Cyclists ride on Circulus during its stay in Portland, Ore. (Photo by Jeff Snyder.)

“…and the ring of power has a will of its own.”
—Prologue to the 2001 Lord of the Rings film

TOILING DAY AND NIGHT at the end of his senior year, Sam Starr ’10 set out to forge his own 50-foot-wide mini-velodrome, a seductive ring of ready-to-race-on wood he called Circulus. Fueled by artistic vision and caffeine, he machine-cut board after board, tightened bolts and sanded away rough spots until the 39 portable sections were ready to be connected with help from a crew of friends. Finally, the senior art project would come to life in the cavernous emptiness of the decommissioned Seeley-Mudd Science Library. As Sam pictured it, the contrast of the sterile, silent location with the blur of motion on the track would make an artistic statement. But first there had to be a test ride to see if his creation actually worked. “A leap of faith,” Sam calls that initial spin. “I had no idea if it would even hold up.”

Sam had faced doubts early on, as some faculty members were concerned that there just wasn’t enough time for him to pull off a project of this scale. But Sam had a habit of making his own path. Before coming to Pomona, he spent a year racing on an amateur cycling team in Spain, building his confidence and riding ability. At Pomona, the art major became fascinated with fungi—yes, fungi—after attending an environmental talk, and he took a year off to work in a science lab at the University of Minnesota back home. He returned to Pomona determined to meld art and science by crafting his own bike-driven mobile biology lab, which he did, eventually riding the 130-lb. “Velolab” to Los Angeles and back in a 50-mile trek. Simply put: Sam can. “We live for teaching Sam Starrs,” says Art Professor Michael O’Malley, who helped guide Sam along the way.

Sam Starr ’10 rides on Circulus in the decommissioned Seeley-Mudd library. (Photo by Lisa Anne Auerbach.)

But Circulus was bigger and more ambitious than any of his previous undertakings. While Sam was fairly certain he could get the velodrome built in time, he worried over whether it would actually be rideable in the tight circle required for it to fit in Seeley- Mudd. His 3-D computer design and scale model would help reduce the risk of failure, but this was no sure thing until he put tire rubber to wood. So there was joy and relief as he made the inaugural ride with friends gathered around to watch. Thanks to centrifugal force—or was it something more?—he had no trouble taking a spin on Circulus without taking a spill. “I just rode around yelling and screaming and everyone was dancing around the side of it,” recalls Sam, speaking in his halting, soft-spoken manner that suggests that even as he talks a portion of his mental RAM is still devoted to making plans or poring over diagrams.

Circulus took off, attracting attention far beyond Pomona’s greenery-and-sunshine campus after a video of the mini-velodrome went viral on the web. The unusual project had obvious appeal for bikers, who were itching to ride it, and Sam suspects the do-it-yourself aspect added to the interest, as people found a certain “romance about such a big … project undertaken by one person.” All the attention was fun, but Sam had his own plans. After graduation, he was off to France for a gig helping with upscale cycling tours for American recreational bikers. Circulus found a temporary home, protected with tarps, in the backyard of a friend’s place in Upland, with a section going for a time to Riverside for a museum exhibition on bike culture. “I was worried that it was going to end up going to the landfill eventually,” says Sam. “There was just no way for me to really be able to do anything with it.”

Sam knew he couldn’t hold onto Circulus. And when he decided to give up the ring, its power only grew.

DAN POWELL SPENT A CHUNK of his childhood amidst metal coffee cans full of bearings and axles as he worked on bikes with his old man. His dad had made a hobby of pulling jalopy bikes from the garbage and fixing them up. “No one stole your bike,” Powell recalls of those days. “Because they looked horrible.” But Powell caught the bike bug and went on to work at a series of bike shops and then at Planet Bike, a well-known bike accessories brand. For a time he lived out of his 1964 Ford Econoline van while working as an intern for Bike magazine in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. In 2008, he and business partner Erik Olson started their own bike-accessories business, Portland Design Works, in the cycling-crazed Oregon city.

