Race Across America 2015 Part II: Durango, CO to the Mississippi River

Vaune Davis and Janice Tower joined the team in Durango. Janice, José’s coach, is from Anchorage, Alaska. She is herself an accomplished ultradistance cyclist and coaches about sixteen riders (in addition to sponsoring and organizing numerous projects around Anchorage). She looks the part of both coach and athlete, with a calm, affable demeanor and arms and shoulders roped with smooth muscle. Vaune, from Toronto, was added to the team to prep José’s meals from Durango on. She is also a superb ultradistance cyclist, having won the Ultra Marathon Cycling Association World Cup in 2014 and having been the only woman soloist in Race Across the West in 2014 at age 54. Vaune is a live wire: funny, garrulous and smart. When we got to the condo in Durango where we were to get an extended rest, Vaune cooked the whole team a fabulous meal and gave me something to make me sleep for eight straight hours. I was put right and ready to continue on the morning of Saturday, June 20^th.

Martin, Janice and I rolled out of Durango together and we took over supporting José around South Fork, Colorado. To start work rested in the light of day as a three-person crew, with someone in the back seat handling the food and drinks, seemed like an unimaginable luxury compared to the previous 880 miles. We traversed a truly beautiful part of Colorado and crossed the Continental Divide at Wolf Creek Pass at just under 11,000 feet of elevation.

José rode strongly over the mountain passes at Wolf Creek, La Veta and Cuchara. The combination of the cooler weather, bucolic scenery and Jose’s performance buoyed our spirits into the parts of eastern Colorado where the terrain became flatter and less picturesque.

Soon after we crossed into Kansas on Father’s Day, though, we started to have trouble with a race official. It was as if he was waiting for us at the state line, determined to stop and warn us every time he passed us or us him. He never charged us with breaking any specific rules the first five times he engaged us, but gave us instructions for how we should crew our rider, often countermanding instructions we had been given by the race director at the pre-race meetings back at Oceanside. Finally, after we had been relieved by the other crew near Greensburg, Kansas and were on our way to Maize, where we were finally going to get some rest, the official stopped us for the sixth time that day. Before I even got out of the van to see what his deal was, I was already seething. To me, it was harassment, pure and simple and I had had enough. He told me I was driving too fast and that I had to remove the reflective triangle from the back of the van since it wasn’t actively following a cyclist at that moment. Since the vehicle had been inspected and approved back in Oceanside exactly as it was set up, I resisted making any modifications to the vehicle and an argument ensued. He finally resorted to the old favorite of martinets the world over: “It’s in the rules.” I was still hot when I called the race headquarters and asked that they get the official to stop harassing us. That was a mistake, all of it; the being angry, the calling, the asking, all of it. Our rider was hit with a 15-minute penalty for my phone call to race headquarters, which was categorized as “unsportsmanlike conduct.”

José would have to sit for fifteen minutes at the penultimate time station in Maryland near the end of the race. In the big scheme of things, an extra fifteen minutes where the rider can’t ride but can nap, eat and drink something or get a massage, is not too bad. When you’re finishing in between eleven and twelve days, fifteen minutes is a drop in the bucket. But if something were to go wrong and he were to miss a cut-off and not be an official finisher it would have been catastrophic and I would have gone down in RAAM history as the goat of crew members of all time. And just the knowledge that my foolishness was going to take a time bite out of all the thought and effort that had gone into efficiency, and José’s effort to maintain pace on the bike, was galling to the whole team. José was coolheaded about it. When I apologized to him he said, “Well, it’s not that big of a deal. If I were you, though, I’d call race headquarters and apologize.” I did as José recommended, even though I didn’t feel like it right then. There was no realistic way to appeal the penalty (RAAM rules bizarrely stipulate that appealed penalties that are not reversed are rewarded with an additional fifteen minute penalty). The penalty hung over me like the Sword of Damocles for the rest of the race. In addition to feeling bad about the obvious inconvenience to José, I was sorry I gave the crew chief an extra headache and I also felt bad that Janice spent about two hours of her rest time working on a letter to race headquarters before we figured out that it would be counterproductive to appeal. It didn’t occur to me until well after the race that the official, a RAAM finisher himself in previous years, was probably just bored and wanted to talk to people about RAAM most of the time he engaged us.

