Congratulations to Jimmy Toner who set the Unsupported Lake Erie Circumnavigation record in the following categories: Male – 18-49 age group, upright bike.

This is also a new Guinness World Record

Unsupported Record Attempt for the Lake Erie Circumnavigation

There was a record up on the board for this route, so naturally one looks and thinks, “I can beat that”. I grew up around Lake Erie, so it felt within my rights to claim victory over its encircling. 

Long John Silver’s – 3:09 AM

It was a straight shot of blinky yellows for about 30 miles, but already there were problems. My front bottle kept managing to escape from its cage on these rough city roads, requiring me to slam the brakes and turn back for the fallen comrade. I eventually took off my headband and wrapped it tight around the cage. 

Downtown Cleveland was empty and quiet. I cruised through Lakewood and the familiar Lake Road. Flat #1 occurred sometime here, then 30 minutes later flat #2. I was not happy, and with only 1 tube left, I’d need to stop again at a bike shop. The sun came out and began its scorching. All the way from the start, through Toledo, and up through Detroit the momentum continued to get broken up with flat stops, bike shop stops, bathroom stops, dumping-water-all-over-my-body stops, and more bottle launches in Detroit construction. 

I approached the Gordie Howe pedestrian bridge to cross the border, but they really try to hide the entrance, and I had to wander a bit to find it. The gates were locked. They closed it because somebody saw a lightning bolt way off in the distance. A Canadian guy was stuck there, locked out of his homeland, but he seemed hopeful. After 30 minutes, they opened and I made it through customs at about 1:35PM, with over 400 miles to go. 

At this point I needed more sugar, which is when I discovered I didn’t have roaming service in Canada. A big detail to overlook. There was an overwhelming feeling of being caught in public with my pants down. I came across the Canadian dollar store (Dollarama) and clip-clopped hurriedly around the store with my darth vader helmet on. Here in Canada, they place their objects in strange places. I could not locate the sugar. Lots of clip-clopping up and down the aisles. Had to get pointed to the sugar, and found they only had brown and coconut sugars. This was nonideal.

Out on the curb I dumped the sugar bags into my bottles and bladder, then threw in scoops of salt mix, then filled with water. I chugged a few other sugary drinks and finally got back on the bike. After a couple hours of bad roads and construction reroutes, I stopped at a library to handle the Canadian roaming issue: “ChatGPT how to fix this QUICK!” As soon as that got hooked up, my phone exploded with tornado alarms. Had to stop again and check radar – a big gigantic storm heading for me, a storm that was not supposed to be there. I will later find out that it ripped out and toppled dozens of large trees in Erie, PA, and caused power outages for 3 days in Detroit, but at the time I thought I could maybe outrun it. 

The Storm and Mr. Horton

Massive walls of dark clouds hung over me to the left. Shapes of clouds I’ve never seen before. I was about an hour out from the next town. There was a growing sense of apprehension and fear – this storm was in the shape of a horseshoe and I was about to get swallowed. There was no cover, no safehaven, no trees or blankets or help of any kind. I was alone with the cornstalks. 

It is very difficult to capture what it’s like, what it’s like after riding a bike for 14 hours, with 20 hours still to go, with exhaustion setting in and dread for how much still to give, with the sky collapsing down on you, with feelings of paranoia, exposure, desolation, with no choice but to accept whatever is about to be unleashed upon you. It is simply a unique context that one does not find oneself in too often, a context that is so characteristic of the simultaneous awfulness and holiness of ultraendurance efforts.  

The rain hit first, then the winds. They tried to rip me off the road. Not a strong, steady flow of wind – rather, an intermittent, bursty type that keeps you death-gripping the bars. There was no chance of staying in the aero position here. Visibility was terrible with the visor fogging up. Then the lightning came a-booming and a-cracking. Loud enough to cause physical jump-scares. I was right on the edge. This was dangerous but I was getting so close. At one point, a car rolled up beside me. I couldn’t see or hear anything through the downpour and wind, but I signalled a thumbs-up and gave a smile. 

Somehow I made it through and took shelter in a Tim Hortons. I sat there for about an hour, dripping a massive puddle, and constantly shivering. I inquired the cashier about the possibility of there being a towel in the vicinity, but she just handed me some napkins. I had planned on waiting for caffeine until late in the night, I had planned on a 100% liquid diet, but plans got thrown out in that dumpage. This truly felt like it was the end of the attempt. There was an agonizing period of coming to terms with the reality of the situation: I needed nothing more than to be done with this, to go back home, to stop pedaling, to peel off the skin-tight suit, to sigh in relief. But look at that, there are still 350 miles to go. Threeeee hundred aaaand fiftyyyy milesssss. Through the night, through the remote areas, in my wet, shivering, discouraged state. I could not be in a worse spot to give up, and I could never ask anyone to come pick me up from all the way out here. Even if I bailed and collapsed in a hotel room, I’d still have to wake up and BIKE BACK HOME! There was no teleporting out of there. No chance of a helicopter evac. There did not seem to be a good solution, so I took the only reasonable one – get back out in the rain and keep pedaling. 

And isn’t that a curious thing.. I was a pathetic man in that Timmy Ho’s. A pathetic man who did not give up – not due to strength, but due to a lack of choice. There is absolutely no way I would have kept riding if I were back home. No way. But when you put yourself in situations like this, you are not given the luxury of choice. You simply must do something that your brain has adamantly decided not to do. It is both a torture and a gift, and is certainly the source of my confusion and fascination with ultra and adventure. People ask me why I do long, torturous rides, and I have never really known the answer, but I suspect it has something to do with situations like this. 

