RAAM Officials

To state the obvious, RAAM wouldn’t happen without the RAAM officials. They spend ages getting ready for the event and seem to stay up for the whole race too! From those doing the paperwork at the start of the race, to those checking off cars during the vehicle inspections, those driving along the route and making sure we are being safe (and not breaking any rules), those that welcome you as you arrive in Annapolis, and those that organise the finishers banquet. You would expect there to be hundreds of people involved to cover the whole route start to finish. But some faces kept showing up again and again.

The first of those is the one and only George Thomas. George was the Race Director for RAAM this year. He’s been a RAAM racer in many forms, as a soloist as well as part of many teams, including a double act with his wife. We first met George in London when he came over to do the Seminar with Rick and Fred. They were brilliant, telling us all about so many things we hadn’t thought of, and completely changing our strategy.

He is such a nice guy and so laid back. It was great to see him along the route and he was there to welcome us into Annapolis. I have to say a special thank you to George for the shoulder massage at the end of the race – just what was required while I waited not very patiently for the racers to arrive!

Dave and Wendy with George the day after we finished

Along the route we had mixed feelings when we spotted a RAAM official, especially if you were driving a car. We did come close to getting a penalty one day when a RAAM official spotted us “taking longer than necessary to overtake our rider”. That was George, and he gave us a warning and made sure we understood just how important it was to keep moving at traffic speed while leapfrogging – we didn’t make that mistake again.

I had a run in with another official just after Monument Valley. We’d just done an exchange, dropping off Martin and then driving forward to pick up Louisa. We had to drive passed her to find a good place to pull off the road (5ft from the line!), and Kathryn jumped out to go back and help her with her bike to the car. Not long after a race official approached us. Eek! What had we done?! But we weren’t in trouble, he just came to say “thank you for that awesome changeover”. That’s got to be another highlight! I just wish I could remember his name to thank him!

And finally to the person that kept me sane throughout the race. On the morning of the race start, when cars and racers were breaking down, Deidre Greenholz kept me calm with lots of advice on what to do next (like taking Magnesium and Niacin to keep cramps and sweats at bay – the racers, not me!). I thought George was calm, but Deidre tops him.

We caught up with Deidre a few times along the route – usually in a Wal-Mart car park – and she always had a massive smile on her face, no matter what was going on! And of course at the end where she was being hostess at the banquet, putting up with everyone saying “my racers have just cycled across America you know” every time they needed something. Patience of a saint behind that smile!

Thanks for being fun and cool, Deidre!

Twinges and niggles.

I’m blogging from my couch with my feet up. . .  and my left and right ankles and right knee in ice-packs.  I spent the previous 15 minutes massaging my tendons with ibuprofen gel.

I’ve made friendly drop-in visits to both my physio friends this weekend.  They weren’t very interested in my grumbles and they certainly weren’t surprised.  I’m not surprised either: the best way to get injured has always been a tenfold jump in your weekly mileage.  But my friends patiently listened and gave me a bunch of stretches (probably should have done these before I got injured) and treatments to use to speed up my recovery.

Before I went away I chatted with a few cycling chums about what the likely effect of RAAM would be on the rest of my season.  Opinions varied between: “you won’t have a rest of season” and “after two weeks off you’ll be riding with the strength of ten bears”.

I like the second one best so I’m determined to shift these niggles.  My right ankle has improved so much since I got back that I can now hear my left ankle complaining.  Another few days and I’ll be perfect.

Louisa too has a sore knee but hasn’t been back on her bike yet to check whether it will let her ride.  She’ll be riding tomorrow and on the 24th she’s racing in a 10 mile TT. 

Worse off than the weary riders are the crew, many of whom have been struck by a terrible affliction:  they are addicted to RAAM!  There are now at least three of our crew talking excitedly about next year and even applying for permits from spouses and making a real start on the bid for corporate sponsorship.

I wish them all the very best.  I will very much enjoy tracking their progress from HERE IN THE UK.