Powell dates his fascination with velodromes back to around 1995, when a couple of guys he knew who had been bicycle messengers told him about an event in Toronto with an insane figure-eight velodrome, complete with elevated flyover, called the Human-Powered Roller Coaster. Powell was transfixed by the blurry video. “As a very impressionable 19 to 20-year-old cycling kid, it seemed like the most badass thing ever,” he says. From then on, Powell recalls, he carried hopes of having his own velodrome.

Fifteen years later, in 2010, he read in the Urban Velo blog that Sam Starr was trying to sell Circulus. Here was his chance. When Powell didn’t hear back from Sam, he figured someone had already swooped in and bought it. But Sam was still in France and just hard to reach, and Circulus remained in storage. When they finally connected, Powell recalled that Sam had mentioned online that he would be happy to get back half of the $3,000 that had gone into the project. Powell offered $1,600, which he had to borrow from friends, and the deal was sealed. In time, he boarded a plane for Southern California and rented a truck to bring Circulus to Oregon.

Buzz about the velodrome’s arrival built quickly in Portland, and Powell and company invited friends to ride at a gathering that fell on April Fool’s Day 2011. They planned for a bigger unveiling, with a big party set for summer. They shored up the track,—which, after all, had been intended as an art piece—adding bolts and wood reinforcement. But they tinkered too much by brushing on a coating of basketball court varnish, leaving the track too slippery to ride just before the party. “We were panicked,” recalls Powell. Some skateboarders saved the day by letting them in on a trick: coating the track with a solution of watered down Coca-Cola would give it more stick and less slick. On went the show, which included a deejay and drew about 400 people, a cross-section of the biking community— “road cyclists, track guys, BMX kids.” The success of the event “kind of validated buying it,” says Powell.

New video from Portland only added to Circulus’ reputation, drawing more views and blog posts on the web. Powell notes the contrasts in the “peaceful and contemplative” video of Sam riding Circulus in placid Seeley-Mudd with the “devil-may-care” footage from the kick-off party. Circulus had left the artsy world of wine and cheese for the sweaty realm of beer and Cheetos. And that was just fine with Sam, who had watched it all from afar, checking in online every few weeks: “I’m sure a lot more people saw it as a bike project after I had let go of it than saw it as an art project when I still had it.”

“It was an art installation because of its context in the library,” he says. “You’re taking something and putting it … where it doesn’t really belong.” Then he turns a tad mystical: When Circulus became part of the bike world, Sam says, “in a way it was going home again.” But Circulus wouldn’t find a permanent home in that Portland warehouse. The velodrome was going on the road.

Next stop: Las Vegas.

EACH FALL, INTERBIKE International Trade Expo pulls in thousands of visitors for what is billed as the largest bicycle trade show in the U.S. With so many big-name vendors attending, Powell and his partner’s company would be small-fry, able to afford only a slim space at the Sands Convention Center. But with crowd-drawing Circulus in their possession, they would get a sweet deal for more room—and plenty of attention. On the first day of the show, an apparel brand had arranged for Jeremy Powers and Tim Johnson, big names in the cycling world, to race each other on Circulus. “They promoted it like a heavyweight boxing match,” says Powell. “The guys came out wearing robes. They weighed in. … They talked smack to each other.”

Their first two races in the best-of-three event went just fine. Then came the final showdown, and near-disaster. Someone in the crowd surrounding Circulus held out a $20 bill and Powers reached out to grab the cash, missed and nearly wiped out. “He came within 10 inches of leaving the surface of the track. You could smell the burning rubber,” says Powell. “This is 40 minutes into the first day of the show where we were going to turn people loose on this thing. I was scared.”

