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Community Corner

Get To Know: Doug Stacks Stays On The Move

Lilburn's director of planning and economic development loves motorcycles and biking.

Doug Stacks remembers his first trail bike at age 7 and his dad soon unable to run alongside as he sped off across that open field.

Ever since, he's been crazy about anything on two wheels -- on road or off.

"I love motorcycles, bicycles -- anything with two wheels," Lilburn's director of planning and economic development said. "That was my love growing up."

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Now 48 and a family man, Stacks is considerably less maniacal on two wheels, but no less eager to take off. He often rides his motorcycle to work from Dacula and can be spotted on his mountain and road bicycles whenever time allows.

Scheduling half-day motorcycle rides outside of time with wife Maria and daughters Rachel and Sarah is increasingly challenging, but it's easier finding two hours for 20 miles of mountain biking or 40 of road cycling near home.

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Quenched may be that once-insatiable thirst for a hilly field, an oval dirt track, or a windy mountain road to challenge on a high-performance crotch rocket. And with knee pain making distance running difficult, cycling is his preferred exercise to whirl the world by.

"Once I got in the woods," he said of mountain biking, "I just fell in love with it.

"You can see so much more of the countryside on a bicycle than you can running," he added of tour biking. "In two hours, if you were a good jogger, you can't cover 38 miles on the road or 20 miles off it."

Stacks had some noteworthy finishes in a mountain biking series, but now rides pretty much only recreationally, often with friends Tim Eskew of Braselton and Michael Driskell of Dacula. Eskew has involved Stacks in seven of his 18 or so tour cycling rides across Iowa, and Driskell is among Stacks' most regular motorcycle riding buddies.

Yet it's Stacks who taught them to mountain bike.

"The first time he took me out, I thought he was crazy as hell, and it almost killed me," Driskell recalled. "Doug can take you out on trails and whip the tar out of you."

Eskew also had trouble keeping up off-road with Stacks.

"He's very good on the technical aspects of mountain biking, going downhill and fast around turns and corners and what not," Eskew said. "He gets a lot of that skill from his motocross days. I told him I don't know if I'll ever get to his skill level and be able to keep up."

Stacks' enthusiasm for cycling has permeated his job in Lilburn for three years, as it did for eight as Snellville's planning director.

Stacks is focused on development of a multi-use trail along Killian Hill between Arcado Road and Lawrenceville Highway (U.S. 29). And, in keeping with his focus on cycling safety, he hopes all street widening projects someday will include bicycle lanes.

He jokes that if not for his parents urging otherwise, he might have become a motorcycle racer, and potentially, worse for wear.

"They kept me from being a millionaire," he likes to say. "But, then again, they probably saved my life."

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