After brain injury, woman is riding to recover

WAVERLY, IA. - Laura Baker was in the thick of last year's rolling circus of sweat-stained memories that is the Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa.

She was there among the 10,000 riders who mingled in the shadow of grain elevators, jostled each other in line at roadside pie stands and made fast friends by the time they dipped tires a week later in the Mississippi River.

Yet Baker doesn't remember pedaling a single mile.

The now 26-year-old University of Denver graduate student and Wartburg College alum rode her inaugural RAGBRAI last year with her father, Tom, a Waverly Realtor.

So technically, Baker isn't a newbie - often emblazoned with a virginal "V" on his or her calf muscles and subjected to a week of quirky rituals.

But she recalls neither the heat nor the high jinks. Weeks after last year's RAGBRAI, she crashed her bike and suffered a traumatic brain injury that erased six months of her memory.

Through a grueling yet remarkable year of recovery, she became determined not only to climb back on her bike, but also to return to RAGBRAI with her dad.

"That sort of represented getting back to her previous life, I think," he says.

Starting next Sunday, she'll make good on that commitment. In a way, she'll ride RAGBRAI for the first time - twice.

Her first RAGBRAI: exhilarated BY the SPEED, THE moment Baker is described on the Caring Bridge website where friends and family chronicled her rehabilitation as a "bike enthusiast, vegan, intellectual, coffee connoisseur, loving daughter and best friend to many."

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After brain injury, woman is riding to recover