While Lance Armstrong was winning the Tour de France, Gary Earl was riding in the tour de America.
Earl, 46, was one of three people bicycling from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean over the past 35 days, ending Saturday afternoon in Ocean City for a ceremonious public-relations event.
Earl said the Health Awareness Tour 2005 was meant to encourage people to live healthy and be active. He spoke at about 25 different locations during the trip.
Healthy or not, riding a bicycle across the country can be dangerous.
During one of the last legs of the trip, bicyclist Raul Salvidar had a nasty accident, flipping over the handlebars of his bicycle while riding 20 mph near Hershey, Pa., Earl said.
Salvidar was unconscious, needed stitches to the back of his head, but continued cycling the next day and reached Ocean City, Earl said.
Bicycling through the desert was tough due to the heat.
The mountains took a serious toll, too.
"It's just heavy on your lungs all the time," he said. "The climbing is really tough."
But Kansas proved perhaps the most daunting obstacle: monotony.
The cyclists rode past a field in Kansas with only a silo visible 20 miles in the distance, Earl said. When they arrived at a small town near that silo, the only sight in the distance was another silo.
The cyclists ended their ride on a crowded 8th Street beach in Ocean City, where they ceremoniously dipped their tires in the water and, eventually, ran into the ocean still wearing their Spandex shorts and green shirts.
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