In 1983 my dad met a guy named Feddie Hoffman.  Actually, he first heard about Freddie like an approaching weather pattern.  My dad and his sister had driven to Vermont to take part in a week-long bicycle tour of the state, and when they got there, they got wind of one last participant who was going to be late.  This was because, instead of driving, he was riding his bike from New Jersey to Vermont.  My dad happened to be the odd man out for a roommate, so he was told he would be matched up with the latecomer.  Finally, after many hours, a young, dark-haired man came pedaling out of the night who would become my dad’s new roommate and lifelong friend.  This man was Million Mile Freddie.

If you move in bicycling circles, or know someone who does, there’s probably about a 50% chance that you’ve heard of Million Mile Freddie.  Since he was a young boy in the 1960’s, Freddie Hoffman has ridden more than 1.5 million miles, the first of which he rode on a tricycle his mother bought him.  He has, since the tricycle days, kept meticulous track of each and every mile he’s put to his back in a series of detailed diaries, from which he can recite on demand a host of figures, averages, extrapolations, and comparisons.  In fact, according to Freddie, he’s ridden an average of about 80 miles a day his entire life.  In the past 20 years, he says, on only one day has he not ridden his bike somewhere, be it to the store, to another state, or to the other side of the country.

To put this in perspective, I’ll go to the oft-quoted comparison, and Freddie’s personal favorite: riding 1.5 million miles means that he has ridden to the moon and back (some 239,592 miles each way) more than 3 times.

About a week ago, Freddie stopped by our house on his way home to River Edge in east Jersey from Florida, where he had ridden to visit relatives.  This was my first opportunity to meet Freddie after hearing so much about him growing up, and an opportunity to hear his story first-hand.

Freddie is not what you imagine when you think of a cyclist of his accolades and accomplishments.  Lean and lithe Lance Armstrong he is not.  His image is a little more at home with the job he works when he’s not touring the country saddle-back: school janitor.  But don’t let this fool you.  Freddie has a capacity for perseverance and a tenacity to defy his initial physical appearance and probably any other human limitation you could think of.  He is big, friendly, verbose, and has a way of making you feel like you’re his best friend, even if you’re just meeting for the first time, as I was.

The first thing he does when he meets me is slap my thigh and comment on my cycling physique.  I enjoy a brief moment of cognitive dissonance as I am simultaneously uncomfortable at the physical contact and flattered at the comment.  But you have to be ready for some surprises with Freddie, so I move past it.  We sit down to pizza (a half a pie and large chicken Caesar salad for Freddie, who says he is cutting back because he didn’t ride that much today), and Freddie proceeds to ignore his food as he seems incapable of pausing in his endless enthusiastic narrative long enough to take a bite.  Over the course of four hours, we occasionally watch with excitement as he picks up his fork and loads it with salad, only to forget about it and leave it resting on his plate.  My mom tries a few times to get a word in edge-wise, just so Freddie can take a few bites, but is largely unsuccessful.  She finally succeeds, and Freddie begins eating his salad around 10 PM, long after the rest of us have finished our meals.

It is clear that Freddie talks like he rides: with a single-minded devotion and indefatigable energy that even he seems unable to rein in, even if he wanted to.  For the first hour or so, we listen as he explains passionately and in great detail some of the finer nuances of bike riding and the difference between touring and racing.  But eventually he comes around to telling his own story, though he tells it like a Tarantino film, not always in chronological order and sometimes interrupting a story to tell another before coming back to the first.

I’ll do my best to sort it out and tell a linear version of his story.

During his birth, Freddie was somehow deprived of oxygen, which resulted in damage to the brain and a consequent learning disability.  As a result, he has no education beyond the fifth grade.  And yet, he can (and will) tell you exactly what part of his brain was affected and how that produced his unique situation biologically and neurologically.

His condition made him a social outcast as boy, and the neighborhood kids used to tease him pretty relentlessly.  Freddie used the tricycle his mother bought him, and later a bicycle, as a means for escape.  He kept track of his mileage, first by counting laps of his neighborhood, later with a mechanical speedometer, as a way of focusing his attention elsewhere and ignoring the abuse he received.

Near his house was a hill of a legendarily steep grade and on which all kids were forced to dismount their bikes and walk.  At some point Freddie got the notion that if he could just train himself to ride to the top of that hill, maybe the other kids would see that he was strong and stop teasing him.  So he applied himself to this task as he would apply himself to almost everything else he would attempt in life.  It took him a year, but he was finally able to ride to the top of that Jersey hill without getting off his bike.  The next day after school, he got the neighborhood kids to come to the foot of the hill with him and he made them a bet.  Five minutes later, he had disappeared over the crest of the hill (with the help of a strong tail wind, he admits) only to reemerge, glide back down, and take their money.  The bullying, he says, slowed noticeably after that.

