Stewart Kohl’s two-car garage looks like any other two-car garage attached to an immaculate upscale home — until you look up. Hanging upside-down from the ceiling are his bicycles, a collection that will stun anyone who still thinks of cycling as a leisurely spin around the neighborhood on a trusty childhood Schwinn. There’s the custom Seven ID8 with electronic gearshift, the sturdy Trek 7500 for commuting to his Public Square office, the third-hand Basso for riding in foul weather, the Hummer that folds up so it can be attached to a parachute and dropped from a plane with military paratroopers.
His favorite, however, is the Comotion Co-Pilot tandem he and wife, Donna, ride in Velosano, the annual Cleveland Clinic cycling event they launched in July 2014 with a $1 million pledge and has raised $8.4 million for cancer research. He explains that the wheels come off and the frame breaks down into three pieces for packing in a large suitcase.
“We’ve never done it, partially because Donna’s not that into cycling and partially because I’m afraid I’ll never get it back together again,” the 61-year-old co-owner and co-chief executive officer of The Riverside Company, a private-equity firm based in Cleveland and New York City, confesses.
Kohl’s passion for cycling is rooted in the sense of freedom he experienced on two wheels as a kid growing up in a New Jersey suburb of New York City. He remembers pedaling for miles as a grade-schooler vacationing on nearby Fire Island. “The towns are fairly small,” he says. “So, you had the sense of really covering ground.” But the bicycle remained nothing more than a primary mode of transportation until the late 1970s, when a housemate convinced him to buy a better one — a Fuji Monterrey — so he could join excursions into the countryside around Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he’d taken a job after graduating from Oberlin College.
“We’d often ride to Dexter, Michigan, along the Huron River,” he rhapsodizes. “It was very pretty — there were nice bike paths. And there was an apple cider mill. So, we would go for apple cider and doughnuts.”
By 1998, five years after Riverside opened its Cleveland office, Kohl was ready for his first day-long “century ride,” a hundred-mile “Sunday in June” tour of Geauga County’s Amish country organized by the Cleveland Touring Club. That same year he completed his first hundred-mile Pan-Mass Challenge, a fundraiser for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston that inspired Velosano, at a cancer-survivor friend’s suggestion. The fun and feeling of accomplishment he experiences from completing such courses still comes at a price.
“Your legs are tired,” he says. “Your butt hurts.” But the aches and pains come with a major benefit. “You not just feel like you can eat — you kind of have to eat. You’re burning a lot of calories.”
Kohl is quick to point out that there are Cleveland-area cyclists who ride much farther and faster than he does, although he bikes working destinations from Seattle to Singapore. “In a good year, I might do 2,000 miles of riding,” he says. “They might do 5,000 a year.” Weekly fair-weather excursions are limited to Headlands Beach State Park in Mentor and downtown Chagrin Falls for lunch at the Lemon Falls Café, exploring sections of the Towpath Trail along the Ohio & Erie Canalway, and circumnavigating the city via Cleveland Metroparks bike trails. But he still experiences that same sense of freedom he relished as a kid.
“It is really one of the only quiet times of the day for me,” he adds. “In that sense, I view it as a real luxury.”
