Cross-Country road back to recovery for Pearson Constantino
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- November
- 19
Westchester Cycling Club’s Pearson Constantino talked with Journal News Writer Ken Valenti last week about his cross-country cycling trip with his brother. Here is the start of the story, click here for the full report. The photos from the trip are by Megahn Sheridan. 
It would be impressive enough to hear Pearson Constantino’s tale of the bicycle trip he and his older brother, Peter, just took across the United States. But consider this: Pearson made the trip two years after he was plowed off his bicycle in Greenburgh by a sport utility vehicle that crushed a vertebra, shattered his hip and gave him a concussion.
It left him with searing back pain that is still with him – and that accompanied him on the
3,500-mile journey he and his brother took from Newport, Ore. to Massachusetts’ Cape Cod. After 51 days on the road, they completed their trip Oct. 3.
Constantino’s back pain was only one of the troubles he faced.
“I had twenty flats,” the musician and lifelong cyclist said in his fifth-floor walkup in Pelham. “I fell off my bike seven times.”
In Iowa, he was struck with food poisoning, but kept going, and 20 miles outside Dubuque, he fell, spraining his wrist and shoulder.
“I rode that day – 98 miles that day,” he said. And the next, they rode an additional 80 miles, all of it in rains brought by Hurricane Ike.
“He was holding on with one hand for about two states, and he was beat up,” said Peter Constantino, 36, of Glens Falls.
Constantino’s June 29, 2006, accident remains unsolved. It’s a crime to leave the scene of an accident when someone is injured, but no one has ever been found and arrested in this case, said Greenburgh Police Chief John Kapica.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 2:58 PM by Randall Wolf. 
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