When Ben Frederick moved to Western Massachusetts in 2015, he had the singular mission of seeing how far he could go as a professional cyclocross racer. “It was supposed to be my breakout season,” he recalls now from his new home in San Francisco.
But the following year, a seemingly minor crash changed everything. During a training ride on the local ’cross course, he fell while riding a sandpit and hit his head. Frederick stood up thinking he was fine, and continued his intervals. “Over the next 10 minutes, it got bad,” he says, recalling how he started to feel dizzy and nauseous. A friend picked him up and took him home. The symptoms persisted, stretching into weeks: His head ached, he struggled to read, he felt off-balance, and he had trouble remembering things. And as the physical symptoms lingered, he began to slide into a depression—a not uncommon side effect of a traumatic brain injury (TBI). In fact, people with a TBI are 11 times as likely to suffer from depression compared to people without one.
A brain injury like Frederick’s, unlike a collarbone break, is often invisible, with an unpredictable recovery. It took two years for his physical symptoms to recede, leaving him with anxiety, depression, and eventually anorexia, borne from a need to control something in his life at a time when he couldn’t control what was happening in his own brain.
Frederick returned to racing in 2018 and had a remarkable season in 2019, but he hadn’t recovered entirely. He started thinking about the brain injury and the eating disorder as “monsters” that lurked in his closet and that he wasn’t ready to face. The eating disorder “got bigger and bigger, until it wasn’t something that I was controlling anymore, it was controlling me,” Frederick says. One thing that helped was when he began to visualize taking a big scary monster and making it tiny—it wouldn’t disappear entirely, but it could become less daunting.
And that’s how the Small Monsters Project (TSMP) began in 2021, with a mission to bring the discussion of mental health and concussion recovery to the forefront in his cycling community. Frederick started a website and his own one-person cycling team—branding himself in a purple and blue cycling kit adorned with tiny cartoon monsters designed by Alex Carlson. And by acting as a live billboard for the cause, Frederick collected donations for the Love Your Brain nonprofit, raising over $50,000 in the first two years. The nonprofit helps people who have suffered from TBIs, and for every $100 donated, a youth cyclist is provided a baseline concussion test and follow-up testing after a crash.
Today his cycling kit serves as a reminder of what he has overcome. Sales of the jersey have raised over $7,000 this season, and this August he hosted a social ride and fundraiser in San Francisco that brought out 120 riders and raised an additional $15,000. “If I’m able to acknowledge these monsters every day, it’s much easier to maintain them,” he says. “Having them doesn’t mean that I can’t have an awesome high quality of life. It’s about making the big monsters small.”
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Molly writes about cycling, nutrition and training with an emphasis on bringing more women into sport. She's the author of nine books including the Shred Girls series and is the founder of Strong Girl Publishing. She co-hosts The Consummate Athlete Podcast and spends most of her free time biking and running on trails, occasionally joined by her mini-dachshund.
