Told by Guinness World Record Applicant Bruce Closser to H&H

It had been in the back of my mind to do this ride for some years. I had a nephew who’d done it some years ago, and I knew others who did things like that. It seemed like an interesting thing to do.

When you have a job, you can’t just take off for three or four months. After I retired, I spoke with my wife about it, but she wasn’t thrilled about being by herself the whole summer. After she died last year from Parkinson’s disease, I thought, “Maybe this is a good time to do it.“

I made the decision in February while skiing in Colorado with my son and daughter-in-law. That didn’t leave a whole lot of time since you usually start out in May. I wanted to begin as early as I could to get through the midsection of the country so I’d be in the mountains before super-hot weather came.

Then I read an article about a guy from Colorado who had just set Guinness World record as the oldest man to bike across the U.S. He was seventy-five. I thought “Huh! I’m seventy-eight and I’m going to do this. The record is there for the taking.” You have to apply, get approved, and submit a whole bunch of evidence before it’s adjudicated. If I hadn’t seen that article, it probably never even would have crossed my mind.

The Trans America Bicycle Trail goes from Yorktown, Virginia to Astoria, Oregon—4,205 miles total.

It was laid out in 1976 for the U.S. Bicentennial and is the first long U.S. bike trail mapped and designated. It’s become a popular cross-country route and is available on paper maps, phone maps, GPS. The Adventure Cycling Association has since made bike routes all throughout the country. You can go almost anywhere now.

I had less than two months to get ready. I’d never done anything like this before, never even did a bicycle tour before. I ski during winter, and I lifted weights to prepare, mostly working on my lower body. But I didn’t have the right kind of bike. There are bikes especially for this purpose but there aren’t many of them around. I researched and found the bike I wanted. The nearest dealer was Love & Bicycles in Negaunee.

The distributor didn’t have the complete bike available so the guys at Love & Bicycles and I got the frame and the fork, researched ordering all the components, and the shop built the bike for me. It was geared exactly the way I wanted (to the extent that we could find the equipment) and was a better bike than what I would have originally gotten.

By the time we got the bike, fenders, panniers (bags you attach to the frame), and racks for them all together, I had just one 1.5 mile ride on it before shipping it out. I was supposed to fly to my daughter’s in Baltimore May 1, but couldn’t get out until May 3 because of a snowstorm.

I started the trail May 5 and completed it August 22—109 days total, with 91 actual riding days, as some days I rested, visited friends, or had to wait out thunderstorm forecasts to avoid possible hail. My bike had to go in a shop to get adjustments made. One component needed to be replaced a couple of weeks from the end.

Chasing down prescriptions was a constant battle.

If I’d known how complicated that was going to be, I’d have planned for it. When skiing in Colorado, I could pick up my prescriptions at the local Walgreens, but the bike trail goes through little towns, a lot of which don’t have a Walgreens.

I have Parkinson’s Disease, so I have to pay really close attention to my meds. It’s a movement disorder where you have a lack of dopamine. Dopamine is a neuro transmitter that allows your brain to communicate with your muscles, so with Parkinson’s the signal gets there late, or garbled, or not at all. It can make you slow or uncoordinated, lose your balance.

We know pedaling is particularly good for Parkinson’s. There are pedaling programs all over the country for it. The Y in Marquette has one. But there aren’t many seventy-eight-year-olds with Parkinson riding their bikes across the country, so I had to figure out for myself how to adjust my medications.

You’re the expert on your body. I figure out what works and my doctor prescribes it for me. I take the normal Parkinson’s meds plus one that’s not so common, so it would be out of stock sometimes, even though the online info would say my prescription was ready to be picked up. If I were to do it again, I would make sure I had every prescription I needed completely stocked beforehand. That probably would have cut five days or so off my trip.

The Trans America Trail isn’t a straight line.

It seems laid out to keep off heavily trafficked routes wherever possible, go through beautiful places, and over every mountain range we can possibly find—Blue Ridge, Appalachians, Ozarks, Bitterroots, Cascades, and the Coastal Range. I did the equivalent of 175,000 feet of climbing, which is 34 miles.

I’m a pretty avid cyclist—I do regular road biking and mountain bike ride with a group once a week. There are five bicycles in my garage. Many times I’ve ridden 40 to 60 miles in a day. What I didn’t know was “Could I do it back-to-back, day after day after day?”

I just had to do it and find out. Turned out I could. Once I knew that (and I was sure of that two weeks into it), then I knew I could complete the trail, barring some catastrophe. Fifty percent of solo riders will finish the Trans America. Of those who get through the first ten days, 90% will finish.

