Perseverance is something David McFadden of Bartlett said he learned from his dad.
Specifically, McFadden said, he learned from his dad the kind of "perseverance it takes to get to the top of a mountain."
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Contact Emily McFarlan at emcfarlan@scn1.com
That's why McFadden's own children had his dad's name painted on their dad's bike. And that perseverance is what it'll take for him to ride that bike to the top of the world's highest paved road in Peru in the next few weeks.
"It's nice to have that piece of him riding with me," he said.
McFadden will leave Nov. 7 for Lima, Peru, to bike the 16,000-foot-high Ticlio Pass with cycling vacation group Pac Tour.
It's a two-week, 602-mile trip, meaning the 12 cyclists in the group will bike about 55 miles a day. They'll stop along the way to shop and collect items to deliver to their destination, the Puerto Occopa Orphanage, 300 miles into the rain forest jungle.
It's the third time McFadden has made the trip.
"I'm a few years older," he said. "What I want to do now is I want to ride to the top of the highest paved road on each continent."
McFadden gets plenty of practice on his bike.
He rode a lot as a kid, he said. And when he and his wife Debbie got engaged, he bought her a bike, too. The two now have a tandem bike, he said, and most of their vacations together are cycling trips.
"It's a thing the two of us do together a lot, but she doesn't like climbing mountains. It's too much work," he said. "For me, it's the challenge."
Almost three years ago, he took on another challenge: Commuting to work on his bike.
McFadden is a marriage and family therapist at Village Counseling Center, which has offices in South Elgin and Hanover Park. That's a 6˝- or 8˝-mile commute in rain or shine or Midwestern winter.
His bike is built to handle it, though, with a rack to hold his laptop, lunch and a change of clothes and steel-studded snow tires.
"It's more like a pickup truck bike," he said.
Before his last trip to Peru, McFadden trained by riding his bike up the 14,240-foot Mount Evans in Colorado, the highest paved road in North America.
For this trip, he said, "Most of the training I do here is on the Fox River Trail. I spend about an hour and a half going up and down that hill. … What I need to do is put a plastic bag over my head to simulate the lack of oxygen."
The trip along the world's highest paved road is "intense," he said, but his legs weren't nearly as tired afterward as he expected them to be. He figures without as much oxygen at such a high elevation, he wasn't actually able to pedal all that hard.
That's a theory he's excited to test once more.
"You get in the lowest gear, and you just grind," he said. "It's hard. It's definitely hard. You just do it."
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