Race Across America 2015 Oceanside, CA to Durango, CO (Part I)

Race Across America is a 3,000 mile bicycle race across the United States from Oceanside, California to Annapolis, Maryland. Riders can compete as members of 8, 4, or 2-person teams or as solo competitors. To cross the continent to beat the twelve day deadline to be an official solo finisher, competitors ride for 20 to 22 and 1/2 hours, drink more than four gallons of fluid, and consume over 8,000 calories per day. In the race’s 34 year history, less than 200 people have officially completed the race as solo finishers (over 2,000 individuals have summited Mt. Everest).   

I bet you’ve experienced it, too, that moment in the latter stages of a 100 mile bike ride where the legs turn effortlessly and the endorphins are surging and you’ve averaged 18 mph and you’re almost sorry to see it end. You think, “Man, if I could just get enough food and water, I could do this forever. I should probably do Race Across America (RAAM). I know it´s 3,000 miles, but they hand you up food and water from a follow van the whole time and the winner only averages, like, 15 mph, which is nothing.”

But, no, you can´t do RAAM. See, when you stopped for that twenty-five minute break at the gas station, your GPS stopped because you set it to do so. It stopped again for ten minutes while you waited beside the road for the new guy to fix a flat. So, in reality, your 18 mph average, when tracked under a running clock, is unceremoniously knocked down to a more pedestrian 16.3. The pacelining and wheelsucking helped you maintain a good speed and saved your energy, too, not to mention the mental lift gained from being with other riders. You picked your route, too; one that presumably didn’t pass through the Sonoran Desert in June, over the Continental Divide, or along the shoulder of Highway 50 in West Virginia. But you´ll come back at me with a list of your cycling palmares and athletic achievements because you think RAAM is simply a long bicycle race. It is not. RAAM is a competition of unspeakable suffering. The bicycle is just the chosen instrument of torture. It could just as easily be a frozen waterfall upon which the contestants kneel, or an upended telephone pole a hundred feet over the water upon which they stand until they fall into the drink, cramped and sleepy.   

So much of the suffering of RAAM has to do with sleep deprivation, the bugaboo of riders and crew alike. Sleep, the last thing the rider fantasizes about just before he or she sinks down into a nether world where sleep and wakefulness meld into hallucinogenic somnambulism. Sleep deprivation is the thing; beyond heat and cramps and exhaustion and Shermer’s neck, that is most hatefully inflicted on RAAM riders, the thing that makes the entire event fundamentally and profoundly unsafe. So, no, you can´t do RAAM. It doesn't make you a bad person. Keep riding your bike for fun, fitness, competition, socializing and transportation. 

José Bermúdez can do RAAM, though. I was convinced of that when I agreed to crew for him this summer. I had seen him at a RAAM qualifier race months before, where he ripped off 500 miles like it was just a fun weekend, bettering his previous time on that same 500 mile course by hours. José asked me to help crew for him like he did for RAW (Race Across the West) in 2011 and RAAM in 2013. Unlike the previous years when I had something else I had to do over the last three weeks in June, this time I really was available, and to tell the truth, I was intrigued by the adventure of supporting a solo competitor racing his bike across the country. José and I had ridden a lot together in College Station, Texas, where I was in graduate school at Texas A&M until 2013. José was a fascinating guy to me, Colombian born, raised in England and educated at Cambridge. It still seems strange for me to hear a British accent coming out of his face, almost like a dubbed movie. I figured out he was actually the dean of my college while I was helping him fix a flat on a ride. He was a strong cyclist even before he started to train specifically for RAAM, a good dude with an appetite and aptitude for high mileage but a notorious half-wheeler. 

When José recruited me and eight other intrepid souls to crew RAAM for him for the last three weeks of June 2015, he promised that he would cover all expenses and, bless his heart, he did. Other crew members told me stories of crewing for other riders that involved paying race expenses up into the thousands of dollars and for me that would have been a show-stopper. I met most of the crew for the first time two days before the race in Oceanside, California. Andrew Dobson is the mechanic I knew from Texas who seemed to always be working on something as fast as he could. James Doggett, a renaissance man from Missouri, was our medical expert. Emma O’Loughlin, originally from County Kildare, Ireland; came from Singapore where she was working for two years as a physical therapist. She had been working with José long distance for months, giving him exercises to strengthen his core, upper body and neck so that he could handle being on the bike for over eleven days. Emma talks exactly like you think an Irish girl from the farm would, and I could not resist the temptation to ask her open ended questions in hopes that she would hold forth on any subject and let the sweet sonority of the land of my ancestors wash over me. Alphonse Lin came from China to attend Texas A&M just over two years ago. Martin Mikes is a funny Brit with an amazing tolerance for sleep deprivation. Michelle Beckley was the crew chief. Lin and Martin were like me, utility players with no special capability for the team. Martin and I made runs to bike stores and Walmarts and bought ice and food, drained and filled coolers and prepped food and water bottles. And we were among the few who were authorized on the contract to drive the rental vans.

