Million Mile Man... Continued

Tour of Ireland. The retirees are comparable to Marilyn Monroe dying while beautiful. Picture her in your mind. Now imagine her as a wrinkled 80 year-old woman, and your Grandfather saying, “She was beautiful in her prime.” Danny was fast in his prime, and to those who don’t know him now, he is just the crazy guy who is constantly riding his bike around the neighborhood.
However, it is good that there are new generations of cyclists coming through Danny’s world. Danny makes it his job to show new riders cycling, and life, as he sees them. Whether it be racing, or just riding, Danny has his perception of the way cycling should be, and he will take every bit of an 8 hour bike ride to share it with you. Each and every bike ride should be an adventure, and there should be no holding back.

“You have ridden a bicycle around Pittsburgh for how many years and you have never thought to go down that road?” he will proclaim as you come upon pavement in the middle of nowhere. “Shameful! You are now shamed into riding down a new road!”

And as soon as you turn onto the road, he will proclaim “NEW ROAD!” with gumption.

In his mind, Danny has a database of roads and places. It is more than an atlas, it is more than a GPS. He knows everything that is within a 150-mile radius of Pittsburgh, and contains information that Garmin could not conjure up if they had to.

“There is a spring on the right hand side about a mile up where we can fill our bottles,” or “On very, very detailed maps, this town is called Gastonville.” It turns out that Gastonville is a church and a graveyard. He will memorize the roads that others have and haven’t been on, and will guide rides as such, tallying up the mileage of “NEW ROADS!” along the way and giving a total of “NEW ROADS!” at the end of the ride.

It is unbelievable to Danny that someone could ride the same roads twice before riding every single road once. As soon as every single road is ridden once, the rider then needs to expand his “radius” of roads.

“You have a 30 mile radius (60 mile round trip rides), that you have muddied like a dog on a leash! Your 30 mile leash is holding you back from beautiful new roads and new rides!”

He keeps a mental index of where people live, where people grew up, how many different ways he can cross the mountain ridge from his house in a single day, which roads he has ridden, with whom he has ridden them with and how many times. When the mental index fails, he has his