“Focus on your ability, not your disability” has become the message of former town businessman Dan Zimmerman.

By his actions, he demonstrates that stroke and brain injury survivors can take back their lives.

He operated Woodworks by Dan on Colony Drive for 20 years before suffering a stroke in 2005 as a result of Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telanglectasia (HHT).

The disease prevents the lungs to filter clots efficiently.

Zimmerman and Catherine (Cat) Brubaker will ride Cattrike 700 recumbent tricycles from Gilbert to Cary, N.C. this summer.

They plan to ride with stroke and brain injury survivors and encourage them to purchase trikes and ride safely.

Their schedule has them leaving June 1, riding on rail trails and organized state rides, and arriving in North Carolina on Aug. 13.

The return trip will take them through Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Colorado and New Mexico.

Last year, Zimmerman and Brubaker rode more than 5,200 miles across the country from Anacortes, Wash. to Key West, Fla.

The trip demonstrated that “suffering a stroke does not have to mean the end of a person’s ability to enjoy an active lifestyle,” Zimmerman wrote on his website.

It took him a year before he barely could talk and three years before he could spell simple words after his stroke. He now lives in Tempe, and his main source of income is rent from his local work working building.

He started riding a trike recumbent four years ago to increase his mobility. The exercise improves blood flow to all areas of his body, especially his brain, he said.

Brubaker survived a criminal sexual assault in which she sustained in injury that resulted in excessive amounts of blood, which caused an anoxic brain injury.

After learning to walk and talk again, she was a passenger in a head-on collision and again a survivor of a traumatic brain injury.

Zimmerman can be contacted at dan@spokesfightstrokes.org; Brubaker’s email is catherine@spokesfightingstrokes.org.