The day and a half before the start was jam-packed with inspections, meetings and gear prep. José was jovial but amped up before the race. All the energy he had been putting into training had to go somewhere and there was a lot at stake. José had successfully finished Race Across the West (RAW), 880 miles from Oceanside to Durango a few years ago, but when he first attempted RAAM in 2013 he was hospitalized with kidney failure within a couple hundred miles of Oceanside. He somehow got back on the bike and continued, eventually having to abandon the race in Salina, Kansas. This year José had developed a support plan in excruciating detail. To José, success was just a matter of executing the plan for which he had trained. “I’m a fit enough cyclist to make it to Annapolis in the allotted time,” José said in one of our meetings in Oceanside before the start. “It’s just a matter of you guys supporting me with the nutrition and hydration that I need.”

When José crossed the start line in Oceanside followed by the other half of the crew, Martin and I ran some team errands and drove ahead two time stations to Brawley, California. RAAM is segmented by fifty-five time stations fifty to eighty miles apart, generally Wal-Mart or McDonalds parking lots. When we took over supporting José in the middle of the night in Brawley, our plan was for me to start out driving and for Martin to be in the back seat next to the coolers of food and drink. That arrangement lasted about two hundred yards, when a race official pulled us over and told us Martin was required to sit in the front seat. The practical outcome of that decision for our two-man crew was that the person riding shotgun had to unbuckle, kneel in the front seat, tantrically contort himself to reach into the boxes of food and bottles and coolers of ice, prep the food or drink, then hand the items out of the window when it was safe for the driver to pull alongside. The navigator also had to document food, drink and timing in two three-ring binders. All the driver could do was drive, which much of the time (and always at night) involved directly following the rider at a distance of about fifty feet. José typically didn´t like us very close. The race officials wanted us very close. The idea was that the follow vehicle, with a reflective triangle on the back and flashing lights on top, would protect the rider and give him additional light to see the road.

I remember it being still over 100 degrees when we left Brawley in the middle of the night. The cool boardwalk of Oceanside now seemed a lot further away than eighteen bicycle-hours ago. Once the riders cross the peninsular mountain range in San Diego County, they drop down into the Sonoran Desert, where they face temperatures of up to 110 to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Successfully negotiating the desert in California and Arizona is absolutely critical for RAAM competitors. It was where José had kidney failure and had gone to the emergency room in 2013. It’s where, year in and year out, many accomplished, even former professional cyclists abandon, a mere two hundred miles into a 3,000 mile race. Totally rested and amped up by the start line environment that seems to be more like the pre-game festivities at an NBA game than a transcontinental sufferfest, the RAAM novitiate underestimates the hydration demands of the race, gets behind on fluids, and in a matter of hours, he or she is done. So José was drinking constantly, and the need to refill and pass him bottles knew no respite.   

If the food and drink preparation process seems overly complex and it seems like it´d be simpler to just pre-mix a bunch of bottles and prepare food ahead of time to hand to him, I would have to tell you that we didn’t do it that way because José didn’t want it done that way. He didn’t like the taste of the pre-made bottles and without a healthy dose of ice in each bottle, the fluid would almost immediately assume the temperature and consistency of camel slobber and he wouldn’t drink it. In hot weather he would want to alternate a bottle of ice water with a bottle of electrolyte replacement. But sometimes he would want a Sprite or a Coke, also packed with ice. Every few hours he would need a protein drink, but it had to be mixed with almond milk and the bottle had to be topped off with lots of ice. Food choices were similarly specific. He’d take tortellini in a plastic bag. He liked fruit, but it needed to be cold and in good shape, not bruised or soft in any way. One thing he liked was marmite spread on ry-krisp crackers, but only if you spread a thin layer of land-o-lakes butter (only land-o-lakes) on the cracker first. His food preferences were a moving target, too. What he wanted in the heat was not what he wanted when it was cool. What he wanted when it was cool was not what he wanted in the couple of limited episodes when it was cold. The mixed, salted nuts that he loved and gave him needed protein early in RAAM hurt the mouth ulcers he developed later on. 