The show went on and so did the races, sometimes strangely. One was between riders in Gumby and Pokey costumes, another costumed race pitted a hot dog against a squirrel. All in all, Circulus was a crowd-pleaser as expected. (Sam Starr had tried to make it back to the states to see Circulus in Vegas, but he just couldn’t pull it off.) Still, Powell, glad there were no mishaps, was relieved when the time came to disassemble Circulus.

The ring, in some ways, had become a burden. Sure, it had brought lots of publicity to his enterprise in Portland, but he and his partner also didn’t want to be known just as the guys with the velodrome. Practically speaking, Circulus took up a lot of space they needed in their warehouse, and set-up and tear-down to take it on the road took hours of crew work—six hours to put it together, four to take it apart.

“My wife was like, ‘It’s time for it to go.’ My partner was like, ‘It’s time for it to go.’ I knew it was time for it to go,” recalls Powell.

So Circulus would be passed along once again.
Powell had a good sense of who the ring should go to next.

POWELL HAD CRASHED at his buddy Jeff Frane’s place last year when he came to Minneapolis for the Frostbike trade show. Frane was one of the first people Powell told about buying the velodrome, and Frane had fanned interest by unveiling the news in his Bike Jerks blog and posting the original video. “That was the spark in the proverbial dry grass,” says Powell. Frane has organized a slew of races in Minneapolis, another bike-crazy metropolis, including the annual All City Championship. “In short,” Frane writes online of his cycling interest, “I am way into it.” Like Powell, Frane also lived out of his van for a time. That was after college, where he’d studied comparative religion and public relations. “Super useful,” Frane says.

Once again like Powell, Frane found a way to make his living in the bike business, in his case as the sales and marketing manager for All-City Cycles. The difference is that little All-City is owned by industry powerhouse Quality Bicycle Products. Circulus was handed off in hopes that a big enterprise would be able to do more with the bulky attraction. Frane talks of bringing Circulus to Midwestern cities such as Chicago or Milwaukee this summer. He’d like to take it back to Vegas for Interbike in the fall, and maybe add a twist, throwing out the idea of a circus tent or a fog machine: “I think there’s a number of ways we could take it.” But there are logistics to be worked out and expenses to be calculated, and, at the moment, Circulus is safely stowed away at QBP’s massive warehouse in Ogden, Utah. Says Frane: “It’s sitting there while we decide what the heck to do with the thing.” The ring rests—for now.

Its maker, though, is hard at work. Sam Starr finally made his way back to the states, landing in little Hudson, New York. With some inspiration from art professor O’Malley, he took up another audacious industrial undertaking. Sam set to work on building a brick pizza oven … in the back of a truck. “To a large extent it’s just another excuse to get myself wrapped up in another crazy fabrication project,” he says. He recently started selling pizza out of the oven-bearing behemoth. (The business is called Truck Pizza: http://www.truckpizza.net./) But Sam remains an avid cyclist. He is still fascinated with velodromes and continues to field inquiries from would-be imitators requesting copies of the 3-D design he used for Circulus, though nobody ever seems to follow through and build one. “Maybe I should go into the mini-velodrome business one day,” he muses. Yes, Sam is tempted by the thought of forging another ring. “It’s in the back of my mind for sure,’’ he says.

Lucy Embick Kunz ’78 climbs onto the arm of the sofa, squats in her white sock feet and throws her whole body into the tale of her recent near-gold experience at the German Life Saving Championships.

The small-framed swimmer grabs below the arm of the sofa and demonstrates how she was perched on the block—one that was more slanted than usual—and ready to dive in.

Just then, Lucy recounts, she tipped forwards off the block, starting before the gun fired, disqualifying her from the second discipline, the combined swimming event. Lucy had already finished 12 meters ahead in the 50-meter freestyle, the first event of the three-part competition. She knew gold in her age category was within easy reach. “I would have won,” she says, squinting her blue eyes, clearly still furious with herself.

