With eighty-one days and more than 5,500 kilometers behind him, Adam Hoerdt pedaled his bike into Waterford on Thursday afternoon and ended his cross-country mission.
A crowd of supporters gathered at Wishbone Brewing Company welcomed him home with a celebratory beer. It marked the completion of the second leg of his coast-to-coast journey.
It was a day of mixed emotions for the 52-year-old whose bike ride was meant to bring awareness to arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC), a disease of the heart muscle that has devastated his family.
Just a few hours earlier, Hoerdt stopped into a Cambridge long-term care facility to see his 24-year-old son, Greg, whose fifth cardiac arrest caused by ARVC has left him incapacitated, unable to walk, talk or eat on his own .
“I’ve been on an emotional roller coaster,” said Hoerdt. “While I did this I was thinking of Greg. Even my worst day on the bike was better than his best day.”
It’s not the first time ARVC has caused personal tragedy in the Hoerdt family. In 2001, when Greg was three and his brother Ben was one, Hoerdt’s wife Jackie, his high school sweetheart, collapsed in the outfield at a softball tournament and was pronounced dead a short time later at the hospital. She was 31.
Doctors couldn’t explain at the time what caused the seemingly healthy young mother’s death. It wasn’t until her son Greg’s cardiac arrests 17 years later that the family would get a definitive answer.
After Greg was diagnosed with ARVC, the coroner’s office recovered Jackie’s autopsy report, along with slides of her heart tissue, which confirmed she also had the disease.
Since that time, five more family members, including Hoerdt’s younger son, Ben, now 21, have been diagnosed with ARVC.
“In 2021 I sat down with my family and said I have to do something for myself, mentally, emotionally and physically,” said Hoerdt of the cross-country bike ride. “I wanted to use this to make a difference.”
Hoerdt consulted with doctors who pointed to the need to bring awareness and research dollars to ARVC, a genetically inherited condition in which there is an abnormality in the muscle wall of the heart. A child has a 50 per cent chance of inheriting the ARVC gene if one parent is a carrier. It is most often diagnosed after the sudden death of someone in their 20s and 30s.
“It’s not as rare as you think it is,” said Hoerdt. “It’s unknown. If you hear about someone having cardiac arrest after a hockey game or on the soccer field, often it’s ARVC.”
Hoerdt, a Waterford resident who was a long-time math teacher at Paris District High School, began his cross-country bike ride in 2021 when he cycled from St. John’s, Nfld. to Waterloo, Ont. when he was forced to postpone the rest of the trip due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He began the second leg of the trip, from Victoria, BC to Waterford, on May 29.
While committed to raising awareness about ARVC and funding for research – the family’s goal is to raise $75,000 to sponsor a one-year electrophysiologist fellowship at Toronto’s Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, Hoerdt also is painfully aware of importance of personal support.
“We need to create a family support network in Canada. I met dozens of people who have been diagnosed (with ARVC) and was able to help connect them. We’re building a community. It’s all about spreading the word.”
A lot has been learned about ARVC since the death of Hoerdt’s wife 21 years ago, but he said the lack of information available about the disease in Canadian research centers continues to be a problem. And, he said, people who think they have an issue need to challenge their doctors to refer them to a cardiologist.
“We’ve come a long way but there’s still a long way to go.”
Contributions to ARVC research can be made to the UHN Foundation at