling around the world in a sailboat. So I moved to Santa Barbara, Calif., to try my hand at sailing, which actually went well, although I learned quickly that sailing can be a bit more expensive than cycling. So I decided to try my first circumnavigation on a bike. Cheap and simple. Seize The World was born.

Once I had the basic outline in mind for a trip to fight epilepsy, my next step was to gather five of my closest, most intelligent and most reliable friends. All of them are friends from CU. They comprise the board of directors for the Seize The World Foundation. We held fund raising and publicity events in Telluride pre-departure, did a tremendous amount of work to get the website operational, worked to get stories about our organization into the local newspaper and on the radio. There was also work to be done organizing gear, although most of this was fairly familiar to me from previous trips. Before I knew it, my departure date had arrived.

Oct. 15, 2008, 8:30 a.m. in Telluride, Colo. We organized a small send off from Main Street in on the morning of my departure. Donuts, coffee and cold, crisp mountain air. Really cold actually. Not a cloud in the sky. It was time to enjoy the last few minutes of home before this adventure got underway. I did not know when I would see Telluride again. A photographer from the Telluride Daily Planet agreed to use my video camera to capture the opening scenes of the Seize The World documentary. About 20 locals turned out to bid me farewell. Or perhaps they had just turned out for some free breakfast. A few had cowbells, a few had bikes to ride the opening miles of the tour. But before I knew it, it was over. And now I find myself in Marseilles. Surely this will be over before I know it too, and I will, once again, be home again after having ridden around the world. And it will have been incredible. But before that happens, I am confident that our small group of CU alumni will have made a difference.

Editors note: Stephen wrote this piece a couple of months ago. As this edition of Buffalum Notes goes out in mid-May, he is in Athens, Greece, preparing to head for Turkey and the Middle East.

Stephen Allen (Hist’06) was born in Honolulu, but grew up mostly in Telluride, Colo. He spent one year studying in Santiago, Chile, during his junior year of high school, and has also traveled to Argentina. Stephen works seasonally for the National Outdoor Leadership School. He plans to be on the road for a total of two years.

The directors of Seize the World Foundation are Sean Brugman (MCDBio’06), Seth Friedman, Ian McKittrick (BioChem’05), Ben Perdue (ArchEng,EnvDes’04) and  Jessie Ransom (Engl,Ethnic’06)

For more information on epilepsy, go here.