Lars Clausen was on a TV show called Evening Magazine tonight. Evening Magazine is a local TV magazine show for the Washington state area. Some might recall that Evening Magazine did a show the Panther Pride and UNICON 11 that’s in my monster gallery.
The Evening Magazine show caught me by surprise. I turned on the TV after getting back from unicycle club practice and there was Lars on his Coker.
There is an online article and an online video for the segment about Lars. The segment is about his ride down the West coast from Canada to Mexico.
Links:
Evening Magazine
Lars Unicycling from border to border
There is a link to the online video in the article. The video is the full 6 minutes for the segment about Lars. The streaming video is about 26MB in total.
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Unicycling from border to border
07:51 PM PDT on Tuesday, August 30, 2005
By JOHN STOFFLET / Evening Magazine
Lars Clausen has been to all 50 states. That’s impressive, but not that unusual until you find out he rode through them on his unicycle.
On his new adventure he hoped to cover the entire West Coast from the Canadian border to the Mexican border, all 1,700 miles.
This teacher’s aide and Lutheran pastor wanted to make the journey in about a month and a half.
His journey began in Blaine on the Canadian border to raise funds for the Inupiat peoples in Alaska � people he once served as a Lutheran pastor.
A couple of years ago, Lars unicycled from the West Coast to the East Coast and back � more than 9,000 miles. It took him seven months and he set two Guinness world records in the process.
“I’ve unicycled since I was ten, and I was out riding it one day and I thought maybe I could ride it across country,” he said. “A car gets you from place to place, but when you travel by unicycle, or when you travel by bicycle, it gets you into the place, and so it’s more about the journey than about the destination.”
On his last cross-country trek, Lars pedaled more than 5 million times.
There’s no coasting on a unicycle, but there are advantages to traveling at the pace of one wheel.
“I go 10 or 11 miles an hour and I call that the speed of hospitality,” he said. “It means I’ve got time to stop and talk with people and they’ve got time to shout out when I go by and we’ve got time to make a connection before I’m past.”
Traveling on one wheel also means you get to be at one with nature.
“Cars are great things, but you roll up your windows, roll down the highway at 70 miles an hour, put the air conditioner on and your purpose is to be somewhere else, and on a unicycle or a bicycle, your purpose is to be right where you are,” said Lars. “Instead of going from place to place, you’re into the place.”
As Lars pedaled down the West Coast, he stopped occasionally to peddle a book he’s written about his 2002 coast-to-coast trip. The book is called “One Wheel � Many Spokes.”
Most days, Lars pedals 40 to 50 miles, and meets up with wife Anne and kids Karianna and Kai along the way. Often, strangers, who’ve passed him along the route or who hear about his unicycle trek, stop to talk.
Fueled by those encounters with strangers who become friends, fueled by family and by a pair of iron legs that just wouldn’t quit, Lars Clausen it from Blaine, Washington to Tijuana, Mexico in 42 days.
Lars’s newest endeavor is called “Straight into Gay America” � a 1,024-mile ride gathering stories of life in the gay community today. He plans to have that book out in spring 2006.