Mettle to the Pedal

RYAN COLLINS ’16, MBA ’20 was on his way home from a training ride, the gritty kind that made him feel like he could conquer the world. After spending the past couple of years racing up the ranks from a junior mid-Atlantic cycling champion to one of the top riders in the nation, he’d just received his dream phone call: an invitation to try out for the Olympic training team representing the U.S. in Tokyo. His bags were packed, and he was scheduled to fly out to the camp the next morning.

Collins could take his usual training route through his pretty Annapolis neighborhood, past families walking their dogs and boats gliding on the bay, or he could speed straight ahead down a shortcut to the salmon dinner—his favorite—he knew his mom had waiting for him. On that July evening in 2017, he decided to shave five minutes off his ride and started pedaling that way.

The next thing he knew, he and his bike were crumpled on the ground as onlookers’ screams pierced the air. In a flash, an approaching car had collided with him head-on.

Paramedics rushed Collins to Anne Arundel Medical Center, where doctors who recognized the elite athlete in their care reluctantly delivered the news: Not only was he not flying out in the morning to the Olympic training camp, but the odds were that he’d never ride a bike again.

“And I’m thinking, ‘Well, just watch me,’” Collins says.

WHEN COLLINS WAS A RESIDENT ASSISTANT in Hagerstown Hall, he set up a stationary bike at the top of a stairwell so he could safely train during wintry weather or before the sun came up. It wasn’t uncommon for Terps to find him pedaling in place on the landing.

“People would come up and ask me, ‘What are you doing?’” says Collins. Some students even offered him mid-ride water or snacks.

Just a few years earlier, he might’ve been the one giving funny looks. He didn’t enter the cycling scene until he was a high schooler, and even then, he started out with indoor biking to condition for his primary sports of soccer and tennis.

He came to relish the camaraderie in the fitness group that he joined, and in 2009, members convinced him to try his first race, a 30-minute event called a criterium on a road circuit in Tysons Corner, Va. He didn’t come close to winning, but watching the more experienced cyclists got the wheels turning in his head.

“Wow, I want to be like them,” Collins recalls thinking. “I want to be stronger, faster, smarter, more tactical.”

He studied that race and entered many others through the Mid-Atlantic Bicycle Racing Association to hone his newfound craft—criteriums, shorter time trials and 10- to 20-mile road races. By the time he came to College Park, he’d risen to the top of the junior category.

A major factor in that success was his interest in nutrition. While many teachers are hard-pressed to get teens to read a textbook, Collins pored over scientific journals for fun, then acted as his own test subject, experimenting with how certain foods fueled his rides.

That passion blossomed at UMD, where between weekends of cramming people and bikes into cars for races with the Terps’ cycling team, he formed his own major through the Individual Studies Program. Called nutritional physiology, it combined health, biology, nutrition, kinesiology and business. He studied abroad in Spain and analyzed the Mediterranean diet, the focus of his capstone project.

“It’s always easier to just go with what is set up. But he was very adventurous, curious,” says Justicia Opoku-Edusei, senior lecturer of biology and Collins’ faculty mentor. “He needed more. That’s the type of person he is. He always wants to explore, push the envelope.”

IN THE AFTERMATH of the accident, no matter how hard Collins tried to lift his arms, they stopped when extended horizontally in front of him, and he likened himself to a zombie or Frankenstein. In a more gruesome tie-in to Mary Shelley’s monster, the screws and bolts holding him together protruded under
the skin on his lean frame. The tiny bumps all over his chest are still visible today.

After his hospital stay, he was couch-bound at home, unable to accomplish the simplest everyday tasks: dressing, showering, even using the bathroom. His parents had to hold him at the waist so he could stand and try shuffling around. He couldn’t hold a knife, so they precut his food or overcooked his veggies into a scoopable mush. Collins couldn’t even find comfort in his bed, needing to sleep upright in the living room so he wouldn’t get stuck, unable to turn over.

“If he laid on his back,” says his mom, Kim Collins, “he was like a turtle.”

He chose a consistent ache over pain medication-induced loopiness, bringing on sleepless nights. It was still summer, he often thought in those hours, the ideal time to hop on the bike and explore with friends. Instead, he could only watch their adventures unfold on social media.

During months of near-despair, more painful questions lingered: How would the world see him now? Would he be able to pick up bags of groceries, or, one day, a kid? Was he now just like a chipped mug on the store shelf that no one wanted to buy or fix or use?

Small victories along the way helped quell those worries. Collins practiced slowly walking from the TV in one room to retrieve his laptop in another, challenging himself by keeping items far apart to encourage him to move more. He turned arm exercises into a game by setting up a jigsaw puzzle; he had to constantly reach for pieces. He was able to keep working remotely for an addiction treatment center, typing with just one hand. And he relearned to dress himself, even if his belt remained unbuckled and his shirt untucked.

But then he’d wake up some mornings and notice the race numbers, trophies and medals surrounding him, and spiral back into an identity crisis.

“Everything up to that point was cycling,” Collins says. “All of my friends were connected to cycling. All of my goals were connected to cycling. ... It wasn’t something that I could avoid.”

So he decided that he wouldn’t. After a few physical therapy appointments at Anne Arundel Medical Center, he brought his Tarmac SL5 bike there. With the same tenacity he had brought to the racecourse, he began tailoring each session to the goal of getting back in the saddle.

