RAAM champion Danny Chew Travels to Alaska by bike and Gets one Step Closer to 1 Million Cycling Miles
What happens to former Race Across America bike riders? Sometimes they’re kind of like old soldiers, “they just ride away.” Two-time RAAM champion Danny Chew is one of those riding away on his bicycle with a goal of tallying 1 million miles. Riding indoors or on a trainer doesn’t count. Chew logs all his miles outside, which is why it’s not surprising that he recently turned up crossing the Alaska border on his bicycle with his nephew, Steven Perezluha.
Perezluha, 18, enlisted his uncle to accompany him on a bicycle tour from his home in Longwood, Florida, to Alaska and back. Since Chew lives in Pittsburgh, his nephew bicycled the first 1,200 miles alone and then with his father.
About Danny Chew
Danny Chew is the type of person that people need to be warned about before they meet him. His eccentricities are sometimes overpowering, and can dwarf the rest of his personality. When off the bike, he is usually wearing sweatpants and a free t-shirt from some race, somewhere. He wears giant glasses similar to those of Mr. Magoo or DMC. Danny usually has a few days worth of a beard growing, and he is also a close talker.
On the bike though, he has quite an impressive cycling resume. He did his first double century at the age of 12, and has kept meticulous logs of his mileage since as he tries to achieve one million lifetime miles. He raced the first USPRO championships in 1985, and participated in legs of the defunct Tour de Trump. When he started slowing down, he changed his style to endurance races, concentrating on the Race Across America (RAAM) and solo 12 or 24 hour road races. He has completed RAAM eight times, winning twice. In 1996 he broke the transcontinental record for bicycles at a remarkable 8 Days, 7 Hours and 14 Minutes coast to coast, a bit longer than most people are comfortable driving the distance. It takes a special person to be able to do these types of events. In preparation for RAAM, Danny’s “Chewness” paid off. He did neck exercises for months, because fatigue has made it literally impossible for some RAAM racers to even hold up their own head. He deprived himself of sleep, and trained his body to know how to function on 3 or 4 hours sandwiched between 20 hours of saddle time. Danny once rode 180 miles, from Pittsburgh to Cleveland, without any food or water just to say that he did.
Read the Million Mile Man . . .
Highlights
A story in the Orlando Sentinel tells some of the highlights of the bicycle ride that continued from Pittsburgh on June 12. It sounds like the teen-ager had no trouble matching his 46-year-old world-class bicycling uncle.
For instance:
– Perezluha prepared for the trip for a year. His training regimen included putting his friend in a shopping cart and pulling him for 25 miles to imitate the act of pulling a cargo-laden bike trailer.
– Partly alone, and partly with his father, Perezluha bicycled the 1,259 miles to Pittsburgh in 7 days.
– Early in their bike travels they decided the trailers were too heavy and unloaded 30 pounds of gear (they started out with a 3-person tent, an air mattress and more).
– Their route took them into Canada at Niagara Falls and across Canada. They found insects a particular problem, along with saddle sores and boredom of riding across the plains.
– They aimed for 100-some miles a day, which usually took six to 14 hours to achieve. Their diet consisted of oatmeal for breakfast and pasta for dinner just about everyday.
Miles
The pair picked up the 1,400-mile Alaska Highway in British Columbia and that became their route to the border. They crossed the border on Aug. 6, 47 days and 5,115 miles after leaving Pittsburgh.
Their bike tour ended in Anchorage. That’s where they turned around and began their return bicycle trip on Aug. 13. We wish them good luck on a safe return home.
Chew’s goal
When Chew arrives back in Pittsburgh, he’ll be 10,000 miles closer to achieving his 1 million mile goal.
The ultracyclist already has hit the metric million mark back in November 2007 during the Dirty Dozen bike ride. That’s a challenging event in Pittsburgh that Chew co-founded. It routes bicyclists over the city’s steepest hills.
As amazing as Chew’s goal is, there is someone out there who has eclipsed it. Freddie Hoffman of New Jersey is the bicycle world’s million-mile man. When I wrote about him back in 2006, he had ridden his bicycle 1.3 million miles.
[Source: Bike Biz-Gene Bisbee]
[Source: Stephen Cummings-urbanvelo.org]
The Truth About Shedding Fat and Cycling
Cyclists begin riding for various reasons. There are a number of cyclist, however, that get on the bike for one reason only . . . and that is . . . to shed the excess fat. Cycling is a wonderful sport in that anyone, even someone who is overweight, can participate. Cycling affords the overweight rider less stress placement on vital joints such as the knees and hips.
To improve performance and to shed that excess fat, consider the following tips:
1. Cycling Diets
Dieting should be avoided while cycling. When shedding weight, its important to shed the right kind of weight. Shed fat gradually without metabolizing muscle mass. Dieting, in general, often causes not only fat loss, but vital muscle tissue loss as well. And if you diet improperly and eat improperly, you may even weight less, but carry more body fat.
Muscle burns calories and the more muscle volume you have, i.e. the more calories you burn. If you lose muscle, you will likely gain fat back faster when your return back to your pre-diet eating habits. Don’t fall for the dieting falacy while riding. You may be thinner, but loss of muscle mass will leave you slower and weaker and a less efficient cyclist.
2. Riding and Calories
As many Corpus Christi riders already know, wind resistence is probably increased 10 fold compared to other places that have less wind. This will greatly increase your chance of burning fat and calories. Factors that influence how many calories we burn when we ride include wind resistence, body weight, pace and terrain. Typically, a cyclist will burn 40 calories per mile at a relatively sedate speed of 15 miles per hour. A weekly ride schedule of 10 hours will burn 6000 calories. This is quite a lot, considering we lose a pound of body fat for every 3200 calories burned.
On a Wednesday night Lamar ride, factoring in wind resistence and speed, it is not uncommon to burn up to 4000 calories! It is probably not very important to count calories while cycling. Knowing how to replenish and rest properly after these types of rides is probably more important in your quest to improve performance.
3. Eating properly and balancing carbohydrate and fat intake
Nutritional balance is an important part of cycling that is often overlooked. High-level endurance athletes perform best with a diet consisting of 60-70% carbohydrate and less the 30% fat. Also, hydration while cycling plays a major role in your ability to burn calories and fat.
4. Dont neglect upper body training
Another area of fittness and shedding weight that is overlooked is upper body fittness. As your body looses weight, because of the lack of upper body excercise in cycling, the upper body can begin looking flabby as you loose not only fat, but upper body muscle mass. Year round resistence training is the answer. A good rule of thumb is to do about 20 minutes of upper body curls including situps, two times a week during cycling season and up to 30 minutes, three times a week in the off season. More on weight training in a later segment of this blog.
Here are some other tips on loosing weight while biking:
- Go long, not hard. Riding a long ride once a week (up to 4-6 hours) will burn lots of body fat. Also riding slow will allow you to burn fat gradully and not loose muscle mass.
- Replenish properly after your rides. Eat a properly balanced meal after your rides that includes fruits and vegetables and skip the high fat dessert. Also, avoid fried foods that are also high in fat content. Drink lots of liquid before, during and after bike rides. Not eating to try and loose more weight after a ride is not the answer, it will only make you feel crappy the next day and decrease your performance.
- Make proper recovery rides. Resting is as important in biking as interval training or riding long. Studies have shown that overtraining will not only cause fatigue, but decrease performance. Signs of overtraining include restlessness, increased sleeping heart rate and a decrease in maximum heart rate and output on hard rides.
Following some of these simple tips will have you looking fitter and enjoying the benefits, both mentally and physically, of cycling.