Into the night

I fought violent shivers for those first 10 miles back in the cold rain. I was still under the belief that this attempt was over, that I was not actually going to keep biking the whole way, but as any ultra-endurance athlete knows, you get good at holding viscerally opposing beliefs in the head and continue onwards anyways. You just let the civil war play out upstairs and quietly keep the physical movement alive. One muscle contraction at a time. The universe shrinks down into single pedal strokes. The entire goal of all the body’s cells becomes one pedal stroke. Over and over. This, for me, does not arrange itself intentionally – it arises out of survival, because the mental landscape becomes too unbearable to face, so the spirit turns to something it can bite and chew – in this case, a single pedal stroke. 

The violet shivers stopped after 30 minutes, and I could comfortably handle the bike again. The rain became lighter, then subsided and made way for a glistening sunset. I was nervous and scared of the coming night. The main concern was wildlife and random road issues that come up on the wheel quickly. I have had experience night riding, and they’ve all come with some close calls. Once I fell asleep after fighting the head-nods for hours, and landed in a soft grassy ditch. Another time I clobbered an unidentified furry creature and miraculously kept the bike upright. But the night also soothes the mind in some strange way. The goal and the current state and the agony of how many miles left just melt away into a trance, and I stared into the lightbeam thrown across the treadmill pavement. Tires hummed on perfect road surfaces, as if they were made from solid bouncy-ball rubber. There was a sense of propulsion that I was not creating. The land was pitch black. Stars twinkled. Crickets symphonized. One or two cars every hour, but I could see them for miles, and knew of their approach minutes in advance. Headlights cut through fog and angled over the rolling hills to make panes of glass.

It was extraordinarily beautiful, until I had to crap my pants. My body was given about a 60s warning before detonation. I jumped off and ran to the woods beside a cornfield. Just before leaving for this journey, I had packed a small microfiber rag for wiping my visor throughout the night. It was certainly used for wiping.. 

The rest of the night is a blur. There was one more Tim Ho stop, where I crammed in 3 large chicken/bacon/ranch sandwiches, 2 donuts, and more coffee. At some point, my brand-new front light died (despite having 60% battery level). I had a backup that wasn’t as trusted, and immediately plugged it into the external battery. It was a terrible moment, though – the thought of having light/battery issues in the middle of the night in remote Canada. All of my gear was still wet, so restoring charges to electronic devices was not an activity I had full confidence in. Then it was continuous riding all the way to the border. Wildlife: 2 separate coyote sightings, and a group of raccoons sitting on their butts in a circle in the middle of the road, looking as if I had just interrupted poker night. 

The Home Stretch

At 4AM, crossing back into the US at the Peace Bridge was not too bad, but speed gets killed just trying to get into the approach, with all the twisty sidewalks they make the bikes go on. I had to buzz for an officer and wait for him to log into the system. I smelled like a pig and looked silly. I mentioned I was attempting the world record and he said “cool”. 

At this point there was a sense of completion. Made it through the remote stretch, got through the border and through Buffalo before the traffic hit. Now it’s 5AM and making progress again. There was still, however, another 160 miles. I knew it was a bad idea, but my legs felt great so I pushed the gas for a couple of hours. Then I had 120 miles of bad legs and pure mental agony. So close.. but still not there, still 6 hours. I passed through Erie, PA where dozens of trees had been ripped out/struck by lightning. Had to reroute a few times due to tree debris and closed roads. 

At 60 miles to go, it started raining again. My feet were in terrible pain. Any pressure caused sensations of deep, sharp bruising. But nothin’ you can do about that except cry. 

A third flat occurred at 40 miles to go, which is when I discovered I had misplaced that extra tube I bought. Possibly when I was crapping in a cornfield. I used up my last tube and elected not to stop at a bike shop for another one and just roll the dice. Somehow I overlooked how awful the ending road would be when I built the route. It was excellent on the way out with no traffic, but at 12PM I encountered HEAVY and RUDE traffic, lots of construction, janky patchworks of pavement, still raining, and MILES of red lights. There must have been at least 30 minutes of stopped time at those lights, and the re-accelerations were particularly painful on my broken legs. A mechanical issue, a crash, a flat, at this point would be highly problematic. 

But I got lucky and clawed my way back to Long John Silver’s with a finish time of 1:26PM, where my parents and Sabrina surprised me with cheers. 

Coda

Ultracycling is a mysterious animal that I know less about each time I dip my toe. I do not know why I am drawn to it, why I keep doing it, whether it is foolish or privileged or selfish or what. I spend a very large amount of time in agony and making promises that this will be the last time I do something stupid like this. And then it becomes something else. I just don’t have any idea what it all is, or what effect it has. I think it’s some kind of paradoxical mix of simultaneously contradictory and truthful ideas. It is selfish, it is privileged, it is absolutely stupid and meaningless, and then it is also inspiring, and can be harnessed to support unselfish consequences. 

This attempt drew a huge response from the community – at least it felt like it. People from all times and areas of my life followed along the live tracking, and it spread from there. I am blown away, shocked, flabbergasted at how many people donated, supported, followed along, and sent messages. It is delightful confusion for me. We were able to raise $2,779 to help people get easier access to mental healthcare services, so maybe there is at least one person out there whose day is slightly less horrifying due to the generosity of the community. 

In case you wanted to see, here are my feet, which are still numb a week after finishing this ride:

Nutrition

-1800g plain sugar (7200 cals)

Tim Horton stops:

-1 wrap, 1 donut

-2.5 sandwiches, 2 donuts

(About 3000 cals total)

Gas Stations:

-3 calypso

-3 big Gatorade

-3 protein shakes

-croissant sammies

(About 2800 cals)

Approx 13,000 total consumed, over 20,000 burned