Racers spend the better part of a year obsessively planning
and training for this event, honing their time trial skills, boosting their
watts/kg and testing & selecting the particular concoctions of energy
powders, electrolyte replacement formulas and recovery drinks that will
maximize their ability to perform, hour after hour, day after day and night
after night for a week straight.
The crew chief likewise invests untold hours in
planning, planning, planning for every racer exchange, every team exchange and
every driver exchange, plus all the meal prep, massaging, showering, bike
swapping & fixing that has to go off like clockwork to ride this race at a
record-breaking pace. Elaborate,
multi-page, multi-color, multi-level schedules promise to befuddle but,
ultimately, deliver the goods.
Then, in one fell swoop, we are at “Plan B” … which
is: makin’ it up as we go along!
During the first night of the race, one of our
racers fell ill, apparently from an electrolyte imbalance created by the
intense effort and heat of riding across the California desert the first
afternoon. Pulling in to what should
have been the site of our second racer exchange, a cool spot in the desert
where the resting racers should have been able to sleep and gather strength for
their next leg, he started vomiting violently.
Our crew chief made a quick decision: take the sick racer to the
hospital for evaluation and, probably, IV rehydration; move the RVs down the
road another 55 miles; and tell the crew supporting the two racers on the road
that those racers would need to tack on another two-plus hours to their current
shift.
Two hours later, our sick racer still isn’t back
from the hospital, and we have two racers coming in who’ve already spent over
two hours more on the road than we planned or they anticipated. What do we do? We can’t squeeze any more out of the two
racers coming in, but we can’t sit still either, so we send out the one
healthy, rested racer we have left and let him ride a solo “time trial” for 55
miles, about three hours, uphill, rather than riding in 20-30 minute shifts, to
allow reasonable rest and recovery for his legs and lungs. Then, so we don’t completely incinerate that
racer, we send out the stronger of the two other healthy racers, to give him
some relief … only problem: the “stronger” racer has now already got two extra
hours in his legs and only three hours off the bike, instead of eight, as
planned.
At the end of the day, our sick racer still isn’t
100%, but we have three racers who have been picking up the missing quarter of
the workload … one of whom has been out on the road for about 18 of the last 24
hours … and if we’re going to get to Annapolis (never mind break the record),
we can’t lose another racer. The crew
chief, who readily accepts input from all but ultimately makes the call (this
is no place for democracy!), dispatches minute-by-minute decisions, constantly
changing course, sometimes even reversing himself, all in the hopes that we’ll
cobble together the resources we have to reach the goal we set for ourselves,
notwithstanding the impediments thrown in our path. In the end, he decides to put the original team back on the road for a full shift ... it's night, so the conditions will be better - cooler temps and less traffic - and the route for tonight's section is more downhill than up. All in all, a good opportunity to break our guy in "easy" ... we'll see.
What makes this the “world’s toughest bicycle race”
is not the “mere” fact that one, or two, or four, or even eight riders have to
string together continuous rides for 3,000 miles … that’s a given, a known, a
monumental but surmountable challenge.
What makes this race so damned tough is that all the training,
preparation and planning in the world can never adequately anticipate or plan
for the inevitable fact that something will go wrong that you hadn’t planned for … Lots of things go
wrong in this race, like every bicycle race, many of them even predictably so, but
there is always something, something that’s almost sure to happen but not
predictable anyway, that challenges the whole game plan.
[P.S. Not enough bandwidth here in Montezuma Creek,
UT to upload pics … more later]
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