David Boyd, above, and his son Michael, below, are 3,000 miles into a journey across the U.S. on bicycle.

David Boyd can barely walk  a mile without his multiple sclerosis kicking in. His upper body is weak, and his sense of touch is far less sensitive than the average person’s.

But for all the disease has taken away in his life, cycling has remained. And is he ever making the most of it.

The 53-year-old New York man is riding from Virginia to Oregon on a recumbent bicycle with his 21-year-old son Michael. The pair stopped in Colorado Springs for lunch on Tuesday, a brief pit stop on the roughly 116-mile leg from Canon City to Denver. According to their online journal, today is Day 60 of their journey. They’ve logged more than 3,000 miles so far.

Boyd was diagnosed with MS, a chronic disease of the central nervous system, in 1988, but the disease has not robbed him of the ability to pedal away the miles. “I can only walk a mile or so, and it’s very unpleasant, but I can  just ride this bike all day long,” he said Tuesday, in a brief phone interview.

He and his wife had talked about a cross-country trip years earlier, but she died in January after a brief bout with cancer. At the same time, his employer was trying to cut back on expenses.

So Boyd volunteered to take six months unpaid leave and do the trip the couple never got a chance to. His son, one of six children, who’d also talked about the trip, agreed to go along.

There have been setbacks. An MS flare-up delayed them for several days in the South, and Boyd’s eagerness to get on the road again led to a crash, no injuries. They hit their stride in Arkansas, he said, and are now typically riding 72 or more miles a day.

Plenty of people do amazing athletic  feats to raise awareness about a cause, but Boyd said his journey is strictly a personal one.

To follow the pair, check out their journal.

First, let me apologize for my long absence. I’ve been working on a project — watch for it in Sunday’s paper — that’s taken me offline for awhile. It is that ever-present struggle here at The Gazette to balance Web and print demands.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about health care reform. I stumbled across an interesting post through the Association of Health Care Journalists, of which I’m a member. One of Obama’s key messages in this debate is that reform can be paid for largely by prevention. Some pretty smart folks refute that idea.

I don’t think anyone would argue that if people, as a population, took excellent care of themselves our medical bills would drop. But using the “prevention” argument as an economic one is questionable. Check it out here.

Michael Noble, a Colorado Springs teen who recently received a new kidney, blogs this afternoon that he’s heading home from Aurora after recently receiving his transplant. His new kidney is working great, and he has plans to head to CU-Boulder.

Here are his words from his Carepages blog:

Michael Noble, the 19-year-old Colorado Springs man who has been on dialysis after a sudden illness his senior year of high school, is recovering after receiving a kidney (I think from his uncle). Here is the story.

According to his mother’s update, he and his donor are not feeling well but are otherwise doing fine.

Twenty Colorado Springs physicians are listed among the nation’s most influential doctors in a unique public database released by USA Today on Thursday.
The local doctors were among 6,000 in 300 metro areas considered to be leaders in their communities in treating one or more of four key chronic conditions, diabetes, asthma, hypertension and high cholesterol. The database was created by Santa Fe-based Qforma for USA Today.
“Unlike standard best-doctor lists compiled by opinion-based surveys, the Qforma analysis represents a national effort to track subtle differences in doctors’ practice patterns that reveal, on a local level, which doctors most influence their peers,” USA Today wrote, in its explanation of the database.
The local doctors are: Bonnie Baswell, Eric Caplan, Stephen Fox, James Glass, David Greenberg, Susan Henley, Melinda Hockensmith, Deborah Jalowiec, Terry Johler, Charles Johnson, Russell Lee, Roger Mallory, William Munson, Robert Nathan, Yogesh Shrestha, William Storms, Christoph Tulin, Gregory Unruh, Richard Vu, and James Warren.
To see the USA Today database, click here.

Check out my story, currently on gazette.com. I may also be posting some updates here.

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Will be live blogging a Colorado Department of Public Health news conference at 10:30. Check in at Gazette.com