It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that any endeavor conducted around the clock for seven straight days is bound to involve incidents of human error ... potentially epic ones. Happily, none of our mistakes, and we did make some, were “fatal” to the team’s goals. Here’s a sampling of some of our more noteworthy blunders:
- One bicycle dropped from a moving vehicle. With hundreds of bicycle transitions accompanying racer exchanges and a couple dozen team exchanges, it was a virtual certainty that something on one of these fast, light, sensitive machines was going to get broken. Amazingly, that never happened, at least not during any of the exchanges. Instead, in one team exchange we failed to properly fasten down Don’s (very expensive) time trial bike, and it worked itself loose from the rack as we were rounding a ramp during a rare section of Interstate mileage, sliding to the ground at about 40-50 mph and, incredibly, doing almost no damage other than one shredded tire and one damaged (but still usable) pedal. The frame, fork, drivetrain and both wheels escaped completely unscathed. As Taylor Keating, one of our team mechanics put it, if you’d simply laid the bike down carelessly from a standing still position, chances are you’d have done more damage. Humorous post script: When Don woke to the news that his bike had parted company with the RV (and its ultimate fate was still in doubt), he responded saying, “I never liked that bike anyway.” Whew!
- One missed time station report. Each team is responsible for reporting when its racer has crossed through one of the 50+ designated time stations across the country. Failure to report within 15 minutes of the crossing can result in assessment of a time penalty, starting at 15 minutes and climbing in severity with successive failures. Some teams have been assessed time penalties of an hour or more, which can be significant if you’re racing against another team or, as in our case, a record (or two). Fortunately, on the one occasion the guys in our follow vehicle got distracted and neglected to make the call, the RAAM officials took pity on our panic-stricken crew members (nothing worse than a crew mistake costing riders hard-earned time) and only issued a warning.
- Countless wrong turns. Even though RAAM publishes a route description that included 127 pages of detailed maps and turn-by-turn instructions, calibrated to tenths of a mile, and even though we had GPS units in every one of our vehicles, we still missed a lot of turns. Well, to be more specific, the RVs missed a lot of turns, which was a pain in the neck (turning around a 28-foot RV with a 6-foot bike rack hanging off the back is a chore under the best of circumstances, never mind on a narrow country road), but the racer vehicle/follow vehicle combination reportedly only missed two turns … which means our racers only missed two turns. Over nearly 3,000 miles of racing on secondary roads through daylight and darkness, that’s a remarkable feat.
- One unlatched RV compartment. We carried a lot of stuff in the compartments under the RVs – racer and crew luggage, tables and chairs, shower tents, water bottles, etc. Typically, those compartments were opened and plundered at every team exchange site, so one of the responsibilities of the RV drivers was to ensure that the hatch doors on each compartment were properly latched before rolling out of camp … and, here’s the important additional caveat, immediately before rolling out of camp. Leaving Oxford, Ohio, yours truly did the latch check about 10 minutes before we actually rolled, leaving some innocent 10 whole minutes to open that compartment, grab whatever he wanted, and saunter off leaving the hatch closed but unlatched. We discovered the error only after making a “distribution” of 30-40 empty United-4-Health water bottles around the outskirts of Oxford.
More significant than the mistakes we made were the mistakes we didn’t make. Those are worth mentioning here, too:
- No injuries. This was huge, and particularly significant in light of this inescapable fact: RAAM is a dangerous event. Cyclists, in general, recognize that our sport is inherently dangerous – 15 lbs of carbon and rubber just don’t stand up well to 2 tons of steel going 60 mph (and let’s not even think about whether the driver of that missile is distractedly texting or tuning in the radio when he or she is hurtling up on your backside). But RAAM is even more dangerous. First, RAAM puts a lot of bicycles and vehicles on the road at once; picture this: on our first overnight section, leaving Brawley, CA, dozens of RVs and other support vehicles leap-frogging their way through dozens of riders, followed by their follow vehicles … and countless bewildered “civilians” … the driver of the semi who got stuck behind our RV most of the way to Parker, AZ (not too far from Area 51) must have been convinced that the alien invasion had begun. RAAM is also dangerous because it runs at night … cycling is dangerous enough during daylight hours; it’s really dangerous at night. Finally, after running day and night for close to a week, the sleep-deprived riders and drivers inevitably become a danger to themselves and each other. Given all these factors, notwithstanding the best efforts of RAAM’s organizers and officials to establish and enforce safety standards, it’s amazing that there are as few injuries (or deaths) as there are. We were certainly fortunate to escape with none.
- No penalties. Except for one close brush (see above), our team happily avoided imposition of any penalties … a fact that not only saved time but also helped maintain our morale and conviction that we were competent to tackle the task at hand.
- No viral sickness. We worked hard to keep our living/working environment as clean as we could, but having 19 people living in 2 RVs and 3 vans for 7 days is not calculated to produce a germ-free environment … and it didn’t. Still, we managed to dodge the virus bullet all week.
- No "missed" team exchanges. Not all of our team exchanges were studies in synchronization, but they were mostly pretty smooth, and we didn’t completely bungle any of them … though we did have a bit of a scramble in La Veda, CO, when we thought we had time to grab a “real” dinner at a local restaurant and instead found ourselves running out the door with sandwiches in hand to make sure the incoming racers weren’t waking up the sleeping racers who should have been dressed and ready to go.
- No one left behind after a team exchange. With 15 crew members rotating through the crew RV and three other support vehicles, it’s not surprising that past crew members have been left in the bathroom when “camp” pulled up stakes and moved on (at least the racers are pretty easy to account for on a four-man team). Happily, we managed to gather all our assets before rolling from any team exchanges this year.
- No vehicle damage. Vehicle damage was apparently a given for many of our repeat crew members (including one RV that seized up when the transmission fluid ran dry and one van that was completely incinerated after its hot exhaust ignited dry grass in a roadside transition), but this year we returned both RVs and all three support vans in nearly perfect condition.
