It was like any other day off the coast of Tybee Island Georgia except for one thing. There seemed to be… a giant hamster wheel in the water.
Inside it was a man who said he planned to get the vessel all the way to London, England.
Before it could get far, the hamster wheel caught the Coast Guard’s attention and got its creator, athlete Ray Baluchi, in legal trouble. He allegedly claimed to have a bomb on board as they told him to stop the trip.
If Baluchi wasn’t stopped, would he have been able to make it to his destination?
The “Something Offbeat” team reached out to some experts – Dean Ovel, a runner who has experience running in a hamster wheel and Bart Kemper, principal engineer of Kemper Engineering – to find out.
“I wanted to do something that I could run on for 24 hours so people could see me,” he said. “A treadmill would have worked perfectly fine from a gym, but it isn’t very visually exciting. So, the idea of a hamster wheel was kind of born from that, really something that just sparked interest and attention.”
“I don’t think this could get across,” said Kemper of Baluchi’s wheel. “I mean, there are some huge issues with this right off the bat.”
Each week, “Something Offbeat” takes a deeper look at an unusual headline. If you have suggestions for stories the podcast should cover, send them to us at somethingoffbeat@audacy.com.