Lucy’s intensity serves her well because she is racing for more than medals: She swims for her own survival. Lucy has been fighting aggressive ovarian cancer since 2003, and she has done it, in large part, by throwing herself into competitive swimming. In a sense, every lap, every moment in the pool is a victory. As a medical physicist who knows her case confides: “The doctors say Lucy Kunz should have been dead seven years ago.”

Lucy has endured 157 days of chemotherapy, three months of radiation and 13 operations on what was once a near-perfect body. She has demonstrated pure mind over matter—winning dozens of golds and breaking an International Life Saving Organization world record in obstacle swimming with a body pumped full of toxic chemicals designed to fight off tumors. She says her greatest achievement may have been when she won the German Masters gold for the 200-meter backstroke in April 2010, about a week after her 118th day of chemotherapy.

She has done all this while grieving an unfathomable family tragedy. Her older brother, Dr. Andy Embick ’72, the one she followed to Pomona, the brilliant and restless Rhodes Scholar she had always looked up to, committed suicide just months before she was diagnosed with cancer eight years ago.

The combination of the two events launched Lucy on a journey of survival. “I never did give up. I never ever ever ever did,” says Lucy. “I have to be like the pop-up figures in comics. I’m shot down and have to get up again. If I give up swimming, I’ll give up my health and my life.”

LUCY’S LOVE AFFAIR with swimming started in kindergarten at her local YMCA in Salem, Ore., where she grew up as the third of four children. Her mother is a lawyer, and Lucy’s late father worked as an orthopedist. Lucy says the Embick children weren’t pushed to achieve. But excellence was in the air at home. She and Andy were always close, and he swam too, even though swimming was not something they shared in a big way.

Andy learned to love gymnastics as a teenager and later preferred the thrill of pursuits such as rock climbing and whitewater paddling. Lucy remembers the time, when she was a kid, that Andy embarrassed her at the pool by walking around the deck on his hands, as if in a gym. That was Andy.

Still, Lucy looked up to her big brother, the firstborn, to the point that he was nearly infallible in her mind. “He was always my example of doing everything right,” Lucy says, adding, “I had absolute trust in him. Andy took me climbing. He got me to rappel. I didn’t even think about it twice. Most people wouldn’t even go over the edge. Andy said ‘go’ and I went.”

Lucy followed Andy to Pomona after he told her she’d like it better than the other schools she’d applied to. Somehow, Andy was always right.

At Pomona, Lucy still went to the pool to keep fit, but she gave up swimming competitively to concentrate on her studies. Burdette Poland, a Pomona professor of history emeritus who taught Lucy in three courses, recalls Lucy as competitive, honest and determined. He remembers how she “broke loose” in her comprehensive exams in history, doing better work than she had ever done before and ranking third among history majors that year.

Andy, for his part, did compete on the swim and water polo teams, but was better-known for his mountaineering exploits, including eight days spent on Yosemite’s El Capitan. Richard Preston ’76, today a bestselling writer (The Hot Zone, The Cobra Event), recalls a conversation in which he reminded Andy that a single mistake during his solo ice-climbing expeditions could lead to his death. “Andy looked at me with this little smile and said, ‘Of course, I know that.’ I said, ‘Why do you do it?’ Andy said, ‘Because I don’t make mistakes.’”

Lucy and Preston dated steadily for two years when Lucy was a sophomore and junior. The pair would lose themselves in conversation about archeology and art history. Looking back, Preston recalls Lucy being in her prime during her Pomona years, except for having to live in the shadow of the monumental reputation of her brother, who had routinely scaled the side of Smiley Hall to get to his room instead of taking the stairs.

Andy and Lucy both were accepted at Harvard in their post-Pomona years, and Andy did go on to Harvard Medical Schoolafter his time at Oxford on the Rhodes Scholarship. But Lucy, after earning a master’s degree in art history at the University of Oregon and going on a Rotary Foundation scholarship to Munich, chose to attend the University of Pittsburgh for her doctorate because of the financial aid package.