ULTRACYCLING CAN BE MONOTONY on two wheels. Unlike the high-speed bursts needed for shorter criteriums, or the blend of endurance and acceleration needed for a traditional road race, ultracycling keeps athletes pedaling for at least 200 km or six hours. On a banked, oval bike track called a velodrome, which averages a couple hundred meters in length, that means close to a thousand laps, with slight left turns every few seconds.

Even on a longer road course—with, say, a 50-mile loop, like the route for the 2025 national championship in Springfield, Ohio—cyclists are still subjected to a physically unnatural position for hours on end: head low, elbows tucked in, back as flat as it’ll go.

In the weeks after the accident, Collins needed to figure out how to reach the handlebars again. That’s how his months of rehab progressed: Could he raise his arm high enough to rest on the bike? How long could he keep it there? Could he grip the bars? How hard? What about gradually sitting upright on the seat, slowly pedaling for one minute, more?

The motions, once second nature, felt frustratingly awkward in his rebuilt body. He was like a gym rat who stopped working out for years, then dived into the deadlift again.

“My hands didn’t have the flexibility,” Collins says. “I didn’t have the strength. I didn’t have the connection to move as quickly as I did before.”

NERVOUS TO RETURN to the open road for conditioning, he stuck to an indoor setup for the better part of a year (though it was a little nicer than his Hagerstown arrangement): a training bike in a makeshift home studio, with a box fan pointed at it and an old blue desk propped up beside it, its shelf loaded with energy bars and gels. Even today, if it’s dark or rainy, he opts for hours-long sweat sessions there before logging on for his full-time job as a senior associate brand manager at Haleon, the company behind products like Sensodyne toothpaste and Centrum vitamins.

He’s been disciplined with his nutrition, too, with a diet of mostly plants, very little red meat and no soda or chocolate. (The exception: post-race cookie dough, whether scoops from a Pillsbury tub, homemade bricks from a neighbor or Tollhouse logs gnawed burrito-style.)

It’s all translated into almost unfathomable post-injury success: Collins won 12-hour national championships in 2019, 2021 and 2022, as well as consecutive world titles for the same duration from 2021-23. In 2020, when COVID-19 shut down racing, he still set world records for the most distance covered in six hours outdoors, fastest 100 kms and 200 kms outdoors, and fastest time to cross Maryland from north to south.

“He has a natural ability—that’s for sure. But Ryan marries that with an approach that is meticulous and with a mindset that’s attuned to growth,” says longtime friend and fellow cyclist Michael Thaxton. “I see his ability to come back from (the accident) as a testament to his character.”

Cycling sponsors came swarming: The Feed athlete nutrition, Ketone-IQ energy drinks, Rule 28 cycling apparel, Factor bikes, Inovalon health care analytics. Their products line the rooms in Collins’ house, with the companies happy to have an elite athlete promoting their brands—especially one with such a unique story.

“There’s people that can really suffer, and people who do not like to be uncomfortable,” says Chris Richardson, co-founder of sponsor Richardson Bike Fit, who’s been partnering with Collins since the accident. “He really can suffer.”

A MONTH BEFORE his most recent outdoor world record attempt in September last year, Collins’ ambitions almost got derailed again.

Backed by financial support from sponsors and inspired by friends’ encouragement during rehab to get back to the velodrome, he’d decided to chase down the global outdoor and indoor marks—his “personal Olympics” after missing Tokyo. Then the Valley Preferred Cycling Center in Breinigsville, Pa., where he had been training and planning to invite Guinness World Records representatives, unexpectedly closed for repairs.

He scrambled to arrange the attempt at the San Diego Velodrome instead, but he was less familiar with that track’s quirks. On top of that, strong winds during training kept blowing him off course, to the point where he couldn’t practice a full six-hour ride ahead of the event.

When he saw his family cheering after his nearly 800 laps on the big day, though, he knew he’d done it.

His 161.08 miles not only set a new global high, but his 100-mile, 100-km and 200-km times along the way were also records. In November, he rode that success into the Borrego Springs, Calif., desert, battling fierce sandstorms to notch another world championship and provide a boost of confidence for his indoor record attempts a month later. With 170.7 miles covered in those six hours, and similar 100-mile, 100-km and 200-km times shattered, he closed out 2024 with eight new world records and a sense of redemption.

As he’s embraced the ultra side of cycling and his life has shifted gears, Collins’ goals on the bike have shifted, too—away from the shorter Olympic events he once strived for. Already in 2025, he won national and European championships. He might summon Guinness again for another record attempt later this year, and he’s preparing for next year’s Race Across America from California to New Jersey.

But after cycling was almost permanently taken away from him, Collins doesn’t want it to be all of him. It’s why he went back to UMD for his MBA while he was still working his way back to full strength, why his family’s house is filled with as many Sensodyne toothpaste tubes as Ketone energy drink bottles.

“When cycling becomes my job,” he says, “I’m afraid that I would lose the love that I have for it.”

That passion is fascinating others, with his story, in a sense, coming a full velodrome loop.

As Collins attempted those indoor records, his father noticed a group of black-clad bikers assemble in the arena’s upper seating area. It was the Mexican Olympic cycling team, in the U.S. for training, now watching in awe as this skinny, sweaty force of nature blazed for hours around the track.

“Here are these Olympians, which he aspired to be,” Roy Collins says, “and they’re looking at him and aspiring to be who he is.” TERP