Personal Best: Raising awareness to fight lung disease

Anabel Stenzel is returning to ride in this year’s Bike for Breath.

After a two-year layoff, Anabel Stenzel is returning to ride in this year’s Bike for Breath.

Last year’s event, an annual ride sponsored by Breathe California, coincided with the biannual U.S. Transplant Games, and Stenzel was busy winning medals in the swimming pool for Team Northern California. In 2007, on the day of Bike for Breath, she was called for her second lung transplant.

Stenzel and her identical twin sister, Isabel, who live a few miles apart in Redwood City, were both born with cystic fibrosis, a genetic lung disease.

“As children, we were too sick to compete in any real athletics,” Anabel recalled. “Our father was a mountain climber and we looked at him with envy.”

After recovering from life-saving lung transplant surgeries, the Stenzel twins leapt off the sidelines and into the game. Isabel has run two half marathons, and in 2006, Anabel walked one — while her body was rejecting the first transplanted lung.

“I have this determination. If I signed up, by golly I’m going to do it,” Anabel said. “I did it with 70 percent lung capacity.”

Stenzel, a Stanford graduate and 12-year employee at the university, boasts of other post-transplant athletic accomplishments: snowshoeing, skiing in the Alps, surfing, hang gliding, backpacking and white-water rafting. And, of course swimming and bike riding.

As captain of Team Second Wind, Anabel has assembled a group of lung transplant recipients, friends and family members — including fiancé Trent, older brother Ryuta and Isabel — to participate in Saturday’s 18th annual Bike for Breath. The ride begins at Life Technologies in Foster City with selected distances of from 10 to 62 miles.

“We ride at our own pace. It’s a ride for fun,” Stenzel said. “The purpose of our team is to raise awareness for Breathe California, that lung transplants exist and are a miraculous renewal for those who face lung disease. In 2006, I rode the 18-miler twice. That is my ultimate goal. I’ll play it by ear. I do admit that the second transplant took a lot out of me.”

While recovering from the second transplant, Stenzel broke her foot while jogging. At the Transplant Games, one month after getting the cast off and one year to the day after the transplant, Stenzel won a gold medal in the 50-yard backstroke and a silver medal in the 50-yard butterfly.

“I think that it was all due to something above me, a higher power, the grace of God that made me win those medals,” Stenzel said.