Riding Is His Ritalin

  Late last year I had an interesting conversation with Dave Howard, an editor I've worked with for years. Dave's the executive editor at Bicycling Magazine, and he mentioned an off-the-cuff comment from a former Olympic bicycle racer. In his day, the ex-racer said, you cycled away your hyperactivity; that was partly how he got into the sport. "I wonder how many kids over the past decade got put on Ritalin instead," he said. "How many potential racers never discovered the sport?" That got Dave and me to talking: What if we took that question seriously? So began a seven-month investigation into the history of ADHD and the use, study, and abandonment of exercise as a serious treatment for the condition. The result appears in this month's issue of Bicycling: Riding Is My Ritalin, a story about the powerful positive effects of exercise on the brain, and the largely unrecognized potential it has for people struggling with ADHD. In the course of my research I turned up a number of promising studies linking concentrated, regular doses of exercise to steady improvement in the management of ADHD in children. Time and again, those studies were ignored or never followed up. The reason? Exercise doesn't result in big profits for pharmaceutical companies. In the course of my reporting, I found one athlete who was going his own way and acting as a one-man test case. Adam Leibovitz, 19, was diagnosed with ADHD 13 years ago and has tried a suite of drugs, from Ritalin to Adderall to all the rest. A couple years ago he decided to drop the drugs and use his bicycle training to calm his mind. So far, it's working. Adam's a nationally ranked spring cyclist and a sophomore at Marian University in Indianapolis. Check out his story here.