Jacob Lemanski is a long distance cyclist who embarked on a global journey in 2013 with no set destination, just a desire to see how far his legs could take him. Over two and a half years, he pedaled more than 38,000 miles across 42 countries, driven by curiosity, endurance, and a love for exploration.
Jacob Lemanski is a long distance cyclist who embarked on a global journey in 2013 with no set destination, just a desire to see how far his legs could take him. Over two and a half years, he pedaled more than 38,000 miles across 42 countries, driven by curiosity, endurance, and a love for exploration.
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Shelby Stanger:
A lot of our guests have wild ideas with a clear finish line like reaching the summit of a mountain or completing an ultramarathon. It's not often that we talk to someone whose goal is more nebulous. It's not about a destination or miles, but about pushing themselves physically and mentally until they can't go anymore. Adventurer Jacob Lemanski applied this same concept to his own wild idea: cycling around the world.
Jacob Lemanski:
There's lots of ways to know how strong I could be, but for myself, it was to ride a bike as far as I could. I had this idea that only getting to a place where I could go no farther would I know that I had gone as far as I could. I didn't want to bike and arrive somewhere, I wanted to go until I quit, and that was really important to me, and I had to dedicate myself fully to realizing that.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op Mastercard.
Jacob Lemanski, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. You've had a lot of wild ideas, all of them are around a bicycle. How did you get involved with cycling?
Jacob Lemanski:
Perhaps my first wild idea was to bicycle across the country when I was 20 years old. I had never done anything like that, and I actually flew out west and bought a bike there to do it, and that's when I first fell in love with bike touring. It was just a spur of the moment thing.
Shelby Stanger:
Wait, so where did you grow up? Were you always outdoorsy? How did this idea even come about?
Jacob Lemanski:
Yeah, I grew up in Pennsylvania. I was going to university in West Virginia, and just a family friend showed me an old grainy video of himself biking across Canada in the '70s, and it was the first time I'd ever even thought of biking long distance. The idea just stuck with me, and it sounded better than working for a summer.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. What year was this when you did your very first bike tour?
Jacob Lemanski:
My first bike tour would've been in 2004, and I haven't stopped since.
Shelby Stanger:
And you hadn't ever ridden long distance before that, You just were like, "I'm going to bike across the country and I'll figure it out when I get there."
Jacob Lemanski:
Yeah. The furthest I biked before that was maybe 20 miles, and yeah, you can figure it out as you go. I wasn't searching for everything I needed to bring. I hadn't seen stories of people doing it. It was totally new to me. And honestly, for all my bike tours, that's how I wanted to go into it. I wanted to, especially today, you can get a street view of every road in the world, and that's not what I wanted. I wanted to arrive into the unknown, even if it was just unknown to me, and that way I could feel like an explorer.
Shelby Stanger:
Jacob's ride across the country took him two months. He was in college at the time, and it was relatively easy for him to fit the trip in during summer break. It wasn't long after he returned that he came up with his next adventure.
Jacob Lemanski:
I just had this thing in me. I just knew I'd be a young man once in my life. I would be a young, strong person and I wanted to see what I could do with that, how far I could take it. It was just important to me to know how strong I could be. I didn't want to bike and arrive somewhere I wanted to go until I quit.
Shelby Stanger:
Jacob's goal wasn't to reach a certain destination or bike a particular number of miles. He wanted to explore places that he had never been before, so he decided to travel internationally. He would fly to different continents and bike across them until he hit a coastline. Then he would fly to the closest point on the next continent and keep riding. When did you come up with this idea and how long was it until you actually left?
Jacob Lemanski:
Let's see I would've been 27 when I thought of it, and then I would've been 28 when I actually left. It took a full year to build up the confidence to actually leave.
Shelby Stanger:
Was it just building up the confidence it took a year, or was it planning?
Jacob Lemanski:
Well, I had to get the gear, but that wasn't that hard. As far as planning, since I biked across the United States when I was younger, I wanted to start in Europe. If I could cross Europe and Asia, that would count as biking around the world. I guess additionally, I had to wait for the weather. I couldn't start that trip at the wrong time of the year. I would've ended up in Siberia in the winter. Maybe even if it took me just a month to really settle on leaving, I actually had to wait until the weather was correct for me to really go. I honestly thought maybe three or four or five months would be enough for me and I would stop. I never expected I would be out for three years.
Shelby Stanger:
Three years? You were on the road for three years. What were you doing at the time when you left? I want to talk about this year to actually get the courage to go.
