From Procrastination to Persistence 

Meet Nurse Jacque

Are you ready for a good bike story? A harrowing tale with steep mountain grades, great distances, high altitudes, bumps and scrapes, a narrow escape, and a bone fracture or two? 

 This isn’t that kind of story. Our story begins on a couch in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, with a woman’s desire to get herself and her husband off it.

When Jacque and Kyran Conarchy wed in 1998, they promised to love, honor, cherish and ride bikes together. But those plans didn’t pan out — the biking part, that is. 

“We rode them about five times, and then the bikes sat in the back of the garage,” said Jacque, 55, a cardiology nurse at Ascension Columbia St. Mary’s Hospital in downtown Milwaukee.  “Bikes get old from resting. They were rusted and the seats were eaten up by time.”

For their 20th anniversary, Jacque bought the couple brand new Trek FX bikes from Wheel and Sprocket’s Brookfield store. 

“Everybody at that store is a bike fanatic and not a salesperson, so it was a wonderful experience,” she said. 

It was October, a chilly month to start riding, she thought. The bikes sat in the garage for almost a year. Finally, in August 2019, Jacque rode her new bike for the first time “and proceeded to die after 5 miles.” 

“I didn’t realize I had the seat too low and didn’t know what I was doing, and so, it was a rough start,” she said.

Then, one day, a healthcare colleague, Lena Michels, who also purchased a bike at the Brookfield store, asked Jacque to attend one of our free seminars, “How to Fix a Flat Tire.”

Jacque said she learned a lot, got her seat adjusted and her gumption up, too.  Jacque and Lena, 31, a runner ready to change up her workout, hit the bike trails together. They started riding 10 miles, then worked their way up to 15, which is farther than Jacque had ever ridden before. 

“At mile 14, I’d start complaining about my knees, but Lena would say ‘I can’t hear you’ and keep going.” 

Every weekend, they would go a little farther. By October 2019, Jacque, reluctant to ride in the fall a year earlier, rode with Lena through December on days when the temperature stayed above 40 degrees. “Come March, we were back out there,” she said.

Their rides grew from 20 miles to 30 miles to a whopping 60 miles in one day. Not only did Jacque’s joints start to feel better, she shed pounds, too. 

“As I started to come down, I felt good enough to bike during the week. I even put a basket on it and went to the grocery with it. When people started to notice I lost weight and asked how, I said, ‘I started to bike more, and it made me want to be healthier.’ I started swimming, too, to do something different,” she said.

Jacque has lost 28 pounds. “I don’t have to lay on the bed to get the pants zipped up. That’s really cool,” she said. “I’m not where I want to be, but I’m on my way.”

She has set a goal to ride at least 50 miles a week and recently decided to level-up by installing pro pedals she can clip into. She also got company. “Lena red-rovered me, and I red-rovered another nurse, and now we have a posse of four nurses who ride bikes,” she said. 

Riding is more important to her now than ever, especially during COVID-19, she said. It’s about more than the physicality of it and weight loss; it’s a way to experience joy and sisterhood. The group started taking on new trails in Wisconsin, including the loop lake bike route, as well as through park lands in neighboring Illinois.

“That has been the non-physical change that’s been so great. I’ve never seen Madison [Wisconsin] that way before. We’ve had a ball going up to Madison or down to Racine. It’s opened up a lot of nature and discovery of new lands.” 

She finally got her husband to ride — once. “We picked a road that was very bumpy that day and it didn’t go well, but I haven’t given up.”

He will have some catching up to do. Jacque is no longer deterred by winter. She’s already thinking about how to stay on two wheels in cold weather as often as possible. 

“At first, as it started getting colder, I thought, ‘This is it. We’re done with biking. And then I remembered fat bikes! So, the next thing I’m thinking about is a winter trip and renting one of those to go on a snow trip on a bike.”

Before Jacque makes tracks in the snow, she has some advice for procrastinators, like she used to be: “Get together with new people who bike and create a passion, so you have someone to ride along with.”

She and her fellow nurses have added bike karaoke to their routine, riding and singing along to Whitney Houston tunes blaring from a speaker strapped to Jacque’s bike.

“I don’t think everybody else on the trail appreciates it. I don’t know if it’s illegal, but we slap the jams on, and most people smile at us and wave, because they know we’re having fun.”