Big wheel on campus rides to help Afghans
Heads spin as Zach Warren rides through the traffic hell that is Harvard Square on a unicycle taller than a mailbox and more wobbly than a rowboat. Onlookers can't help but smile -- a unicycle does that to people, Warren says. Some can't help but stare -- because, well, what if he falls?
''Would I do that? Are you kidding me?" asks freshman Diana Link, who paused in front of the Out of Town News stand as Warren flashed by, his sneakers eye level to most drivers. ''At least he has a helmet on."
As crazy as Warren might seem during his daily ride to Harvard Divinity School, where he is a first-year graduate student, it's nothing compared with what he'll be doing this fall. That's when he'll be going for the world record in speed unicycling.
Not familiar with the record? To break it, Warren will need to pedal 100 miles in just fewer than seven hours. Or, as his website says, ''Zach must maintain 112 Rotations Per Minute (RPMs) to tie the world record. That is nearly 2 rotations/second!"
Oh yeah -- he can't fall, either.
But that's OK, because Warren last fell from his unicycle . . .
''Today," he says, answering a reporter's question. ''Every day I fall off it."
What hasn't been said is that Warren doesn't care about the record nearly as much as about raising $10,000 for the Afghan
For the past three years, the circus has traveled from village to village, setting up in local schools. Composed of about 40 Afghani teenagers and a handful of trained performers, the circus aims at teaching Afghani youth how to tell stories, act, dance, play soccer, and enjoy other fun activities that children have had little exposure to during warfare and under Taliban rule.
Warren, 23, plans on joining the circus this July as a juggling instructor (he's been a professional for five years) after a monthlong tour of Ireland, where he'll be riding his unicycle and escaping from straitjackets at performances for special needs students.
''Zach will be great" in Afghanistan, said Christopher Taylor, a childhood friend who introduced Warren to the Mobile Mini Circus. ''In many ways, he's a walking circus himself."
Warren says he picked up unicycling while at college in Indiana, where a friend sold him his unicycle because he needed cash to go skydiving. After about four days, he got good enough to ride the cycle to class and soon became renowned as the town unicyclist.
''I'm a pretty forgetful person. I left it all over the place, but people always returned it," he says.
When Warren moved to Somerville last fall, he started riding his unicycle to class again, as well as to Central Square bars and generally wherever he needed to go, eliciting smiles from most passersby.
''The greatest thing is when I talk on my cellphone while riding," he says. ''Then people really go nuts."
Unlike in Indiana, though, Warren now locks his unicycle. ''I had the first one I brought stolen," he says.
To break the unicycling speed record, set in 1987 by Takayuki Koike of Japan, Warren must finish his ride in less than six hours, 44 minutes, 21 seconds. And by his own admission, he hasn't come close to Koike's time.
In fact, Warren's longest ride ever is 40 miles. With his summer travel plans and research work -- Warren will be analyzing laughter patterns of Afghani children he meets -- he won't have much time to train before his Oct. 11 ride at Dover International Speedway in Dover, Del.
Still, he hardly seems fazed.
''I can run a marathon fast. In just under three hours," he says. ''So just add on another four hours."
Then again, Warren, who hopes to teach psychology, has fairly philosophical views on success and failure.
This is a man who, while interviewing for a Rhodes scholarship, took out juggling balls to explain his outlook on life. (''Juggling . . . is about letting go, taking risks. Sometimes you have to drop something to pick up," he says.)
One of the classes he's taking this semester is titled ''The Science of Happiness." He's also taking a class called ''Death and Dying." ''So I'm tempering things out a bit," he says.
Warren is also good friends with one of his mother's medical-school classmates, 60-year-old Dr. Jules Lodish, who suffers from ALS -- Lou Gehrig's disease -- and has reached the point where he can only blink his eyes.
''We've been e-mailing for four or five years. We talk about all sorts of things: girls, what it's like to be a father, what it's like to be a mute quadriplegic," Warren says of Lodish, who communicates with the assistance of a computer. ''He's so incredibly humble. He's someone who lives his life at the threshold, despite what most people would call an impossible circumstance."
Regardless of how his attempt goes, Warren says he's committed to raising the funds for the Mobile Mini Circus through ride pledges.
Berit Muhlhausen and David Mason, the Danish couple who founded the group, hope that such a donation will help them reach 25,000 new students this year.
''Our Afghan artists who know just a bit [about] riding [a] unicycle cannot believe what Zach is going to do," they wrote in an e-mail from Afghanistan. ''Nobody has ever done anything like this for us before."
Of course, for Warren, the unusual is really kind of ordinary.
''That sure is a big wheel," said student Joseph Shamis, 22, gawking as Warren zipped past on his unicycle, disappearing into Harvard Yard. ''Wouldn't you do it if you could?"
For more information about Warren's ride, go to www.unicycle4kids.org. 