Direct Following

So what’s it like to direct follow a cyclist during RAAM? Boring? Certainly not! I was lucky enough to work the midnight to midday shift, and based on the rota ended up direct following Dave and Cuz three times (cos they finished in 6d 4h 36mins in case you hadn’t heard!). RAAM insists that you direct follow the cyclists between 8pm and 6am local time, so I had six hours of following this (that’s Dave BTW):

 

The guys were changing over every 30mins and at night you might think that 30mins would drag. But it didn’t. It helped that we were more often than not, in touch with other teams, either overtaking them or occasionally being overtaken! It really made it feel like a race.

The best bit was as the sun came up though. You can’t beat the massive sunrises in America. I felt privileged to see so many.

I wish I had a photo of my favourite sunrise, coming out of Monument valley, following Dave and looking in my rear mirror to see the massive red outlines of the amazing stone formations. I would have dug out my camera but shortly afterwards I had to put my foot down to try to keep up with Dave bombing down a hill at 50mph!!! One of my favourite moments.

One of the challenges we faced was that you are not allowed to direct follow during the day before Kim, CO. That means, come 6am, stop direct following. Sounds easy, but when you then factor in changing time zones, you need to be on the ball about when to stop. Not so easy after only a few hours sleep! But we worked it out and avoided any penalties.

Another problem we faced was that during the night you need to have your light bars flashing – when you see how dark it is in the top photo you can understand why RAAM want all this stuff. One of our light bars stopped working on the third night. We diligently phoned up RAAM headquarters and let them know. They allowed us to continue using the vehicle as long as we 1) used the car as a leapfrog vehicle only 2) kept our hazard lights on all the time 3) got the bar fixed ASAP in the day.

So come 6am the next day when I came off leapfrog duty and had a few hours before I was needed on the route again, I bombed ahead to Walsh, CO. Three shops later and I had one strobe light, but had run out of shops. So drove on to Ulysses, KS, and two shops later I had a second strobe light, hooray! I have to say that every shop owner was really helpful which made the whole task much easier. And they all showed a great interest in the race. It’s amazing that RAAM has been going through those towns for nearly 30 years, and some of the locals still don’t have a clue what it is all about! I also met some guys who work their way across Kansas combining (harvesting) all the crops – they had seen the cyclists over the years, and were really curious why they did it – a difficult question to answer!

Spot the difference

I can’t believe how smoothly the actual race went! We had a few last minute panics on the morning of the race – Louisa was diagnosed with Strep, but downed some antibiotics and got on with it (amazing will-power!), one of our vehicles decided it’s battery wasn’t happy but we managed to ignore and carry on, and Barbara managed to slice her hand – fortunately Medic Steve was on hand to bandage her up.

Then the race started and it all went really well. We had a few hiccups here and there but in 3000 miles we had only 2 punctures and 1 sore knee. Amazing!

So something had to go wrong somewhere – spot the difference between us going and coming back:

Hmm, where did those cardboard boxes come from? Well Greyhound lied to us. We were promised delivery of our bike boxes within 3 days, but 9 days later and only 3 of the 6 had turned up. Our last 2 days in the US were suppose to be spent enjoying the sights of Washington DC, but were spent either at the Bicycle Pro Shop in Washington (thanks Ryan for all your help!) or the Annapolis Greyhound depot (thanks Taneka for all your help!).

After much toing-and-froing we managed to get the bikes back to the UK (although we still have some bike boxes to ship back when they finally show up!). The flight went reasonably smoothly. It was busy so none of us slept well but all in all not too bad. So there the story should end..

.. but no, on arrival at the Hounslow Barracks where the Army had kindly offered to look after our car for free (as it’s close to Heathrow), we discovered they’d lost our car key. They turned their office upside down but to no avail. They found one for Brian’s car, one for Cuz’s car but none for Dave’s car.