Jacob Lemanski:
Well, I was working, I was working as an engineer designing air conditioners for helicopters. I started dating a woman. She actually joined me for the first two months of the trip, but I went for so long that she was actually married to someone else by the time I finished.
Shelby Stanger:
Oh, no. I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh, but that's... Oh, wow, because you're gone so long. At what point did you guys break up on the ride?
Jacob Lemanski:
She hung in there about eight months and I still wasn't done, so I understood in a way.
Shelby Stanger:
Your very first step in planning it, it was quitting your job or making the decision to go?
Jacob Lemanski:
Yeah, I made the decision to leave and then quit my job. I'm a responsible person, I had a decent engineering job. I wanted to save up a little more money, that was part of it. I had a life, I had to abandon a life to go and just ride my bike, so it took a while to actually believe in myself to go start that and to step out of society to go try.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah. What did that process look like? I think that's the biggest part that people struggle with when they go pursue a wild idea is like you have this idea, A lot of people have ideas, but then to go do it, it's a whole other thing. What are some of the key things that you think gave you the courage within that year to go do it rather than just talk about it or think about it?
Jacob Lemanski:
Well, it was really important to me to know how strong I could be, and I know I keep coming back to that, but for whatever reason, that just was in me. I had to know.
Shelby Stanger:
In February of 2013, Jacob packed up his bike and boarded a plane to Portugal. When he landed, he put his bike back together in the airport, loaded it up with panniers and a guitar and started riding.
Jacob Lemanski:
I flew into Lisbon, Portugal. It was rainy that day, and I had my map on a tablet because paper maps, I would've been biking across paper maps every few days so it was too many to bring along. I stepped out of the airport and I got out my tablet to check where to go, and rain got on the screen and it stopped working, and immediately I was lost.
Shelby Stanger:
OMG, that's everybody's worst nightmare. What'd you do?
Jacob Lemanski:
Well, I had to duck under bus shelters across the city until I could figure out how to get to our hotel for the night. Much later in the ride, years into it, when I'd get to the edge of a town, I would get out my tablet and I would check the map and I would just memorize the route across the city.
Shelby Stanger:
You have a good sense of a direction in this engineering mind because if I try to memorize a route, I go left instead of right. I just can't do that. It's not part of my brain. You must have an innate sense of direction.
Jacob Lemanski:
I got better at it. It's interesting because on that trip I was living outside, and when you live outside, you always know where the sun is and the sun is a super easy way to know which way's east and west and north and south. I was just tuned into direction just because I was living out under the sunshine and also I was always basically traveling one direction from Portugal. I traveled east until I hit the next coast. That's how it went.
Shelby Stanger:
During his first year on the road, Jacob pedaled east across Europe, and then through Russia, Mongolia, and China. When he reached the coast of China, Jacob knew he wasn't done. He went home to Boulder, Colorado to wait a few months for a weather window before heading up to Alaska. From Alaska, he biked all the way down to South America. Jacob then made his way across New Zealand, Australia and Africa. All in all, the journey ended up taking 999 days.
I want to ask you about some of the logistical stuff. Where did you sleep at night? Did you stay in hostels or were you just sleeping outside?
Jacob Lemanski:
I brought a hammock. Each night, I would sneak away into the forest or into the farm fields and set up a place to sleep. I would always sneak away from the road. I had this feeling that if no one in the whole world knew where I was, that's how I felt safest. And that worked for the most part. Every once in a while, a farmer would find me on his way home in the evening, and no one ever bothered me. But that's how I would sleep at night, just out under the stars.
Shelby Stanger:
Did you have little a carry behind, pull along? How did you deal with mechanical failures in some of these remote places? What would you do?
Jacob Lemanski:
I had four panniers on my front wheel, two on my back wheel, and then a guitar on top. And in the desert, I would carry a big jug of water on my front rack as well. And when I left, I had the idea of being a ship at sea. I wanted to leave with everything I needed and I didn't want to have to ask for help the whole way. Tires would wear out every 6,000 or 7,000 miles and I would leave with extra tires for that inevitability. And in the end, everything on my bike got replaced except the blue frame. That's the only thing that lasted the whole time.
And as things wore out, I would end up in a big city and I would get stuff replaced. I had a total breakdown in Tasmania, on the island south of Australia, and my rear hub broke and I just couldn't bike further. And this happened to be in one of the most remote places I had been in the whole world, and the next town was about 60 miles away and the only thing to do was push. And actually, I pushed for 24 hours before the first car passed me, and sure enough, that car picked me up and they gave me a ride to the next town, and I was able to get my bike fixed.
