Ryan Leech is my hero.

Mountain biking fans know Ryan Leech as a foremost innovator of trials riding, the sport of bicycle-based acrobatics. Leech's work has been featured in dozens of mountain biking movies and live competitions, where he negotiates unimaginably-difficult jumps and obstacles using his trademark combination of power, grace and imagination.

As much as I enjoy watching him in action, this does not make him a hero. He became my hero after I read Mountainbike magazine's June issue, with an inspiring story about how a professional mountain biker becomes a global citizen.

The article explains how Leech recently had an epiphany while filming a new trials movie in British Columbia that was set in an old-growth forest soon to be logged. Leech was struck both by the forest's majesty and by the sense of impending loss, realizing that he would be one of the last to enjoy the forest once it is clear-cut: for a long, long time.

He determined himself to learn more about it, about logging in BC, about resource extraction in general, and about the environmental movement. He read one of my favorite books, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, by Thom Hartmann and hooked up with the David Suzuki Foundation, a very cool nonprofit organization dedicated to educating people about the environment.

For a guy who never graduated from college, Leech hit the books hard and got himself up-to-speed using the same determination and self confidence that makes him a world class mountain biker. I appreciate how he understands himself, his strengths and his limitations, and about his fellow humans.

Leech knows that, as passionate as he is about saving the world, he does not want to simply preach. Instead, he is summoning a skill that few wield more prodigiously: his keen sense of balance. He is searching for the ways to effectively use his sport to deliver his message about the need for us to live more in harmony with nature. He is searching for the best way to entertain, inform and inspire.

Leech is a hero, because he is realizing his true potential not just as a mountain biker but also as a human being, and this gives him a clear idea about how he will make his life truly meaningful.

I wish him godspeed!