Most people would be tired after biking 6,762 miles.

Mike Potter isn’t most people, though, and is full of energy as he drinks espresso while looking through the images and videos of his journey on a fat bike that took him through 23 states and nearly traced the perimeter of the United States. 

He takes a sip before showing the video he took of the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. His excitement is evident as he shows the video he took in the Florida Everglades of the first alligator he’s ever seen.

“There’s the alligator and then there’s me only 10 feet away,” Potter joked.

Potter carries this enthusiasm with him everywhere he goes an in everything he does. This, coupled with his thirst for adventure, is what allowed him to become a world-traveling fitness trainer, start and his own newspaper for a number of years and later join the Army Infantry at the age of 37.

His undying zeal is also what allowed him to embark on a nearly two-year journey on a bike with little idea of what he was getting into.

Potter, whose father passed away when he was 14, realized how short life was after taking his mother to the hospital for a heart issue in 2012. Everything turned out to be fine for his mom, 81-year-old Shirley Potter, but that was the first time he had seen his mother so vulnerable.

“I had never seen her like that and it really freaked me out,” he recalled. “It made me realize how fragile life can be and that life is really short.”

The trip to the hospital was the final impetus for the journey. 

“I just had this desire to get out of here and explore while I still could. I was only going to do it for about seven or eight months, but it ended up being one year and 10 months,” Potter said. “I love Whitefish, the mountains are beautiful and the people are great, but I wanted something more, so I pushed myself out of the nest and did something that scared me and it was magical.”

 Potter started pedaling around noon on Sept. 7, 2012, with the plan of camping at Lake McDonald. He was anxious the first day, because even though he was raised in Whitefish he had never camped out and he had never biked that far before. On the first night, he couldn’t find the campground and ended up sleeping in a bivy sack on the side of the road, scared to death. After spending 404 of the next 668 days camping, Potter now laughs at his inadequate camping skills on the first night. 

“I knew everything there was to know about a week later. Now, I would consider myself an expert. I understand the wind, time charts, the best time to cook, sleeping-pad systems. I can set up a tent blindfolded. Literally, I can set up a tent blindfolded. I’ve done it.” Potter said.

Potter has always had an all-in attitude.  As publisher of the Whitefish Free Press, he would write and edit the stories, take the pictures to accompany the stories and then design and lay out the pages for the paper. During the three years he ran the paper he watched it grow from a 8-page black-and-white paper to a 24-page, full-color paper. During his two-year, three-month, 19-day stint in the Army, which he joined because he was extremely curious about the camaraderie of infantry soldiers during a time of war, he won a U.S. Army bodybuilding contest.

Potter has also always been visually inspired. After the Army, he went to the University of Hawaii’s Leeward Community College to study digital media and has spent the past couple of years running a business that focused on making videos and creating websites and photo galleries. When he felt like he mastered these skills, he searched for the best way to put them to use. 

“I was sitting right here and all of sudden it hit me. I said to myself ‘I’m confident in my skills and abilities and now is the time to hit the open road,’” Potter said, adding there was only one way to do this. “In a car everything goes by way too fast, but on a bike you get to experience everything.  I wanted to taste it, hear it and see it.”

He spent the next four and half weeks working with Wheaton’s,customizing his bike for his five cameras and 110 pounds of equipment. His custom, multi-grip handlebars look more like a car’s dashboard with all the devices attached to them. There are camera mounts on the front and rear forks and racks for his equipment. Potter said having a bike with 4 1/2-inch-wide tires with all that equipment is like having a couple of puppies at the park — everybody wants to come up and talk to you.

“Every single day somebody was curious about it, from all walks of life. I mean, every city, state and county I was in somebody wanted to talk about it. I had so many conversations just based on the bike itself,” he said.

Potter estimates he met about 3,000 people on the trip and hours upon hours of video footage. Some of the footage can be seen on his website, www.relaxedchaos.com. He is in the process of going through the tapes to make a documentary.

The generosity of the strangers he met is something that Potter never will forget. He was amazed at how many people invited him into their homes and fed him. 

Potter’s initial plan was to trace the perimeter of the U.S., but after biking through Montana and North Dakota he came back to Whitefish for a business project and restarted his trek in Boston. From Boston he rode to Portland, Maine — the first corner he reached. From there he rode down to the Eastern Seaboard to Key West, Fla. Then he cut straight across the South to reach his third corner, San Diego, on March 31, 2014. Potter rode up to Oregon, and by that time he started getting calls from friends and family wanting him to spend the summer at home. He decided it was time and reached Whitefish at the end of July.

Potter is still deciding if he’s going to resume his trip and finish riding the perimeter of America. 

He said it’s impossible to isolate a particular favorite incident as he pulls up a video of him in a redwood forest. Then he shows a video of him riding on the beach in Northern California as the tide moves in. There’s the lobster in Maine, Cuban coffee in Miami, riding across the entire state of Texas ... there were too many “magical and aha moments to count,” he said.

“It was life-changing. It changed my entire perspective on life, which I didn’t think was possible at 44,” Potter admitted. “There is a lifetime of amazing things to see.”

Potter is going to spend the next weeks focusing on his documentary and then who knows what his next adventure will be. He wants to bike across Europe with the new quadricopter he has for aerial filming, and he also wants to publish a cookbook with all the recipes of the healthy food that fueled his trip.

“Who does this? Who just jumps on a 150-pound bike and just goes for it?” Potter mused as he launched into an explanation of his high-octane protein pancakes. “I do.”

Reporter Aaric Bryan may be reached at 758-4441 or by email at abryan@dailyinterlake.com.