Shelby Stanger:
24 hours.
Jacob Lemanski:
It's a long time, but I was just out there riding my bike anyways. It's not like I had to be anywhere or I had different plans than moving down the road slowly.
Shelby Stanger:
And what about food? Were you cooking on the road?
Jacob Lemanski:
Yeah, I had a little stove that burned gasoline so I could cook. I'd always try to have a couple extra days of food on me in case something happened or in case I met someone to share with, I would have extra. My longest stretch between grocery stores was 11 days in Bolivia, so that was unusual. I was almost always hitting the grocery store every few days.
Shelby Stanger:
Amazing. Did you ever run into any trouble?
Jacob Lemanski:
Not with people, really. I had plenty of close calls with the weather, with cars, but nothing so bad that it forced me to stop my ride.
Shelby Stanger:
Do you have any stories of those?
Jacob Lemanski:
Yeah, I got caught in a hurricane on the Baja. I didn't have a phone to know what the weather was going to be, so. It's hot in Baja, Mexico on the peninsula. I had set up my hammock and a little breeze was coming in and a little rain, and I thought, "Ah, this'll be nice. It'll cool the weather off for tomorrow," and that rain just kept getting worse and worse.
And through the night, the hurricane hit, and by morning my hammock was full of water. And being in the desert, I just kept thinking, "The rain is going to stop at any moment," but eventually I couldn't believe that anymore. And I got up and the roads were flooded. I biked to the next town and with each pedal stroke, my shoe would dunk under the water, there was so much water in this street, but still, I was convinced that this was about to blow over.
And I got back on the highway and I was biking out of town. Cars were pacing me and taking photos and recording me as I went because a weird guy biking in the hurricane. Eventually, enough cars told me to turn around that a bridge was out, that I couldn't go that way, that I believed them. And I went back to the town that I had left, and I found a little hotel to stay in, but no one was there working, and I ended up just taking shelter in basically their hallway between rooms. And I stayed there for the night and just waited out the storm, and then in the morning I got started again.
Shelby Stanger:
Cyclist Jacob Lemanski set out on an adventure in 2013. He wanted to bike as far as his legs would carry him. Turns out, his legs could carry him pretty far. Over the next two and a half years, Jacob cycled roughly 38,000 miles through 42 countries. At a certain point, while he was cycling across Africa, Jacob realized that he just didn't feel like biking anymore. How did you know you were done?
Jacob Lemanski:
There was a morning I got up and I was camping in a forest in Africa and I didn't go anywhere, I just stayed there. That was the first time in years that I didn't hop up and was excited to get on my bicycle. I knew I was getting close to the end at that point, and it was just a few weeks later where really I was done and I quit, but I was just on the side of the road. No one was coming for me, and it took me another 50 days to get myself home.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow. How come it took you 50 days to get home?
Jacob Lemanski:
I wanted to give myself the experience of getting back home. It's different emotionally, and suddenly I had a destination. Suddenly I could do the math and understand about how long it was going to be until I was finished. I was counting down, and that was really hard. On the way out, I only had to think about tomorrow because I never knew when I was going to be done. But on the way back, suddenly I had an ending and it felt different. I still wouldn't let myself just fly back home. I flew to Europe, I biked a couple more weeks in Europe. I flew to the East Coast and bicycled to where my family lives, and then I took a train out to Denver from the east, so it just took time.
Shelby Stanger:
Coming home after a grand adventure can be really weird. I think it can be hard to relate to people. Did you have that experience?
Jacob Lemanski:
Certainly at the end. I would say for myself, I felt like I could have been traveling for a year, maybe a year and a half, and returned and slaughtered myself back into the life I had before. But I went twice as far as that. And by the time I returned home, I had been traveling in countries where I couldn't speak the language. For years, I had been alone. I had been living without mirrors. I had no relationships to bounce my ideas off of or reflect my actions. Out there isolated as I was, I say I became exactly who I am, and that's the person I was when I got home.
I was exactly myself, unapologetically. And also, because of that, I was disconnected from how other people saw the world and what they thought about things. I just couldn't relate to anyone. And also, I didn't feel like anyone could relate to me. I met someone around that time that told me a story about his astronaut friend who had orbited the earth looking down and not seeing any borders and how it moved him. And he came home and people couldn't understand that. And I thought, yeah, but you have other astronauts to talk to about that. I didn't have anyone to talk to about it, so it felt very isolating, honestly.