The siblings maintained a close relationship despite the thousands of miles between them. Andy, a physician, made his home in Valdez, Alaska, and Lucy settled in southern Germany, raising three sons with her husband Roland, who works in banking. Lucy met Andy regularly for ski trips in the Alps, followed his expeditions with interest and consulted him for medical advice regarding her children.

All along, Lucy would find time for brief swims, but only when her children joined a team did Lucy return to competitive swimming. Within no time, Lucy began racking up the medals at swim competitions across Germany, pleased that she had found a way to combine her love for swimming with her responsibilities to her family. In 2002, Lucy won three gold medals at the Life Saving World Championships in Florida and was named athlete of the year in Schweinfurt, where she practices swimming and teaches everyone from toddlers to triathletes.

Then came the news that Andy had rowed his skiff out onto Prince William Sound and killed himself.

Why Andy made this choice remains a mystery to Lucy. She confesses, “It’s a tragedy which, in its profoundness, is incomparable to anything else in terms of being an incalculable shock to me and to our whole family.” Lucy believes the shock compromised her immune system.

AFTER THE CANCER DIAGNOSIS, Lucy at first focused on the pain, the suffering and the fear she felt in the face of cancer and the treatments. But she intuitively understood that she had to turn negative feelings into positive emotions in order to survive, so Lucy began swimming in even more competitions, just when most people would have believed that impossible. The initial diagnosis of cancer and the ensuing treatments only kept Lucy away from swim meets briefly. To her doctors’ amazement, she won four gold medals at the Bavarian long-distance championship in March 2004, less than four months after her first operation.

Lucy began to develop a personal philosophy about living with the disease. She had seen how other cancer patients had given up quality of life during treatment, and she resolved to follow a different path. And, as the years went by, Lucy says Andy’s death increased her determination to survive. “He gave me even more reason never to give up,” she says. Lucy’s medical advisers say her attitude has been a key part of  her survival. “Frau Kunz keeps fighting … Such illnesses do not have to be accompanied with weakness and low performance, if patients are willing to actively do something about it and fight their way through,” says biochemist Ulrike Kämmerer, who Lucy consults on her diet.

Kämmerer and a colleague at the University of Würzburg, medical physicist Rainer Klement, were co-authors on a recent paper about the benefits of a high-fat, low-carb diet for those diagnosed with cancer, the diet Lucy keeps and one she calls the “Atkins diet” for cancer patients. In the paper, titled “Is There a Role for Carbohydrate Restriction in the Treatment and Prevention of Cancer?” published in October in the journal Nutrition and Metabolism, the two explore the effect of glucose on tumor cell proliferation.

The diet is not widely recommended by doctors because many don’t know about it, and there have been too few tests of the diet, Klement says. But the researchers say the sugars in a high-carb diet actually feed tumor cells. By lowering the amount of sugar in the blood, a cancer patient can “starve” a tumor of the nutrition it seeks. “Several factors play a role in Lucy’s survival,” Klement says. “One is the swimming, which gives her lots of strength because she loves it, and she swims with abandon. The swimming helps to detoxify her body. Doing sports in some sense is like reducing carbohydrates—both work together well, and both are helping Lucy. And then she’s strong psychologically and has an extremely strong will. That surely also plays a part.”

Lucy herself says having strong and supple muscles has helped her recover quickly from numerous surgeries to remove tumor growth from different parts of her body. Her rigorous swim training has reduced her pain substantially and become her best physical therapy. “After all that radiation, if I hadn’t really pushed myself, I wouldn’t be able to move today much at all,” Lucy says.

Still, from a medical point of view, Lucy’s swimming ability defies explanation, given her metastatic condition and the large number of chemotherapy treatments she has undergone. Kämmerer says, “Lucy is swimming times that hardly any healthy (and younger) person could. It’s extremely exceptional.”

IT’S TUESDAY, THE DAY when Lucy devotes herself to her students at the pool. She is conducting a class with nine small children. As she helps the little ones with their backstroke, Lucy’s strongest stroke, she holds their small heads in her palm like a healer.

