Cyclist on trek to witness history
With two Guinness world records to her credit, Lynn Salvo still has more of the world to see
The long, long road that brought Lynn Salvo and her bicycle to St. Catharines Thursday started with two words: Middle age.
“I was thinking, I’m 49 years old, I don’t want to be what 50 typically means,” she said, glancing at her riding partner, David Goodrich.
“So I started my PhD, I started a business and I started running. All at once.”
That was 20 years ago. And she did them all.
Since then she has set two world records — oldest woman to cycle across the U.S. (2016, 5,090 kilometres) and across Canada (2018, 6,600 km).
Now she has completed 80 per cent of a cycling trip from the southern U.S. to North Bay, Ont., that links the two east-west routes.
Eventually, her finished route will resemble a peace symbol, laid over the map of North America.
That’s fitting because Salvo, 69, from McLean, Va., is riding for peace in the name of her brother, John, who was 28 when he died in the Vietnam War in 1970.
By chance she met Goodrich, 67, of Rockville, Md., when she attended a reading he was doing for his book “A Hole in the Wind.”
He was a top global climate scientist for the United Nations before retiring, and he likes to ride long distance, too.
A student of history, he saw a map of important Underground Railroad sites and charted a ride he and Salvo could take that would include lots of stops.
His wife, Connie, drove in a car with them, carrying supplies and keeping an eye on their progress. They cover about 75 km a day on bike.
They stopped at the Salem Chapel BME Church on Geneva Street Thursday, the end of his ride. Salvo is continuing to ride on to North Bay.
Church member Rochelle Bush toured them through the church, where Harriet Tubman worshipped for the 10 years she lived in St. Catharines from about 1850 to 1860.
Salvo and the Goodriches hit the road together June 14, starting from Cambridge, Md., where Tubman was held as a slave, and where she later returned to bring other slaves to freedom.
They’ve visited numerous churches that were stops on the Underground Railroad route, and the graves of Tubman and author Frederick Douglass.
They also stopped at the boarded-up store country store in Mississippi where teenager Emmett Till was accused, in 1955, of harassing a white woman before he was lynched. And they went to the courthouse where his killers were set free.
“David knows more history, while I enjoy learning it on the way,” said Salvo.
“And I really get a thrill out of being on the spot where something happened. There is something about the geography in certain places.”
Making the same trip by car, they’d be insulated from the people around them. Travelling by bike, you meet the most interesting people.
“I remember a truck driver who said, ‘There’s no way I’d hit you. There’s too much paperwork,’” Goodrich said with a laugh.
Part of attaining a Guinness world record is collecting witness statements to verify it. That means approaching random strangers for their signatures.
“Things like that happen that just wouldn’t happen in a car.”