4 hours later a lovely chap called Nick drove us home so that Wendy and I could crash, and Dave could pick up his spare key and head back to Hounslow to pick up his abandonned car. He should be home any minute now…

Back to earth with a very large bump..

I can’t believe our RAAM experience is all over. It surpassed all my expectations, and to finish in the time we did was just the icing on the cake. Every single person on the trip has been incredible, and the crew worked SO hard to get us all safely across the finish line, I can’t thank them enough. Honestly, I genuinely believe that the cycling is the easy bit.

The team went our different ways on Monday, with Tom, Brian and I heading up to New York for the last (thank god) trip in the RV. Certainly something I won’t miss trying to sleep and eat in! The rest of the team stayed to sort out bike boxes, which from what I can gather has been a rather trying 2 days. Thanks for all your efforts though!

So, life after RAAM. After throwing yourself into something this big for 6 months, I am expecting life to feel a little ‘flat’ for a while, but nothing that I wasn’t expecting to feel. It really has been an incredible journey, one I am pleased to have shared with Martin, David and Cuz on the bikes, and our 9 wonderful crew. As Martin rightly said, the banner was probably the best bit. It has made it back to London safely with me, and everytime the RV went passed there was James smiling down. I think he would be proud.

The world is watching.

I had texts during the final hours of our race from all sorts of people, including a friend in Australia and a few friends I hadn’t heard from in many months.  Also from my Dad, as late as 2 in the morning.  I read these texts gratefully during the gasping, sweating, gatorade-gulping, food-stuffing intervals in the minivan between pulls.

RAAM draws people in.  One of our crew is already setting up to race in 2012 and another for the following year.

The week was everything I’d hoped it would be.

Perhaps the best thing was the banner on the back of the RV.  A last-minute idea in Oceanside I think.  It stayed put the whole week.  The banner and the baton set us apart from other teams so that even in the screaming-row, food-on-floor, empty-legged, gone-the-wrong-way moments the whole enterprise always felt right and important and worthwhile.

The RV was overcrowded and awkward and almost always on the move.  The crew worked flat-out with next to no rest, infrequent showers, cramped shared beds, logistical hassles, personality clashes, irate riders and monotonous follow-car work.  They were wonderful: slick, patient, tolerant, amused, cheerful, encouraging, self-deprecating, complimentary.  I’m ashamed that I wasn’t nearly gracious enough when stuff inevitably went wrong.  And yet even when I blamed the crew for my own mistakes, they just smiled, said “I’m sorry” and got us back racing.  Brilliant.  Thank you crew.

The RV might easily have been a miserable hovel but was in fact civilised and a place to look forward to resting in and eating good food.  Thank you Barbara.

I’m pleased to say RAAM really was a race and we really were in it.

We rode hard always. I rode my time-trial bike and wore my pointy hat for most of the riding and we ate up the miles. Our strategy meant I only ever saw Louisa really.  She was incredible. During most of our shifts we were passing or yo-yoing with other teams and on bumping into them later, off-shift, they invariably said “who on earth is that girl in your team?” or “what do you feed that girl in your team?”.  They were magnanimous and friendly even after embarrassing drubbings by Louisa.

The final day was an all-out head-to-head duel with the German mixed team.  We lost but I think we all relished the excitement.

And now after some hilarious disaters with the bike boxes we’re packed and ready to leave. I’m being hassled by David and Catriona to get off this PC in the foyer of our Washington hotel so we can go and eat before checking in.

It was a magical week and I’m grateful David and Louisa for dreaming it up and to the crew and Cuz for allowing it to happen.

James was on my mind the whole way, principally seen laughing hysterically at our balls-ups but also egging me on.

Here are the few photos I took before the start and along the way:

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Final photos…

Here are the final batch, which covers the last few days of racing and the finish. A truly amazing trip, and it was an absolute pleasure being part of such a great team. The family should be very proud of what they have achieved. I never met Josh, but wish I had. I have heard many, many good things about him over the past week, and I have no doubt that he is looking down on the family with tremendous pride.  Tom