CITY FOCUS:Man dedicated to cycling

Paul Defeo loves his road bike, and he rides it five days a week, even to work. The avid cyclist lets few things get in the way of his pastime — not injury, not surgery, not even the years when every time he rode a few miles, he would wake up the next morning with his heart beating wrong.

The Huntington Beach resident has lived through a broken neck, a major heart valve problem and years of cardiac arrhythmia, managing to take 100-mile rides every month last year. Now, Defeo is finally past the health problems and is training to ride 525 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles to raise money for arthritis research.

Defeo did heavy-duty riding ever since the early 1980s, but it all stopped in 1998 after a desert motorcycle ride with a neighbor went wrong. He snapped his spine high on the neck, risking not only paralysis but also a shutdown of his lungs. He later found out his neck muscles, strong from biking, may have saved his spinal cord.

“I didn’t realize I had broken my neck,” he said. “I got concerned when the paramedic was asking me about every 30 seconds ‘Can you breathe?’”

It took nearly a couple years till he had the courage to try riding again, even after he had graduated from the immobilizing halo screwed into his head to a hard neck collar, then a soft neck collar and finally free movement.

“I was nervous about the stress and the pressure on my neck, and the vibration,” he said.

So when he had trouble getting back into shape in 2000, Defeo first chalked it up to the lack of activity. But things got worse.

“I wasn’t getting any better,” he said. “I was getting out of breath even for just a short walk.”

A doctor told him his heart’s mitral valve was barely pumping and he would soon become a “cardiac cripple” if nothing was done, Defeo said. Surgery fixed that problem, but left him with another — stray electrical signals in his heart were throwing it off rhythm, leaving him as weak as ever.

Defeo got more medical help, zapping his heart with electrodes to kill cells giving off the unruly signals, and the heart got back into rhythm — mostly. But the dedicated cyclist wanted to get back on his wheels; over time, he did, even though his heart would fall into the wrong rhythm every time he pushed too hard.

“I would feel fine and I’d go riding like 10 miles, and maybe even a little further,” he said. “Then one time I’d wake up and I could just feel my heart not beating properly. It might last a couple of weeks, and I couldn’t ride at all.”

Drinking plenty of water and electrolytes, Defeo finally managed to get back into shape. After he breezed through a 55-mile ride in early 2006, even with a cold, he decided to take a challenge — ride a century, or 100 miles in bicycling terms, a month all year.

“I went, ‘Yeah if I can ride 55 miles with a cold and not feeling very well, I can do it,’” he said. “So I decided I was going to take [the next day] off and ride to San Diego.”

Defeo said he hasn’t felt a quiver from his heart in more than a year, which made him confident enough to sign up for the California Coast Classic, an eight-day ride in late September that raises money for arthritis research. He plans to go the distance, as well as raising more than $2,900 for the cause.

Those who wish to sponsor Defeo on his latest venture can go to 2007ccc.kintera.org, click “Sponsor Participant” on the left-hand menu, and search for him by name.

Despite the calamities of the last decade, Defeo has actually never been in an accident on his bike — well, never till last month.

“It was right in our parking lot at work,” he said. “I didn’t see a speed bump, I was looking ahead. I was a little bruised up; it was just a little road rash.”