Cyclist Spells “HELP!” Across America in 22,920-Mile World Record GPS Drawing
The riders behind Le Monde des Cols spent years building journeys around the high roads of Europe, ultimately documenting 526 unique mountain passes and summits while each rode a separate motorcycle.
By Atlas Editorial Team
26 October 2026 • Raleigh, North Carolina [USA]
A Stranger Waiting at the City Limits
Jeff Molby was sitting outside a gas station about ten miles from Key West, eating a banana and drinking a Gatorade, when a woman named Kate stopped to ask about his loaded bicycle. They talked briefly before going their separate ways. Forty minutes later, when Molby reached the city limits sign, Kate was standing there, applauding.
“She shook my hand and said, ‘Congratulations, you made it!’” Molby recalls. “It was so touching for a complete stranger to take time out of her day to recognize my little achievement.”
He expects to tell that story for the rest of his life.
On October 10, 2026, Molby completed a three-year bicycle journey covering 36,886.94 kilometers (22,920.48 miles) across 757 GPS-recorded rides. Viewed together on a map, his routes spell “HELP!” across the United States, with brief excursions into Canada and Mexico.
Molby started volunteering with the American Cancer Society after meeting a family devastated by colon cancer. His own father had survived the disease after early detection and treatment, a contrast that made him reconsider what cancer patients and their families endure.
He became particularly concerned about transportation. Patients requiring frequent treatments often depend on others simply to reach their appointments. Having lived without a car for much of his adult life, Molby understood the practical consequences of that dependence.
“The fight against cancer is far broader than just research,” he says.
When his son left for college, Molby found himself with an empty nest and an opportunity to combine travel with advocacy. He created ChemoRiders to raise awareness of the American Cancer Society's Road To Recovery transportation program and began cycling across the country on October 10, 2023.
The original plan was practical: travel westward, alternating between northern and southern routes while visiting communities and speaking about volunteerism. There was no particular shape to the journey beyond the geography itself.
Finding a Word in the Roads
The first suggestion of something larger emerged almost accidentally. Molby had added Little Rock to his itinerary for the 2024 solar eclipse and included the Natchez Trace because he wanted to experience the road. Together, those decisions created a loop that would eventually become part of the letter L.
By spring 2025, he was considering whether his accumulated route could become recognizable artwork. After experimenting with different possibilities, one word finally made sense.
“Help!”
“I don't specifically remember the moment, but it was a long period of brainstorming with a lot of ideas that didn't feel right and then ‘Help!’ came to mind, making sense instantly.”
The message drew inspiration from Fred Rogers and his familiar advice to look for the helpers during difficult times. Molby wanted the finished artwork to encourage compassion across communities, regardless of where people lived.
By July 1, 2025, he had committed publicly to the design. Completing it required approximately six additional months of travel and some considerable logistical rearranging.
The H shifted a planned Rocky Mountain crossing southward, avoiding potentially difficult September weather between Montana and Seattle. The exclamation point gave him an excuse to visit East Coast cities he had previously omitted. Other ambitions, including a possible finish near the Grand Canyon, had to wait.
His Android phone recorded the rides through Strava, while TravelMap allowed him to observe the emerging image. Six major repositioning trips by plane, bus, and train connected different sections of the drawing, with motorized travel excluded from the cycling measurement.
The result is gloriously imperfect typography, its strokes following actual roads, mountain passes, cities, and the compromises imposed by geography.
The physical demands were substantial. Molby experienced neck, back, and hip injuries, along with frequent leg cramps. But he found the psychological toll of living constantly in public even harder.
On May 14, 2026, exhausted and attempting to nap in Friendship Park in Rutledge, Tennessee, he was confronted and told to leave. The encounter brought months of accumulated frustration to the surface.
“The stress of being constantly in the public eye, with no space of my own, always subject to the whims of anyone with unkind assumptions about me… I couldn't take it any more,” he recalls.
He considered finishing the P and abandoning the exclamation point. But leaving early would not answer the uncomfortable question of how to return to ordinary life after so long on the road.
He continued.
The Last Mile Wasn't His Alone
On the evening before the finish, Molby's family gathered in a Raleigh hotel lobby to prepare approximately one hundred peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a nearby Food
Not Bombs distribution.
His mother had booked her flight months earlier. Aunts, uncles, and cousins joined the celebration, and a younger relative arrived with supplies to make signs.
On October 10, Molby met a local cyclist named Mike at Shelley Lake Park. They followed Raleigh's greenway system, stopped to visit volunteers repairing bicycles at Raleigh Community Kickstand, and continued toward Moore Square downtown.
As the final miles disappeared, Molby became unusually quiet.
“I got pretty quiet at the end as reality settled in that the Final Mile was finally here, that my massive passion project was finished… successfully.”
His mother greeted him with an embrace. Richard Averitte welcomed him on behalf of the American Cancer Society and the Rotary Club of Raleigh. A woman passing nearby noticed the gathering and thanked him for his advocacy. She was undergoing treatment for breast cancer.
Afterward, the family helped distribute the sandwiches, attended a Rotary Oktoberfest gathering, and ended the evening with dinner and cards.
Atlas World Records has certified Molby's achievement as the Largest GPS Drawing by Bicycle (Individual), with a verified distance of 36,886.94 kilometers (22,920.48 miles), approximately 6.3 times the previously published benchmark.
Yet Molby's strongest reflection concerns everything he depended upon while supposedly traveling alone: roads built by strangers, food grown by others, tools he never invented, and communities that welcomed him.
“Everything that every one of us does, we do as a community,” he says. “Even when we're mostly riding alone.”
He has since returned to Michigan to rest with family. After three years organizing life around the next destination, he is looking forward to doing very little.
The finished GPS drawing remains on the map: five characters stretching across a continent, assembled from thousands of ordinary roads.
Near Key West, long before the drawing was complete, Kate had waited beside a city limits sign simply to applaud a stranger.
She didn't know what his map would eventually say. But she had already demonstrated what he meant.
Certified by Atlas World Records on 26 October 2026