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Martin Krieg
I am Martin Krieg, a graduate of Cal State Hayward and former accountant. I have crossed the country twice on a bicycle after first rehabilitating myself from paralysis, clinical death and a seven week coma as a result of a car wreck.
In 1979, I rode across America on a standard upright bicycle. For my second trip across America in 1986 I rode a recumbent bike and organized media events, public speaking and fund raising for the National Head Injury Foundation. That ride reached 40 million people amongst my newspaper, public speaking and TV and radio appearances. Upon its completion, to spread the word for the interconnected network of safe bikeable roads and paths called the National Bicycle Greenway (NBG) (which became a nonprofit in 1993), from 1987 to 1994, I published 60,000 Cycle America Regional Directories in four different parts of California.
In 1994, WRS Publishing published the book I had written and rewritten for 14 years. Called Awake Again, it shows how I turned my long rehabilitation and subsequent bike rides, into the same game I am playing now to make the NBG real. Once this next chapter of my life's dream, the NBG, can stand on its own, I will then return to my writing and public speaking, Until then:
For the next five years, I alternated between traveling the country to promote my book and learning the excitement of the all new World Wide Web as I built the first web sites for well over a hundred small and large bike companies. In 1997, I began a campaign to send hundreds of cyclists to Washington, DC. It started in Santa Cruz, CA with two Swing for NBG events and a Lighthouse Party send off. All of which ended with a widely know bike celebration called Cycle America 2000. We brought that excitement back to the West Coast with two huge cross country relay rides both of which ended in the Surf City with Festivals. During this time, I also personally inspired, coached and consulted on over a dozen other successful transcontinental bikes rides.
Since 2003, here now in Palo Alto, CA, we still produce the annual National Mayors' Ride and I began the Mountain Movers Podcast series. In addition, I have also written How to Bike America and am working on a business plan for the NBG as well as what amounts to the sequel for "Awake Again' called “How America can Bike and Grow Rich, The National Bicycle Greenway Manifesto” (HBGR).
I took the 2007 Mayors' Ride season off to devise a fully interactive Google mapping system that runs like a game while building community to let users calculate, request, plan, utilize, store, display and vote on bike routes. I did this all toward the end of making bike and not car travel the focus of the new map I foresee so we can fully impregnate the American consciousness with bicycling. It will be this mindset that will accelerate the need to turn the principal roads and paths we identify for safe coast to coast bike travel into the National Bicycle Greenway heaven I know can be made real.
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