Two men wind up East Coast bike trip

What started out as a way for two men to improve their health turned into a two-year East Coast adventure as they rode their bikes from Calais to Key West, Fla., during their vacations.

It all added up to a 3,067-mile journey, and Jason Baack of Frankfort and Dick Young of Bangor, both employees of the Cutler Health Center at the University of Maine, faced adversity along the way.

They had to hunker down in March to let a snowstorm pass in North Carolina, rode through thunderstorms and endured scorching temperatures.

Then there was Florida, where broken glass punctured their tires five times in one day. They had eight flats during the whole trip.

But the journey also gave them a chance to see a part of America they otherwise wouldn’t have seen, at least not in the way they did. The two used some back roads and paths.

Baack and Young used recumbent bikes, which have seats that are more like lawn chairs than regular bike seats.

They traversed sections of the unfinished Greenway Trail and they crossed the Seven-Mile Bridge spanning the rich waters of the Florida Keys.

The two finished their East Coast ride a week ago after covering 235 miles from northern New Jersey to eastern Connecticut.

The 6-foot, 4-inch tall Baack, 32, had previous experience in extended trips, having hiked the Appalachian Trail in 1995. But he admitted it was health concerns that prompted him to begin riding the recumbent bike.

As the electronics communications coordinator for the health center, Baack gets e-mails from UM students wanting to know how to improve their health. Yet he weighed more than 350 pounds before the trip.

He said he felt a little guilty about forwarding advice that he himself wasn’t following.

As a 45-year-old athletic trainer, Young was finding it harder to fit his own fitness into his schedule and he said that staying in shape was getting harder as he was getting older. At 6 foot 11/2 and weighing 235 pounds, Young said, his doctor had told him he should lose 10 to 15 pounds.

“We were developing a culture of telling students one thing and not doing it ourselves,” Baack said last week.

So they got into bicycling together. Like any new regimen, they started slowly.

The two began with shorter jaunts on their bicycles, gradually moving up from 10-mile rides to longer excursions. A 60-mile trip to Belfast led to a ride from Brewer to York, about 220 miles. Then they learned about the Greenway Trail, which Baack described as the urban Appalachian Trail.

From that emerged the idea of covering the East Coast, using their vacations over a two-year period to make various legs of the journey. Winter vacations were reserved for the warmer weather of the south, although Baack said the snowstorm in North Carolina held them up a day.

Both men said that since they have been biking – three vacations a year – they have lost weight, Baack about 85 pounds, and that they have lowered their blood pressure and feel better overall. It helped them with their workouts.

Knowing that they had their riding trips ahead of them helped keep them on track throughout the rest of the year. The various weather conditions they would face, such as the high heat in the South, also helped them train better.

On their bike ride vacations, their routes and stops were planned with help from their wives. Both men are amateur ham radio operators and used global positioning system equipment that allowed their position to be picked up by one of their wives in a vehicle in the area.

They could then pinpoint where they were and where they needed to go. Family members could also track their progress by logging onto a special Web site.

An SUV they initially used was replaced last fall by an RV that gave them greater flexibility, reducing the reliance on hotels and allowing them to stay in a park in a scrape.

With the East Coast trip completed, the two men are setting their sights on a coast-to-coast trek, also during their vacations, although Baack said he has had to promise his wife a bike-free vacation in Key West.