With the exception of a few spectacularly explosive episodes, apology and forgiveness was the standard approach to interpersonal conflict on the crew. One of us, pressed by the demands of the race, would snap at someone else, usually in a way that was disproportional to the gravity of the error, but then quickly and genuinely apologize and patch things up. 

The main concerns in Kansas are wind and boredom. RAAM has been run from west to east for the past thirty-four years because of the prevailing winds, and they´re famously strong in Kansas. We needed a tailwind for José and we got it about half the time from the south-southwest, at an angle off of his right quarter. The other half of the time it seemed to blow directly from the south at a ninety degree angle to him so hard that he sometimes had trouble keeping the bike in the road.

At some point in Colorado we discovered that the tracker system online was working dependably enough for us to check the progress of the other riders. Through much of the race up through Colorado we regularly crossed paths with some of the riders, Claudio Clarindo, Jason Burgess, and Shusanah Pillinger, to name a few. It might seem strange in the light of a competition, but we couldn’t help but cheer our guts out for the other riders, even in José’s sight and hearing, and their crews cheered for José, too. The magnitude of the undertaking and the suffering we knew the riders were enduring made passionate fans of all of us. 

   

The updates about the riders we couldn’t see made José more competitive, which we wanted to moderate earlier in the race. He went into the race knowing that the goal was to finish, and not beat this guy or that guy, but soon after getting through the desert he started to go more and more into race mode. We started out telling him not to worry about the other riders and just to race his plan, but by Kansas we figured out he needed something other than the plan to keep him focused. The guy is naturally competitive, and after all, it’s a race. When we told him that Norm Hageman and Matt Hoffmann were forty miles ahead of him in Kansas, José asked, “Well, how do I get up there with those guys?” I was incredulous that José was thinking of ramping up his pace to close a forty mile gap. That was too much to even think about even at that point in the race. It would have been foolhardy for him to blow himself up trying to catch up to guys who may be blowing up themselves. I yelled out the van window, “You don’t do anything. You wait for them to make a mistake.”

We were all worried about him developing Shermer’s neck, a malady which had tormented him in 2013. Shermer’s neck occurs when the neck muscles fail and the rider can no longer hold his head up. Many iconic photos of RAAM are of competitors riding with a neck brace on, just to attempt to deal with Shermer’s neck and finish the race. But the Shermer’s neck brace compromises the cyclist’s vision, awareness and ability to control the bike, and we wanted to avoid the brace until as late in the race as possible or, optimally, to never use it at all. Emma, the physical therapist, gave him stretches and mobility exercises to do on the bike and coached him on what muscles to engage to minimize the probability of having to get into the brace.

The repetitive motion of cycling for thousands of miles take their toll, though, and the rider’s points of contact with the bike take an incredible beating. James Doggett treated José’s saddle sores every 250 miles or so and we swapped out the bike saddles for Selle Anatomicas, seats with so much give they were essentially leather slings. He never complained of hand numbness during the race, but in the months after the race had to get surgery on his right hand to decompress the medial and ulnar nerves. By June 24^th, some seven days into the race, José developed debilitating pain in the big toe joint on his right foot. Cycling shoes are, by design, light and stiff and the lack of cushioning and flex ensures that much of the road vibration is transferred through the bike into the feet. Also, the rider’s power to the bike is transferred through the feet, so the stresses there are considerable and foot problems are common. When he got off the bike for a sleep in Ft. Scott, Kansas, he could barely put any weight on his right foot and the sight of him leaning on James Doggett and limping pitifully into his hotel room was disheartening. The physio team soaked the foot in ice and cut a large section out of a spare right shoe to take the pressure off his toe. Thankfully, the treatment worked and he was back into his regular shoes within a couple of days.   

