[Drive Fast Race Hard Thrust.rar
Abdul Soumphonphakdy
Danny Chew is snarling, snorting and barking at me, his face thrust forward so it's only six inches from my own. White flecks gather in the corners of his mouth. He's pushed his bristling brown hair back on his head, and his eyes gleam behind his glasses, the bifocal lenses coming down almost as far as his gap-toothed grin.
This is, he tells me, one of his best party tricks: turning into a werewolf. He's already shown me some others. He's performed renditions of his favorite tunes: "How 'bout a band called The Re-Flex? 'The POL-i-TICKS of DAN-cing, doo doo doo!' The Hooters! 'Doo! Doo! DOOT! We were liars in love and we DANCED, doo doo DOOT!'" He's also guessed my height, weight and shoe size -- all accurately.
Post-transformation, Chew reclines in gray sweatpants, leather moccasins and a "Race Across America" T-shirt. He is sitting in the living room of the Squirrel Hill house he still shares with his mother, the house he has called home for all of his 44 years. Around him are trophies from years of bike racing -- competitions local and national. Two plaques shaped like the United States bear his name and winning times for the Race Across America, a grueling, ultra-endurance trek across the U.S.
Unlike, say, Lance Armstrong, Chew doesn't bike with a team. He is, on the road and off it, usually alone. And that road can be dangerous: Behind the basement stairs is The Bicycle Graveyard, where mangled bikes linger until they're stripped for parts. There's one from his biggest wreck, a deer that came out of nowhere. "BAM! I didn't even see the deer," Chew recalls. "I woke up in the hospital 10 hours later. A week later I was back on a new bike."
Chew is best known for winning the Race Across America in 1996 and 1999. Sleeping only a couple of hours a night, Chew finished the 3,000-mile trek in less than 8 days and 8 hours. He's finished in the top tier of the race a half-dozen other times. And although sponsorship dollars have dried up as younger, flashier racers have started winning, Chew has a bigger goal in mind.
To accomplish it, he has to keep himself from doing the very thing he treats as a party trick. Danny Chew can transform himself in an instant ... and yet those who know him say he hasn't changed in decades. And he can't change now, not if he wants to reach his goal.
To succeed, Chew has to keep himself from growing up, and from settling down. Because by his calculations -- and, next to biking, making calculations might be his favorite thing to do -- he'll be an old man, in his 70s or 80s when he does it ... when he rides his millionth mile.
"It was like I created a monster," says Danny's 50-year-old sister, Carol Chew Perezluha, laughing over the phone from her home in Florida. "Danny credits me with being the one to get him into cycling." When she and a neighborhood girlfriend were 15, the cute boys they saw on bikes led them to take up the hobby. Baby brother Danny, then 9, and middle brother Tom, 12, caught the bug.
All three Chew kids were serious bikers for a time. Carol qualified for state-level competitions, and Tom made the Olympic team in 1980, during the U.S. boycott of the Summer Games in Moscow. But it was Danny who has traveled the farthest of all.
Danny was always an odd duck, his sister recalls, and he preferred the bike to almost any kind of kid-mischief. "He always has a strong group of cycling friends," Carol says. "They admired him for his cycling, so they overlooked his social quirks." Those same cute boys who got her into biking in the first place were like older brothers to Danny, she says. Their father Hal built a trailer that could haul 13 neighborhood kids and their bikes to long rides in Ohio or Wisconsin.
But on a bike, he could outrace all that awkwardness. "Even when he was 14 years old, Danny loved to ride," says Oscar Swan, who has known Chew for more than 30 years (and who has written a book about Pittsburgh-area bike trips). "There was no one else in Pittsburgh who was close to him at that age."
And shortly after he started riding, Chew began tracking the distance he'd gone. He loved math, maps and biking, so keeping track of the intersection of the three was a natural habit. He logged his miles obsessively, first by meticulously measuring map scales, and later adopting increasingly sophisticated odometers and bike computers.
Races count, whether he wins or loses. Commuting counts, whether Chew is headed for a bike shop across town or to visit friends in Columbus. Miles logged on stationary bikes do not count, and are held in contempt: "The difference between a stationary bike and being out on the road is huge!" Chew says, in his distinctively stentorian, all-exclamation-points way of speaking. On a stationary bike, he declaims, you don't have to pull your body weight up notorious Western Pennsylvania hills or be buffeted by the wind.
