FARMINGTON – Without realizing it, a young Peru man became a celebrity last year in the world of endurance unicycling.

Max DeMilner’s quirky Six States, One Wheel journey covered 720 miles across New England to raise money for college. His trek also spawned next summer’s premiere Ride the Lobster, an international unicycling endurance race across Nova Scotia.

“It’s very exciting,” DeMilner, 21, said Sunday afternoon inside his apartment on the University of Maine at Farmington campus.

DeMilner and his brother, Kyle DeMilner of Philadelphia, and their dad, Charles DeMilner of Flagstaff, Ariz., will compete as Team DeMilner. They will join other three-person teams of more than 100 endurance unicyclists from four continents, 17 countries, 17 American states, and eight Canadian provinces in the 500-mile, five-day ride that has been dubbed the “Tour de France” for unicyclists.

“I couldn’t possibly have imagined something like this happening. After unicycling around New England last year, I didn’t realize I had made a name for myself. Basically, I did it because I ran out of money for college,” said Max DeMilner, who was invited to preview the course in September with Edward Wedler and three world-renown unicyclists.

Wedler, of Greenwood, Nova Scotia, dreamed up the unique race to promote tourism in Nova Scotia, which is shaped like a lobster, DeMilner said.

Last fall, Wedler found a blog link on Google Earth to the Unicycle Max Web site that Kyle DeMilner created for his brother’s 2006 journey.

“I took a GPS transmitter for my own navigation and (Kyle) took that and ran with it to use Google Earth to show my progress,” Max DeMilner said.

For Ride the Lobster, relay batons serve as a GPS transmitting device provided by Britech Information Systems of Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia.

“This will make the race available live on the Internet to anyone in the world. People in Israel who can’t go to Nova Scotia to watch their team, can watch it online in real time. That’s really spectacular and it will keep the teams honest, because it will have the course programmed into it so unicyclists can’t go faster (than normal) or deviate from the course,” Max DeMilner said.

On his apartment wall, the Mountain Valley High School graduate, who is majoring in philosophy at UMF, has a large map of Nova Scotia, under which hangs a banner photograph from a Sept. 24 article in The Hants Journal of himself pedaling furiously around a corner in Nova Scotia.

That same image of DeMilner riding his unicycle – named Capt. Pasquale – is now being used to market Ride the Lobster at www.ridethelobster.com.

“I’m just amazed that this event has inspired casual unicyclists to take up long-distance unicycling. And it’s even inspired unicycle manufacturers. For a long time, there was only one company that put out a 36-inch unicycle, and now another company did it, and later this year another one will. But the most exciting thing about all this is that it promotes the sport,” DeMilner said.

Googling “Ride the Lobster” also reveals the far-reaching scope of the one-of-a-kind event.

DeMilner said he did his qualifying ride in September, traveling on Capt. Pasquale from Farmington to Rumford in one day and then back to Farmington via Livermore Falls on the second day.

“Five hundred miles from start to finish … in five days. It will be the longest, most grueling unicycle race in history. Even for the top riders in the world, that’s pretty ambitious,” DeMilner said.