David Boyd, above, and his son Michael, below, are 3,000 miles into a journey across the U.S. on bicycle.

David Boyd can barely walk  a mile without his multiple sclerosis kicking in. His upper body is weak, and his sense of touch is far less sensitive than the average person’s.

But for all the disease has taken away in his life, cycling has remained. And is he ever making the most of it.

The 53-year-old New York man is riding from Virginia to Oregon on a recumbent bicycle with his 21-year-old son Michael. The pair stopped in Colorado Springs for lunch on Tuesday, a brief pit stop on the roughly 116-mile leg from Canon City to Denver. According to their online journal, today is Day 60 of their journey. They’ve logged more than 3,000 miles so far.

Boyd was diagnosed with MS, a chronic disease of the central nervous system, in 1988, but the disease has not robbed him of the ability to pedal away the miles. “I can only walk a mile or so, and it’s very unpleasant, but I can  just ride this bike all day long,” he said Tuesday, in a brief phone interview.

He and his wife had talked about a cross-country trip years earlier, but she died in January after a brief bout with cancer. At the same time, his employer was trying to cut back on expenses.

So Boyd volunteered to take six months unpaid leave and do the trip the couple never got a chance to. His son, one of six children, who’d also talked about the trip, agreed to go along.

There have been setbacks. An MS flare-up delayed them for several days in the South, and Boyd’s eagerness to get on the road again led to a crash, no injuries. They hit their stride in Arkansas, he said, and are now typically riding 72 or more miles a day.

Plenty of people do amazing athletic  feats to raise awareness about a cause, but Boyd said his journey is strictly a personal one.

To follow the pair, check out their journal.

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