Mr. Magnuson is our featured speaker during the all-you-can-eat pasta dinner, Saturday night the 28th at the Holiday Inn University. Read the article below and prepare to be inspired!

Cyclist takes the hard route to health
Dropped 80 pounds from 255 pounds

By SUSAN SKILES LUKE
Associated Press
Published on: 07/18/04

CARBONDALE, Ill. - Sure, Lance Armstrong accomplished a great feat battling back from cancer to win the Tour de France five straight times with a shot at a sixth title. But what about cycling enthusiast Mike Magnuson?

Far from a world-class athlete, Magnuson has never won a major race. He has no endorsement deals. The only published picture of him on his bike doesn't show sleek muscles like Annie Liebowitz's famous shot of a naked Armstrong, but rolls of bare fat squished together as he strains to reach the low bars.

But the creative writing professor at Southern Illinois University accomplished his own long shot atop his bike.

He morphed from a 255-pound, beer-guzzling chain smoker two years ago into a smoke-free teetotaler who cuts a sleek figure in skintight Italian racing suits. Rather than spending hours on a bar stool, he rides up to 70 miles a day and competes with an amateur racing team.

Magnuson, now 41 and 80 pounds lighter, wrote a book about his ride to health. But he says "Heft on Wheels: A Field Guide to Doing a 180" is not a how-to book and no one should do what he did in the summer of 2002 — go cold-turkey with smokes and booze while consuming only three high-protein shakes a day and riding the hills near his home in swampy summer heat.

"It was stupid, stupid, stupid," Magnuson said while watching the Tour de France cyclists racing through Brittany on TV.

"I could have dropped dead," he said. "But I was desperate to be somebody else."

Health officials say it's OK to go cold-turkey on cigarettes and alcohol, but losing weight should be gradual and with a doctor's advice.

"We would congratulate him on quitting smoking and drinking," said Craig Stevens, spokesman for U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona. "But it's better to lose weight slowly."

The native of Menomonee Falls, Wis., has always loved cycling, but admits that until recently he loved drinking and smoking and eating equally well.

He'd ride for hours, but wheeze from the cigarettes and struggle to drag his weight.

"Going up a hill was just blinding agony," Magnuson said. "I'd be out of breath, my chest would hurt, I'd get this tunnel-vision experience, it was terrible."

And it would get worse. In early 2002, he published an article in GQ magazine about his improbable love for cycling and posed for a photograph that was a send-up of Liebowitz's famous shot of Armstrong. (It was around this time that Magnuson published another book, "Lummox," on the joys of being a corpulent slob.)

The contrast between the photographs embarrassed him into action.

"I didn't want to be this person people laughed at," he said. "I wanted to be an athlete."

So he quit smoking and drinking, "and pretty soon after that, I quit eating," he said, letting out a riff of laughter.

But he kept riding. For devoted cyclists, pain is part of the endurance sport. Magnuson embraced it and wrote about what was going through his mind while he suffered.

"I can feel my guts consuming themselves," he wrote in his book. "I can taste something alkaline on my tongue, the taste of old food, the cheeseburgers and milk shakes and megaton pasta salads of days long gone."

These days, Magnuson rides six days a week with his team and is working on making cycling a family pastime with this wife, Elizabeth, and two young daughters. Although he says he still suffers in the saddle - what cyclist doesn't? - the difference is palpable.

"My lung capacity has quadrupled. And not being hung over gives you an incredible boost of energy," he said, laughing.

He also says he's a better teacher and parent. Magnuson, recovering from the broken collar bone he got when he spun into a guardrail on a recent ride in France, says his book's message to others is simple.

"You don't have to be who you have been," he said as he prepared for an afternoon ride, downing an energy bar and recording its calories in a journal.

"You get into a lifestyle and maintain it for years, but you don't have to continue on the same path."

Then he was off.