Chew documents each ride in a meticulously kept diary. The red leatherette hardbound volumes -- each with the year inlaid in gold print on the cover -- sit in order in a desk drawer in Chew's bedroom. Each diary is packed with blocked printing that looks like the work of a fourth-grader, with letters exactly as tall as the space between the lines. ("I press so hard I have to have two sheets underneath," he says.) The daily entries are mostly in blue, though the first time Chew rides with someone new, their names are entered in red. (I'll get an entry tonight, Chew says, but only in blue because we didn't ride.) And each day's entry details weather conditions, companions, bike mishaps, routes taken and miles. Always miles.
He doesn't race much anymore, and doesn't ride as fast as he used to. But then he's not chasing any records, either: At least one other person, a New Jersey cyclist named Freddie Hoffman, has already reached the million-mile mark ... and he's still going. "At this rate, he'll get to 2 million," Danny says of Hoffman matter-of-factly, without a spark of competitive fire.
The million-mile point is just a way to measure the immeasurable: Chew's desire to ride. And with no commitments on his time, he just spends most days on the bike. The number "is just a way to describe how far you went."
Still, his worst fear is getting somehow disabled, because then he'd have to stop riding. Then he'd never achieve his arbitrary goal. But even if -- when -- he does makes it, he says, he'll just keep riding. No reason to stop.
And yet in some ways, despite all that motion, Danny has barely budged. All three Chew kids have degrees from the University of Pittsburgh. But Danny "never followed through" after graduating with his, says his sister Carol. "That's when we realized" her brother's life would take a different path.
Middle brother Tom Chew makes a living as an engineer in Hong Kong. He "kept up the riding, but his family became more important. My family was more important," says Carol, who teaches college math while raising two kids.
His room is a sort of time capsule. A low-slung, neatly made twin bed is dressed in a leopard-print comforter with elephant-print sheets peeking out. Tacked to a corkboard by the desk is a certificate from the Dean's List of 1986-87 at Pitt and a few autographed photos -- headshots of news anchors and muscle-bound female bodybuilders, who he says he admires for their dedication to a grueling physical pursuit.
I'm perusing a diary entry from earlier in the year with details of fixing a flat on a sunny Western Pennsylvania roadside and Chew is switching the tapes he's copied off the radio, going from Three Doors Down's "Kryptonite" to America's "Horse with No Name." Suddenly, he thrusts a mostly-empty screw-top tube into my hands. It is Rite-Aid brand hemorrhoid cream. I drop it immediately.
Thoughts and ideas just bubble over. While explaining the configuration of his bike's handlebars, he'll opine on whether women should shave their armpits or leave them lush (either way is fine with him). After explaining his elegant thoughts on why he is an atheist, he asks if I have a sister ... and what size shoes she wears.
"Sometimes I think some of the far-out and left-field and eccentric things that he does, he has a plan," says Don Erdeljac, who has known Chew for years. "It's not so much that he's far out or weird. He has a plan. He's looking for an observation, maybe like he's trying to screen people. The foot thing might not be about a genuine interest in feet, but how you react to what he says."
Today, as when he was growing up, Chew's friendships are based almost entirely on biking. Angelo Cialone, owner of Biketek in Squirrel Hill, has known Chew since they were teen-agers racing in the zoo parking lot. "He has the same kind of personality," Cialone says. "He talks forever. Nonstop, rar rar rar rar rar! He gets real personal as he rides."
"He's fun to ride with," says Stephen "Steevo" Cummings. Cummings and Chew met in 2002 while riding the "Dirty Dozen," an annual race Chew and his brother Tom concocted in 1983 to showcase Pittsburgh's hills. Whoever earns the most points climbing the 13 verticals gets serious bragging rights. Cummings has won the last three, but is still in awe of Chew and his encyclopedic knowledge of the roads: "He knows every single road within a 90-mile radius of Pittsburgh. He'll ride to Columbus from memory." And when you venture on to a new road with him, Cummings says, Chew will crow "NEW ROAD!" as you ride.
"In a lot of ways, [Danny] is like a 16-year-old," says his sister Carol. She has a 15-year-old son, Steven, who gets along famously with his uncle. "And I can see why they can relate to each other," she says.
Steven, too, was a restless kid with some discipline problems until he found an outlet in sports. He's started keeping diaries of his athletic pursuits, just like Uncle Danny. During a visit this Christmastime, Steven beat Danny's personal speed record for hauling up the 36 flights of stairs in the Cathedral of Learning -- Danny's only other athletic pursuit besides biking. Shortly after that visit, though, his uncle called to let Steven know he'd smashed Steven's record.
795a8134c1