Yup. Really. Sam Whittingham, from BC’s Quadra Island, recently broke the self-propelled human speed record in the Nevada desert. Sam peddled his custom made recumbent bike to a top speed of 132.5 kilometers an hour. Chris Keam witnessed this attempt and writes about it on The Tyee. The first few paragraphs are included below, for the full article please visit The Tyee website , where you can also watch a video of Sam’s attempt.

=========

Sam Whittingham of Quadra Island made history in the Nevada desert on Thursday, pedalling the tear-drop contoured recumbent bike — the Varna Diablo III — to a world record speed of 82.3 mile per hour (132.5 kilometres per hour), claiming the $26,748 deciMach prize as the first person to do so, and cementing his position as the fastest self-propelled human on the planet. (Further down in this story, you can watch a video by Chris Keam and Earl Cassorla of the historic event.)

"I’ve been knocking on this door for years," said Whittingham, before a Thursday morning attempt to crack the deciMach barrier. "I want in!"

In that session, Whittingham went on to post an 80-plus mph time for the second time in his very successful career racing the specialized streamliners. So very close, but still not the new record Whittingham and bike designer Georgi Georgiev have been chasing ever since they were the first team to break the 80 mph barrier in 2002. Then Whittingham did something he’d never done before. He elected to try again during the evening session. In a sport where the athletes often collapse in an oxygen-deprived heap shortly after exiting their streamlined, fully-faired recumbent bikes, it was a risky move. Two runs in one day could have left Sam’s body without enough time to fully recover and destroyed his chances to post competitive times on the last two days of racing.

Continue reading ….