On this particular afternoon, Lucy skips the nap she usually takes poolside. Typically, she lies down on the tiled stadium bench for a doze. Lucy has organized her chemotherapy treatments and her schedule around her coaching commitments and her own swimming routine. She even manages her available energy throughout the week so that she can be at her best on Tuesdays.

Dealing with her lack of energy is just one side effect that Lucy has had to learn to live with. She says it took her years to come to terms with the limitations that the disease brings with it. Lucy has hit multiple physical low points but, she says, the thought of giving up doesn’t enter her mind. In 2010, while on holiday in Michigan, she says she experienced pain at a level of 13 on a scale of one to 10 after two months of thoracic radiation. “I basically lay on the floor of the summer house all vacation,” Lucy recalls.

Lucy says her unusually well-tested pain threshold allows her to keep going. “I am able to transfer the tolerance of pain and suffering I have had to develop to survive the treatments for my cancer to my competitions in the pool. … I can let swimming hurt. I can go beyond my limit.”

Professor Poland compares her fight with cancer to the story of Persephone from Greek mythology, since Lucy is forced to live another life in a different realm when she’s undergoing cancer treatments. “Lucy has the good fortune to be able to come back but always with the limitation that she has to return to the underworld before the end of the year,” says Poland, who has been corresponding with Lucy in recent years.

He adds, “When I was a kid, I would get a fever and go to bed, waiting for deliverance. I would lie back and let nature take its course. Lucy is the extreme opposite of that. … She is indefatigable.”

Lucy’s story of courage also helped Richard Preston as he recovered from a shattered pelvis after a ski accident in 2010. A few years earlier, the author had taken up tree-climbing while researching his 2007 book, The Wild Trees, about the people who climb some of the world’s tallest. After the ski mishap, he feared he “would never climb a tree again,” Preston says. “I thought a lot about Lucy during that time. If Lucy Embick Kunz can break the world record in swimming with ovarian cancer, then climbing trees with a shattered pelvis ought to be doable.” Preston has now increased the vertical distance he can climb to that of a redwood tree. He did it in honor of Lucy.

“I see her as a breathtaking athlete—but her accomplishments are not just physical,” says Preston. “They’re spiritual at the same time. People who have seen this deeply admire it.”

EIGHT YEARS INTO THE FIGHT, Lucy hardly seems battle-weary.Just recently, she received news that her tumors had not shown medically relevant growth, which meant she could extend the pause in her chemotherapy for another three to four months. “I feel like I have been saved from a burning airplane,” she says.

Amid her cancer treatments and swimming meets, Lucy still grieves the loss of Andy: “There is never a day when I do not miss him.” Resolving the tragedy isn’t possible, but she is no longer trying to find answers about why Andy did what he did. “Andy was always absolute in his decisions. I have accepted it,” Lucy says.

It’s not just the swimming that helps her cope, but the people she meets in occasional competitions for people with disabilities. At these meets, Lucy swims with people who are blind, deaf, paralyzed or have limbs missing. (She is categorized as “generally” handicapped.)

Lucy’s eyes well up as she describes a swimmer who has no arms and legs: The swimmer bites on a cord with his teeth to hold him at the edge of the pool (any body part counts). When the starting gun fires, the swimmer releases the cord and begins to propel himself through the water with sinuous short dolphin motions. “You watch people who swim 50 meters without arms and legs, and everything becomes quite relative,” Lucy says, adding, “I don’t think it’s fair for me to complain about my health.”

Nor does she complain. Andreas Moser, who coaches triathletes with Lucy at the Silvana pool in Schweinfurt, notes that Lucy doesn’t talk much of her cancer. She will just occasionally mention in a neutral way that she’s going to lose her hair again, something that makes her bathing cap the perfect accessory.

“I don’t look for excuses,” says Lucy. “I just swim.”