Pedals of FaithA Memoir of Breaking, Waiting, and the God Who Meets Us in the Wilderness
For most of his life, Ricky Fodor was a man in motion - chasing the next deal, the next market, the next finish line. Then, in November 2023, everything stopped. No job. No plan. No next step. Just a blinking cursor, a quiet house in Bentonville, Arkansas, and a question he couldn't outrun: Now what?
Pedals of Faith is the true story of what happened in the stillness that followed - a season that stripped away everything Ricky had built his identity on and left him staring at a version of himself he barely recognized. It's the story of a marriage tested and deepened by uncertainty. Of a wife, Raquel, whose faith carried them both when his ran dry. Of a bike that sat untouched in the garage for months because he no longer had the strength to ride it - and what it took to clip in again.
It's the story of applications sent into silence, of doors that closed without explanation, and of the slow, unglamorous work of learning to trust when nothing was certain and no one was hiring. And it's the story of what came after: an unexpected door opening with a French cycling brand, a business built from nothing across three continents, a first paycheck that felt like water in the desert - and a phone call from Brazil that brought Ricky home to say goodbye to his parents, both lost within months of each other, after years of distance he never meant to let grow so wide.
Through it all, cycling remains the throughline - not as metaphor, but as ministry. The rhythm of the pedal stroke as prayer. The Ozark gravel roads as sanctuary. The climbs of southern France as revelation. Ricky writes with the specificity of someone who actually lived every mile of this - the color-coded rejection spreadsheet, the FedEx box of jerseys that arrived like a promise, the sample he crushed by hand at a friend's kitchen table who told him: this is what wine-making looks like.
At its center, Pedals of Faith makes an unflinching claim: that the season Ricky feared most - the unemployment, the waiting, the humiliation of starting over at forty - was the same season that slowed him down enough to keep a medical appointment he had been putting off for years. An appointment that saved his life. This is a book about how God's delays are not always denials, and how the wilderness we resent is sometimes the only place quiet enough for Him to get our attention.
Written with raw honesty and without easy answers, Pedals of Faith speaks to anyone walking through their own unemployment, grief, health scare, or season of waiting - and to anyone who has ever wondered whether the pause in their story might be preparation rather than punishment. It is a memoir about marriage, faith, fatherhood of the soul, and the particular grace of a God who sets a table in the middle of the wilderness, long before the feast makes any sense.
Pedals of Faith is also the foundation of Faith Over Fear, a men's health advocacy movement Ricky founded to encourage men to stop putting off the appointments that could save their lives. Through Faith Over Fear, Ricky partners with Highlands Oncology on cancer awareness and is preparing a fundraising climb of Mount Kilimanjaro in 2027.
For readers of When Breath Becomes Air, The Boys in the Boat, and Wild - but told through the lens of faith, family, and two wheels on a gravel road - Pedals of Faith is a story about what we find when we finally stop moving long enough to listen.
Available in English and Portuguese (Pedais da Fé). Learn more at pedalsoffaith.com.
