Today in sporting history

On this date in 1988, a man named Ronald J. Dossenbach began a cross-country bicycle trip. This wasn't just any cross-country bicycle trip -- it set a new record. And it wasn't even this country. It was one of only three nations on earth that's bigger than the United States. No, it wasn't the USSR (the largest controlled-border nation the world has ever seen), and no, it wasn't China.

Twenty years ago today, Dossenbach left Vancouver, British Columbia, and alighted for Halifax, Nova Scotia. According to Google maps, the shortest-distance route between those two cities is 3,474 miles miles. By comparison, it's 2,764 miles from New York to Los Angeles. And most of that shortest route is through the United States, so he must have gone a couple of hundred miles farther just for the sake of staying in Canada.

Dossenbach completed his cross-Canadian course in 13 days, 15 hours. That's a total of 327 hours. So assuming he went 3,600 miles, that works out to about 11 miles an hour at all times. That's the average speed he was moving whether he was riding, stopping to eat, sleeping, whatever he was doing.

I recently rode 20 miles on the Trumbull County section of the Western Reserve Greenway Trail, and completed that trek in about an hour and a half. That works out to about 13 miles per hour. And I really pushed it, and was proud of myself for keeping up that pace. This guy kept up almost as good a pace as that -- for more than TWO WEEKS.

What can I say about that? It's darned impressive.