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Cyclist Sam Westby biked through eight states to set a Guinness World Record for the most U.S. states visited in 24 hours.
About 290 miles into his 304-mile ride through eight states, Sam Westby could see the sun rising over the waves as he pedaled on Route 1A along the Atlantic shore in North Hampton, New Hampshire.
The “epic view” of the sunburst horizon at Fox Hill Point on an early summer morning gave the Northeastern University Ph.D. student a boost on his way to setting a Guinness World Record for the number of states cycled in one day. Westby rode through eight states in less than 24 hours, finishing on Aug. 11 in Kittery, Maine, and smashing the previous record of six states.
“It was a great way to cap off the ride,” Westby says of the shoreline stretch. “This road was already one of my favorite roads in New England, but sunrise took it to another level. It was better than finishing. Finishing is rarely the payoff moment for me.
“When I do big feats like this, the best parts are nestled into the experience. Sometimes it’s a ‘it can’t get better than this’ feeling like sunrise on 1A, other times it’s during a fun conversation getting to tell people the story after. There hasn’t been a ride I regretted, so there’s always some type of payoff when you do crazy things like this.”
Westby started his 24-hour ride a little after 8 a.m. on Aug. 10 at the Tri-States Monument at the boundaries of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. Rolling out from the granite marker, Westby immediately had three states under his belt. The eight-state ride also traversed Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine.
Police escorted him for the first three miles of his route through Port Jervis, New York, and he felt like a celebrity.
“Let’s go, this is going to be awesome!” he thought to himself as he headed northeast with perfect weather conditions.
Westby pushed through eastern New York, hitting the highest elevation on his trip of 1,200 feet along Wingdale Mountain Road in Wingdale, New York. He then hit rolling hills in Connecticut, descending one grade at more than 50 mph about 100 miles into the ride.
Westby, who’s from Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, intentionally conserved energy, riding slow and steady up hills.
It didn’t hurt that a Wisconsin-based bicycle manufacturer, Trek Bikes, lent him the company’s fastest and lightest racing bicycle, a Madone Gen 8 SLR9 AXS, which is 5 pounds lighter than the road bicycle he owns and it has electronic gear shifting.
“Going uphill felt amazing,” Westby says, which helped him save energy with every pedal stroke.
The most difficult aspect of the 24-hour ride, Westby says, was the lack of sleep. He became groggy around 3:30 a.m. as he pedaled through northeastern Massachusetts. A friend on his support team gave him a caffeine gel and “that was enough to get me to Maine,” he says.
The most stressful part, he says, was maintaining his energy. By the end of the ride, he estimates he’d spent more than 11,000 calories.
“You need to constantly be shoving calories in your mouth,” says Westby, a network science student who expects to receive a Ph.D. in the spring.
He had 120 grams, or a little over 4 ounces, of sugar in his water bottles at all times and ate snacks every 30 minutes, including bananas, clementines, apples and energy gels. On breaks, which he made every 50 miles to refill water and food and rest, he would eat sandwiches, muffins, donuts or pizza, totalling 8,000 calories over the ride. His parents met him every 50 miles to resupply the food and water.
“I did a lot of testing to see what my stomach could handle,” he says. “Pizza sits really well in my stomach.”
Westby spent months researching and mapping his route, he says, using the Ride with GPS platform and tips from various websites. But he had to be aware of stoplights and hills that could slow him down or tire him out.
“I probably ended up adding seven-ish miles for considerations like that,” he says.
He considered starting from Maryland or Delaware. He tried numerous possible routes between the New England states and chose to avoid mountainous Vermont.
“I tried getting to nine or 10 states, but that was definitely out of my ability,” he says. “This route that I picked was really the shortest and best way to fit eight states in.”
During the Guinness World Records attempt, Westby needed to secure signatures from two independent witnesses in every state. In Rhode Island, a full restaurant fell silent when he walked in around 9:30 p.m. in his neon biking gear and a helmet and headed for the restaurant manager.
The rules also required him to record his ride on a GPS device and take a one-minute video every hour. Every mile of the journey had to be completed on the bike without drafting behind vehicles.
Growing up in south central Wisconsin, Westby and his brother have been biking since they could walk, he says, because his parents were avid cyclists.
He prefers long-distance biking to driving as it allows him to take in the views and to hiking, which he finds too slow for his liking.
“It is so simple, there is only one thing that you have to be doing every single day,” Westby says. “I just have to bike.”
Among the long-distance trips he completed are a 1,000-mile, 11-day ride around Lake Michigan in 2021; a month-and-a-half-long cycling trip from Oregon to New Jersey in 2023; and the Tour Divide ride from Banff, Canada, to the Mexico border on a mountain bike last summer.
His coast-to-coast trip in 2023 drew a large online following, Westby says, and he now has more than 70,000 Instagram followers.
As an undergraduate student, Westby focused on mathematics, but he also read a lot of psychology books. Eventually, he decided to combine the two, graduating from college with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and psychology.
He joined Northeastern’s doctoral program, interested in small-group interaction and optimizing team performance.
“There’s so much more to be studied in cooperation and improving human cooperation,” he says.
Under the supervision of Alicia Modestino, he now researches how automation and the AI revolution will change data science and software development jobs.
The Guinness World Record certification was the realization of a childhood dream, as his parents had bought him the Guiness Book of World Records every year for the last 20 years.
He has also attempted breaking another Guinness record for the “Largest GPS drawing on a bike by an individual,” starting in Oklahoma City in February 2024 and riding over 1,000 miles. The record, however, went to someone else, but Westby raised about $12,000 to provide nearly 400 pairs of shoes for Boston schoolchildren.