Shelby Stanger:
I want to start a support group for previous guests who've gone on these big trips and feel exactly like you feel.
Jacob Lemanski:
Yeah, give me their number, we can chat about it. I was glad to be back home. I ended up setting myself up in a garage with the door open, so I was half inside and half outside and I could feel the weather and see the sunshine, but still had a roof over my head and that's where I was comfortable. For myself, I started making art. On that trip, really the only thing that I missed while I was traveling was this ant farm I left behind. I missed it like a pet. I got home and I got that ant farm started and just feeling inspired by my journey, I conceived to build the world's most beautiful ant farm. And just like that bike trip, I took it as far as I possibly could.
I ended up building a piece that was four feet tall and eight feet wide, and I put lights in the frame, which illuminated a colorful background, which shined out through the tunnels as the ants dug. I created this living art piece, and it was slow, just like my bike ride, and you never knew what it was going to be, just like my bike ride. This is how I integrated my experience. Using my engineering background, I created a beautiful object. It was like a beautiful and wild time in my life for sure, right after that trip.
Shelby Stanger:
What is it about an ant farm to you that is so beautiful and in some ways cathartic? Take me there.
Jacob Lemanski:
Well, it's like chaos theory. These ants are, it starts half full of soil, it's a blank canvas, and then the ants create something, and it's fun to watch nature. And the ants, especially, I connected with ants a lot while I was traveling because ants are everywhere. Each night I would cook my dinner and then I'd find an ant hill and I'd set my pot down next to the ant hill and they would clean my pot for me. For years, that's how I did my dishes, and I let the ants do it.
Shelby Stanger:
Making art with ants was a way for Jacob to stay connected with the mystery and solitude of nature. His relationship with this living art piece has helped him incorporate his experience on the road into his life back in Denver. Another thing he's doing to help this process is making a podcast. Jacob is recording short episodes, mostly under five minutes, that recount every single day of his bike trip.
Jacob Lemanski:
When I traveled, I kept the journal, and the journal is essentially just a rough first draft that I wrote laying in my hammock. And since then I've been editing it. I wasn't a writer when I started this journey, and it's taken me nine years now to become good at writing and to edit the journal enough to start the story. What the podcast is is a retelling a day by day retelling based on my journal. Each episode is two or three minutes long, and that's the highlights of a 24-hour day.
While you get the stories, you miss sitting on a bike quietly for six hours every day, and what that does to a person, which is more than the quick stories, but I want to bring people around the whole world with me up to that moment when I quit. I feel like if I can do that, they'll understand. They'll understand why I stopped.
And as a listener, they'll also be ready to stop. They'll be like, "I've been listening a long time, let's wrap it up." That's why the story's starting now. Basically, it's taken me almost a decade to write it.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow, okay. What's it like retelling this story and sharing it?
Jacob Lemanski:
The podcast comes out twice a week and it's for 1,000 episodes, so it's going to be a 10-year-long retelling. It'll be slow. The journey was an epic, I want people to feel that in a way. I want them to cross continents with me and to hear day by day how the terrain changes, how the people change, how the weather changes. And so to be rewriting it and then retelling it is for myself to re-experience it. And yeah, it's joyful for me to just sit and ponder each day specifically and how I can find beauty in it and find a story in it and find a lesson in each day that I was out there.
Shelby Stanger:
What's the name of your podcast and where did the name come from?
Jacob Lemanski:
My podcast is called How To Move The Stars, and the name comes from, in Alaska, I could find the North Star, the Big Dipper points to it. And up in Alaska and Canada, it's way over my head. It's almost right above me. And as I traveled south, I watched that North Star drop to the horizon, and eventually the Southern Cross started to come up and I realized that just with the strength of my legs, just the power of my own body, I was moving the stars in the sky. It was profound to realize that it made me feel significant. One small person in this whole universe, I was able to move the stars.
Shelby Stanger:
Once he returned home, Jacob was able to find an engineering job right away. But after saving money for a few years, he decided to transition to a career that allowed him to be outside. Today, Jacob leads e-bike tours in Denver and sells ant and nature inspired art and clothing online To see it for yourself, check out antlife.space. You can hear Jacob's retelling of his 999-day bike ride wherever you listen to podcasts or on Instagram or YouTube, just search How To Move The Stars. We'll also put a link in our show notes.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger. Produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it, and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.