Transcript

Julie Flaherty: It’s a spring morning in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Drew Nelson, Tufts Class of 2025, is in a yard surrounded by about a dozen electric bicycles. He’s here to outfit patrons of the Community Pedal Power E-bike Lending Library.

Drew Nelson: This has a power button, so I’ll have you just hold that center button there a little bit longer than you think you need to. It’ll turn on—beautiful. 

Flaherty: Nelson volunteers at the lending library on most weekends. 

Nelson: This is a Class 2 e-bike, and so there is a throttle.

Biker: OK

Nelson: What that means is if you flick this, it’ll propel the bike forward on its own. 

Flaherty: He doesn’t get paid a cent. His goal is just to show e-bikes can replace cars for many kinds of trips.

Nelson: I am an e-bike librarian. We give people the chance to try out an e-bike completely free for up to a week and let them see how it integrates into their daily life. Can they take their kids to daycare? Can they do their grocery shopping without a car? The answer is always yes. The stories I hear are just phenomenal. Every time someone comes back after using the bike for a week, they won’t stop talking. It’s amazing.

Flaherty: Nelson is champion for e-bikes: better for people, better for the environment—a less expensive transportation option for people in the city.

Nelson: We’ve had in the last year 105 people purchase e-bikes after using the lending library. The total mileage that they will ride in the next coming year is the distance to go around the globe 13 times.

Flaherty: Nelson loves bikes—both electric and acoustic, as he calls them. He is also the chief mechanic for Tufts Bikes, and, when he is not taking classes for his biology major, can be found helping people with repairs and tune-ups.

Which is kind of surprising when you know that biking will probably always be linked with one of the most difficult, painful periods of his life.

You see, before coming to Tufts, Nelson’s world revolved not around bikes or biology, but ballet. 

He started lessons at age 6, mostly because his mother was already taking his sister to dance classes. Not sure how the first class would go, his mom told him to borrow some ballet shoes from the school’s lost and found.

Nelson: Then after the class, I went and I threw them back in the lost and found. And so my mom assumed, well, he didn’t really like it. And then I walked up to her and said, “I want my own ballet shoes.”

Flaherty: When he was 14, he moved from New Jersey to Florida to train with noted ballet teacher Peter Stark. By 16, he was in London on a full scholarship to the Royal Ballet School. By 18, he had accepted a job in the corps of the Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen. He was known as a quick learner of choreography, but he was probably most proud of his partnering.

Nelson: Developing those relationships with some of the women in the company, developing that trust and learning their nuances, the way they move, the way their hyperextension in their legs might affect balance—it was really fascinating for me.

Flaherty: Copenhagen was also where he first learned the joys of biking. 

Nelson: Seeing all these people biking—kids, families, these big bucket bikes with two or three kids. And so when I moved to Copenhagen, I bought a bike just because that’s what people do, that’s how you get around. That’s the best way to get around. 

Flaherty: Nelson joined the Boston Ballet in 2015, and within a few years, he was promoted to second soloist, taking on more difficult roles like the Snow King in the Nutcracker.

Nelson: Boston’s snow pas de deux is really hard. And so it took a lot out of me, but super fun. You get off stage and it’s exhausting but exhilarating at the same time.

Flaherty: He was working hard, and it was paying off.

Nelson: Yeah, it was exciting. I was thrilled to be on that path, that trajectory towards my ultimate goal, which was becoming a principal dancer.

Flaherty: Then, in the fall of 2018, he started having trouble with his ankle.

Nelson: Eventually it got to the point where I could only use about 50% of my plie, or the bend in my ankle. And so, I eventually had surgery on the ankle. I had os trigonum, which is an extra bone that chips off in the ankle. So that was removed. I had bone spurs removed. And through that recovery, nothing got better.

Flaherty: As he recovered from the surgery, he tried to get out and enjoy the city, doing things with people outside of dance, including some group cycling. 

Nelson: And in one of those group rides, I was in a crash where I flipped over the handlebars and broke my fibula, tibial plateau, and tore my ACL. And so that recovery was three surgeries over the course of a couple of years. And so yeah, I had pretty much done everything to my left leg to prevent me from ever getting back to ballet. I took the recoveries really seriously. And, yeah, just wasn’t able to make it back.

Flaherty: As hard as it was, Nelson knew he had to start thinking about a different career. His plan B had always been real estate, but he tried it briefly—and hated it. Then he thought about health care.

Nelson: I think a lot of the people who have had the greatest impact on my life are actually the physical therapists that I worked with at Boston Ballet, in Copenhagen, some of the physicians who treated me. And they were always with me at the worst times. And I think just being able to give back and give other people that care, it really resonated with me.

Flaherty: Of course, that kind of career would mean going back to school. He did two years at a community college before transferring to Tufts as part of its Returning Education for Adult Learners program, also known as REAL.

Nelson: It felt like I would be respected by the professors as an older student. Being part of the REAL program would allow them to immediately understand that my background is very different from most of their other students. 

Flaherty: Going back to school was challenging. Getting back on a bike? That was about as hard as you would think. He suffered with PTSD for a long time after the crash. But one day, he decided to try. 

Nelson: I don’t even remember where I was going, but I think it was somewhere that was just easier to get by bike than public transportation. So I was like, well, I’ll just try it on the bike today and see how I go. And yeah, it was pretty scary.

Flaherty: Very slowly, over time, he got his biking confidence back.

Nelson: I give myself a ton of braking distance,  and all of the bikes that I ride have really great brakes. I spent a lot of money on them because that was important to me. So yeah, I feel pretty safe and confident now.

Flaherty: Now he’s on a mission to help other people bike often, and bike safely. He got certified as an instructor with the League of American Bicyclists and is a vocal advocate for bike infrastructure, like bike lanes. It all comes together in his work with the e-bike library.

Nelson: Giving people the chance to try something for free and getting more butts on bikes. I love it. And I also love that some of those people are now coming to some of the public meetings about bicycle infrastructure and they’re bringing their kids, and their kids are talking at the public meetings. It’s pretty difficult to deny someone safe infrastructure when they’re 4 years old. I think just kind of introducing that next generation of people who are walking and biking and using public transportation and giving them a voice is really valuable.

Flaherty: One day, Nelson hopes to be a physician assistant. Until then, he’s looking to spend some time working in bike shops and continuing his bike advocacy.

Nelson: So we’ll have you take this for a little test ride. 

Biker: Mm-hmm.

Nelson: You’ll go downhill. Keep taking rights until you come back to us.

Biker: I’m excited to try.

Music by Shutterstock.