He rarely wanted just plain whatever, and when he did, we sometimes seemed incapable of giving it to him. At one longer stop for sleep and a big meal, the cook prepped pasta with chunks of chicken breast and pesto. He didn’t want it. He wanted pasta with olive oil and a little garlic. The specificity of tastes came to be like a joke among the crew. Someone would text, “José wants kiwi fruit handpicked by barefoot virgins.” In Colorado, José’s hankering for clam chowder in the absence of the cooking crew involved Martin and me going to Walmart ahead of him, buying a camp stove and cans of chowder, and warming them up hunkered over them in the parking lot. I complained to Martin that it was kind of an esoteric request. But Martin assured me that the chowder was something he had liked on the 1,000 mile race he crewed for him in March. We just had to come up with it because the third van with the camp stove and most of the food had to go on ahead. It hit me then that Martin and others had crewed for him before and they knew what he liked and that I didn’t. I realized that I needed just stop worrying about how exotic the food requests seemed to me. Obviously, the guy needed to eat massive amounts of food to make it through RAAM. He knows he won’t just eat any old thing. He made it pretty clear to us what he liked and didn’t like. He paid for it and paid our expenses to be there to provide it to him. Additionally, without needing to understand all the science behind it, I buy into the theory that in an extreme event like RAAM the body craves what it needs. I don’t know if we got better at anticipating what he wanted or if he got more flexible, but eventually we got better at feeding him by analyzing the weather, his effort, what he last ate, and what we had on hand in the van. We got better at taking the initiative, too. We’d pull up alongside him and yell, “How about some smoked salmon?”     

                                           

Every twelve hours or so, usually at one of the time stations, we’d swap crews out of the follow vehicle, do all the stuff we needed to do to take care of him, drain the water out of the coolers, and reload ice and supplies into the follow vehicle. The goal was to do the swap in less than twenty minutes, so we were scrambling. The shorter the time off the bike, the less rapidly he´d have to ride to make the cutoff times. Inevitably, with one van following and two others either driving ahead or temporarily staying behind, we would fail have something he wanted. He asked for a coke at one point and we had not a single one in the follow van. “But I bought forty-eight cokes and brought them to California! Forty-eight!” José exclaimed. He had a point. To pay for travel and expenses for a bunch of people and buy all the stuff you know you´re going to want, and not be able to get a cold coke when you want it is not right. Sometimes we´d have what he wanted and not know it until we completely unpacked the van. It was helpful that most of the gear was stored in transparent tubs that José had organized and labelled, but the minivan we rented to use as a follow vehicle was so full of gear and food, it was like working a Rubik’s cube to get to anything but the most routine, obvious items. Sometimes, especially when it was just Martin and me, we couldn´t get to something without stopping the van (which we couldn’t do at night without him stopping, too). At one point he told us he wanted pita chips and hummus at the next stop. There were no pita chips to be found, so I offered him mini-pretzels to dig into the hummus and then I gave him some chunks of chicken breast. He was happy with that and I made a note that we needed pita chips. He was definitely not picky about having everything perfectly clean. The hands we used to fix flats on the bike and slather him with sunscreen were the same hands we dug down in the ice chest to fill his water bottles and prep his food. He didn’t seem to care. He accepted the amount of dirt and grit generated by RAAM without blinking.

Almost immediately after RAAM started, we were all plunged into a cruel test of sleep deprivation. After driving for twelve to fifteen hours supporting José, we’d need to drive two or three additional hours to the next destination and possibly need to buy or prep items (eighty pounds of ice, at the very least) to be ready for the next handoff. We’d then check into a hotel and try to get to sleep, sometimes in the middle of the afternoon. So I’d lay there in a warm hotel room, without a clearly established time for when we needed to be ready to relieve the other crew, attentive to every ding and vibration of the smartphone, dog-tired and unable to sleep. In Prescott, Arizona, after unsuccessfully trying to sleep during our break, I spent a couple of hours doing Martin’s and my laundry, walked around town for a little while, bought an antihistamine (thinking it would be a safe way to make me drowsy), lay back down and tried again. The antihistamine only succeeded in giving me nervous legs and I still couldn’t sleep until right before we had to go relieve the other crew in the middle of the night. So, in spite of the large coffee I downed before we started our shift, my eyes were already burning as we switched over in the dark and I was immediately sleepy in the vehicle supporting José. My biggest fear driving was that I would fall asleep and plow into him, but I would switch off with Martin before the sleepiness made me too unsafe. I also invented techniques for staying awake. Martin and I talked about every movie we ever liked as well as cultural differences between Brits and North Americans. When we were talked out, I would try to keep myself awake by pinching the skin on the inside of the arm under the bicep. At one point in Utah during the 3 a.m. death hour, when José couldn´t stay awake enough to safely ride his bike, we´d put him in the van for short naps while we stumbled around along the shoulder and squinted at the shapes of the rock formations on the near-black horizon. We´d wake him up and get him going again, all of us so sleepy it was like two drunk guys putting an extremely drunk guy on a bicycle and pointing him down the road in the inky darkness towards Colorado. We had eighty-one hours to make it from Oceanside to Durango, CO, the first mandatory cut-line, which, in practical terms, meant we had until roughly midnight Friday, the 19^th. We rolled in well under the cut time, but several hours slower than we had planned. José wasn´t sleeping enough, and in his zombie state he couldn’t maintain good speed. We’d have to make some adjustments. In Durango, we picked up two new crew members, Janice Tower and Vaune Davis, and Vaune, at least temporarily, solved my sleep problem. 

 . . . to be continued