That’s because five days in, you head up the Appalachians. They’re the hardest in the whole thing because they’re so steep and go on for a long, long time, 200 miles or more. They have older roads, not engineered to modern standards of 6 or 7, maybe 8% grades. The road by Marquette Mountain has a 7% grade at its steepest. In the Appalachians, you can get 12, 14 even 17% grades. While riding them, I had my epiphany about a hard day.

I was complaining to myself about how hard it was, wondering “Do I really want to be here doing this?” I told myself “Well, you have two choices here–you can climb this hill or you can sleep in the bushes.”

I decided “Okay, I signed up for this. I knew it was going to be hard, but it’s a hard day, not a bad day.”

I think that distinction is important. We all have to do hard things in our lives, but they’re not necessarily bad. You can think “This is a hard day, not a bad day.” And you just do it. My technique of getting up and riding as long as I could, which might be only a minute or two up that mountain, then wait ’til my breathing settled down, might be another two or three minutes, and go up through a series of stops and eventually get there. Then you get to go down and that’s a lot of fun!

The headwinds are the hardest thing, not only because they can practically bring you to a stop. When you get to the top of a hill, you think “I did it. I’ve won.” Not with the wind. It just keeps blowing. This implacable, uncaring wind just keeps wearing you down. The last twenty miles one day, I hit a howling headwind. I screamed at the wind that day, “You will not stop me! I will do this!”

In the many conversations I had with people along the way, they always asked why I was doing this. It took ’til I got to Colorado to have the answer.

What I observed as I went along and met others biking the whole trail is that people do this when they’re at a transition point in their lives. When you have a job, kids at home, you can’t just take off and do this. People do this when they retire, graduate, quit their job and are trying to figure out what to do in their lives. I met one fellow at a restaurant who told me that when he was seventeen, his brother came back from Vietnam and said ,“Why don’t we ride our bikes to Alaska?” And they did.

The death of my wife Sally was a huge change in my life, definitely a transition point. It’s the first time I ever lived alone—I went from family to college to military to marriage. So I think that’s the reason.

Biking the Trans America has given me a huge feeling of satisfaction by doing something that’s hard and being successful at it. I found it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be and as people think it is. Once you can do fifty miles of daily riding, you just repeat that same thing over and over again. If you can do it five times, you can do it fifty times.

I realized I can step on my bicycle and go anywhere. I was constantly amazed at how far I had come. While I was doing this, I wrote about it on Facebook—Notes from America, with a detailed record of almost every day. It got really popular. I was really surprised. And I discovered I had some capacities at seventy-eight that I didn’t really know I had. It was a big confidence-builder.

I also learned that given an opportunity, people want to be kind.

I was the recipient of innumerable acts of kindness all the way across the country. I never had a negative encounter with another human being the whole trip, and I had situations where I needed someone’s help and it just came spontaneously, sometimes even before I asked.

I got off route for a prescription and had to chart my own course through rural Kentucky. There weren’t a lot of places to stay. I ended up in a little state-run campground that had no food or water there or en route. It was a hot day. I was virtually out of water, already thirsty, and facing a full night plus packing up and biking fifteen to twenty miles in the morning. When two fellas there found out, they took all my water bottles and drove half an hour away to fill them for me.

In Oregon, I got stranded with two flat tires due to very sharp, pervasive, tiny, strong, hard-to-locate goathead thorns. A woman living nearby provided water so I could locate and fix the holes, but every time there was another leak. She offered to drive me to a bike shop in town. They knew immediately what the trouble was and put a strip inside the tire that would be impenetrable for the thorns.

I also learned that this is an incredibly beautiful country.

Viewing it from the vantage point of a bicycle may be the best possible way—you’re going slow enough that you can see all the nuance and details, yet you’re going fast enough that you can cover some ground. I love driving, but you see things completely differently on a bike. And you can stop anywhere on a bike, unlike a car.

People would ask, “What was your favorite part of the trip?” I’d say “Right now; being here.” I didn’t have to be any place at any time. If somebody wanted to talk for twenty minutes, I could do that. I had time, and I had wonderful interactions with people.

I tried to enjoy every day and realize I didn’t come out to do this ride to get to Astoria, Oregon. I came out to do this every day and enjoy and appreciate every bit of it, and not look toward the end as being a destination. I think that worked well.

Excerpted from the Winter’23-’24 issue of Health & Happiness U.P. Magazine, copyright 2023, Empowering Lightworks, LLC. All rights reserved.