A shuffling of crew members had Alphonse Lin working with Janice and me in the follow vehicle. In Jefferson City, Missouri we supported José for a shorter than average shift, only 88 miles. While he slept for two and a half hours in Washington, MO we prepped the vehicle, food and equipment for continued support in the dark, unsure of which crew would go out next, and went to get some sleep. An hour and a half later, at about 5 a.m., we were back on the road with José for the sections from Washington, Missouri through St. Louis to the other side of the Mississippi River into Illinois. He had until 4:39 pm that day to get across the Mississippi River to make the cut-off to stay in the race. The road out of Washington, MO was especially challenging, extremely narrow, curvy and hilly with no shoulders. There must have been a large construction site nearby, because pickup truck after pickup truck zoomed past us with all the look of guys on their way to work from sun to sun. We pulled over in a driveway to switch José over to his lighter bike, which also involved changing over lights and batteries, GPS, bottles, and Bluetooth speaker. He got on the climbing bike and took about ten pedal strokes when he got chain-suck (where the chain does not detach correctly from the bottom of the chainring) and snapped his rear derailleur hanger, making the bike immediately unserviceable. We got off the road and went through the process of swapping bikes again. He started from there up a hill that must have been 13 to 15% grade, wobbled and crashed. There was no shoulder and no place to park, so we stopped in the road and jumped out to help our rider, praying that our flashing lights would keep us safe. All this was going on before morning civil twilight in a hilly, wooded area, so it was as dark as the inside of a cow. Over twenty years in the Marine Corps on dive operations, parachute jumps, in helicopters, on live fire ranges, and in combat, I felt like I developed a sense of when I was in a situation what was truly dangerous, and at that moment in RAAM, all of my sensory alarms were going off. In spite of all that was going wrong, with race time ticking away, José kept his cool.

I remember going through Marine Corps Mountain Leader course in the Sierra Nevada as a young Lieutenant back in 1989 . At one point I was so frustrated with managing my weapon and all my military gear on skis, that after one painful and humiliating biff, I stood up and effusively cursed the cold, the snow, the mountains, and the mother of whoever invented skis. I cursed the prepositioned supplies in Norway and the entire northern flank of NATO (which we were training to go protect) and profanely declared that, as far as I was concerned, the Russians could have anything frozen and snow-covered. I could be forgiven for not being adept in the mountains in winter, having grown up in Louisiana, but even in a school environment that was a bad move. I was an officer, and therefore a leader, and going on a rant in front of everybody wasn’t helpful.

José’s calmness through all that was going wrong that morning helped us deal with the stress. He could have reacted badly in about thirty different ways, but he just said, “Oh, I started off in my big chainring. Rookie mistake.” And he got on his other bike, thanked us for our help, and ground up the hill.

The area around St. Louis where we approached the Mississippi River was as highly trafficked as you might imagine on a workday morning, and drivers, impatient with a cyclist and his follow vehicle, were nasty and aggressive with us. All teams were instructed by race headquarters to load up their riders at a specific point, cross the Mississippi, and drop them some 27 miles into Illinois to continue riding east. It was late morning when we carefully loaded José’s bike into the back of the van (his other two bikes were on the rack on top), perched Lin on one of the coolers, put José in the third seat (he went to sleep as if there were an on/off switch on his butt), and made the portage. I was deadly sleepy behind the wheel, but at this point I was the only authorized rental van driver in our crew. I would catch myself drifting off, veering and slowing down as I desperately applied all my known techniques to stay awake. We finally put José back on the road at a truck stop where we were able to get huge cups of coffee and regain some alertness.

In spite of the short rest and all the dangers and problems of that morning, we had crossed the Mississippi some six hours ahead of the time limit to keep him in the race. Janice, Lin and I looked at each other with relief and I think I said, “Man, that was sketchy.”   

  

 . . . to be continued