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SELDOM HAILED CYCLING HEROES: IAN HIBELL

Ian Hibell would’ve been 76 this year. He died almost exactly three years ago, and if you never heard of him that’s hardly surprising. Hibell didn’t ride in the Tour de France — he rode much tougher miles than that, nearly a quarter million of them, in fact, in the last 40 years of his life.

In the 1970s he took an 18,000-mile expedition from the tip of Cape Horn to the farthest bikeable point in North America, in Alaska. While the riding was brutal and exhausting, getting across the Atrato Swamp in Colombia, which had never been crossed directly, was near suicide. Hibell and two other men averaged barely 400 meters of progress a day, struggling chest deep through muck, sleeping in hammocks strung above the water, and carried their bikes overhead as much as possible. They nearly starved, too, rationing tablespoons of oatmeal by the end. Hibell wrote that upon exiting the swamp, when they spied an unlikely hut on dry land, “Our physical appearance would have brought tears to a Spanish inquisitor. We were torn, bloody, and haggard, but how good it felt to be alive!”

Somehow, even after more than two years on an expedition, Hibell hungered for more. So after returning from Alaska he set about riding from Norway’s North Cape to Cape Town, South Africa, the crux of which would be getting across the Sahara. And Hibell did nearly die during the desert crossing; he’d carried enough water to need a refill every third day (at first, the Sahara jeep traffic was kind enough to offer the guy on a bike handouts of water). But eventually he got off course and didn’t see a soul for five days. Only at the last minute a nomadic Toureg found him and offered rescue.

It’s fitting, albeit tragic, that Hibell was killed while riding his bike (a car struck him in Greece). After all, Hibell truly did spend his entire life pedaling: As a toddler he’d sneak away from home on a tiny pedal car and get all the way across his town of Brixham, England, when the police would have to pick him up and bring him back to his very vexed mother.

(Thanks to Adventure Journal writer Michael Frank for the story) 

6 months ago  /  20 notes  /  Source: 18milesperhour