A trio of University of Cincinnati engineering students are wrapping up their senior capstone project. This is no theoretical experiment — they're working with one of the country's top para athletes to create an indoor training cycle.
When it's rainy outside, a professional cyclist might just take their bike inside and put it on a stationary trainer. That won't work for Omar Duran. No such trainer exists for his handcycle. He's preparing to join an eight-person team in racing across the country from San Diego to Annapolis, Md., in under seven days.
"Race Across America is no easy feat and I'm going to need every day [I can get] on the bike," Duran says. "That's rain or shine. That means if it rains, I need to be on the bike inside my garage."
Duran is training 18 hours a week for the 2025 race. He covers 40 to 70 miles weekly using his hands and arms to propel his handcycle to a peak of 1200 watts.
"That is pro-cyclist [power] like what you see people at the Tour de France making ... 1200 watts would be like riding in an 800-horsepower car."
Duran challenged students in UC's engineering capstone program to create a stationary trainer for him through a national program called Quality of Life Plus (QL+). It pairs students with wounded veterans to create cutting edge technologies to improve their quality of life. Duran is a retired Army staff sergeant. He was injured while serving in Afghanistan. A bomb went off, blowing him over a cliff. He broke several bones, suffered traumatic brain injury and a spinal cord injury, and remains paralyzed from the waist down. He learned about adaptive sports and handcycling while recovering at Walter Reed Medical Center.
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Jason Whitman, who sometimes provides freelance photography for WVXU, works with QL+ and UC to match students and veterans to create solutions.
"Omar and I have known each other for about 10 years because we're both competitive cyclists, and we're both veterans, and I just thought, 'Yeah, we should build this for Omar.' "
Whitman describes Duran as a "humble guy" who isn't quick to point out that he's one of the best handcyclists in the world who has been on several U.S. Paralympic teams.
Duran lives in Florida. He recently came to Cincinnati to meet with the three-student team of Evan Papadopoulos, Kyle Becker and team leader Jack Barchet, to help refine their prototype for a stationary training handcycle. Barchet explains the trainer needs to function as a stand-alone device. Mounting Duran's handcycle in some kind of traditional stationary trainer, he says, would require taking the whole bike apart.
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"It would take, like, at least an hour for him to do, and to do that every time he needs to ride indoors just because there's bad weather for one day would be unreasonable."
Instead, the team is using a pre-built device called a kicker that's used in standard bike trainers, and flipping the concept upside down.
"If you think about normal bikes, it replaces your back wheel, and your bike sits on it and then you ride as normal," Barchet explains. "Handscycles work a little differently. They kind of work flipped upside down from normal bikes, so, we had to design a frame to mount that kicker upside down. The fork of his bike, which is where the crank set where his handles are on that he drives from, he has a secondary fork so we're using that. The actual bike components are all just true bike components, but then we've designed the frame around it to hold everything."
Barchet says the goal is to have the trainer ready or nearly ready by graduation at the end of the month, but all three team members are committed to refining it or continuing the work after graduation if they need to.
"At the end of the day, pleasing Omar is the main goal," says Barchet. I know a lot of my other classmates are on projects where things might work in theory, and that's sort of good enough, but for us, obviously, we want Omar to be able to use and train with this forever."
Duran is pretty excited, too.
"This will be my first stationary and I think it'll be the only one in the world at this moment that's a handcycle version. So, it'll be pretty cool."