In 1969, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and Freddie discovered his next goal.  Though by age ten he was already regularly riding centuries (100-mile rides), Freddie devoted himself to racking up on his bike the mileage the Apollo 11 crew had traversed in their Saturn V.  What took the astronauts four days took Freddie several years.

Talking to Freddie, you can see that he deals in a lot of metaphors, most of them not what you would expect, though they’re often uncommonly apt.  Freddie talked to us for a long time about the space program, and it was clear that he saw his own journey in terms of small steps that can add up to giant leaps.  Something about the unfathomable odds the astronauts had to overcome seems to speak to Freddie on a personal level and inspire his emphatic devotion.  To boot, I’ve met few people with as complete a knowledge of the space program as he is able to call upon at any given moment.

Of course, Freddie didn’t stop when he reached the moon.  Stopping is not a concept he’s had much experience with.  He kept riding, and in 1980 he hit his stride.  Freddie calls it the Roaring Eighties, a decade (down to the day, according to him) of an average of over 100 miles a day, a decade in which he rode more than half of his total lifetime miles.  He experimented with racing, but mostly he continued to ride the way he does best: long, hard, and usually alone.  When my dad met him, the bike Freddie was riding was appropriately named “John Bull,” after the longest-running steam locomotive in the world (also from Jersey).

It was during the Roaring Eighties that an event transpired that would transform Freddie’s riding forever.  In 1986 his mother passed away from leukemia.  Until this point, Freddie had ridden for himself, as a way of standing up to the mountain of challenges that was his birthright.  After the passing of his mother, he began to ride for her, naming his new bike “Ruth E.” after the woman whom he credits with giving him the loving support to surmount his personal adversities.  He began going door-to-door to collect pledges (on his bike, of course) for sponsorship of his rides.  He has since raised more than a million dollars for leukemia research.

It would seem he’s become intimately familiar with that figure, because ten years after the death of his mother, Freddie hit another landmark event: his millionth mile.   Freddie hit this milestone of milestones on his way west across the country on a lonely stretch of desert road in Colorado (he, of course, has the date logged and committed to memory: August 8, 1996).  Freddie describes the experience as lunar.  He stopped his bike and in the driving sun looked around at the landscape that surrounded him.  He could see for miles in every direction.  No humans, no buildings, no animals, just rocky, otherworldly terrain as far as the eye could see.  The passion with which Freddie calls forth this image is intense, and he tells us that he felt like he had done it.  He had made his moon landing.

Obviously, Freddie’s appetite for miles wasn’t sated by his millionth.  He continues to ride and has tacked another 500,000 onto his tally.  He has done this despite having to take care of his ailing father, who died in 2007 from Alzheimer’s.

The story Freddie tells of a role reversal between father and son is touching and even more amazing than his cycling history, if that is possible.  Freddie, who didn’t trust the the task of caring for his father to a nurse, continued to work as a night shift janitor while he tended to his father.   He was also the only family member strong enough to lift his bedridden father in order to bathe him and keep him from getting bedsores.  After his father’s death, Freddie began stumping for Alzheimer’s research in addition to leukemia and continues to ride for both causes.

And Freddie isn’t content with just raising money.  In his efforts to win over potential donors, he has striven to learn as much about his causes as possible.  He explained to us at great length the exciting new research being done into combating cancer, explaining complex scientific ideas with a mixture of impressive vocabulary and a knack for putting it in layman’s terms.

He’s the same way about his own condition.  He’s done a great deal of research into the disorders that have come to describe what used to baffle his doctors and understands them on a very deep level.  And he acquires all this knowledge by cold repetition, doggedly subduing his learning disability seemingly by brute force of will.  Freddie believes he is in a unique “twilight zone” between the mentally handicapped and those who try to help them; he feels he is able to act as an interpreter in this regard and has worked with researchers to try and help them get inside the experience of mental disability.

And yet, despite all the barriers Freddie has toppled on and off the road, he remains challenged.  He’s been recognized by two presidents, 50 governors, and even members of British Parliament, and yet he has few close friends and has never had a wife or even dated.  He believes that it is essentially impossible for him to be in a relationship with a woman and openly recognizes how challenging it is for others to interact with him.  But he seems to accept this as fact; he is incapable of being any other way.  He speaks of it almost like a scientist observing himself from behind a two-way mirror.  It’s a sobering and strangely inspirational thing to experience.

After meeting Freddie and listening to him, I can only say that he is probably the most rawly genuine person I have ever met.  Once you get over your initial shock at the volume of his voice and quantity of his words, you come to see that he embodies an almost superhuman devotion to the things and people he loves and is so brimming with pure, hard-wired zeal that he can’t get the thoughts out fast enough to fully share with you the scope of his world, though he would love nothing more.  It is certainly impossible to capture the whole experience of Freddie in a humble blog post.