I received an email last week for Jim Pitre, RAAM race director that solo riders had until today to choose between the Traditional (old rules) and Enduro (sleeper) categories. We can change our mind once before May.
I don’t like the idea of the mandatory sleep stops. It’s not that I think 40 hours off the bike is unreasonable but I want to be able to sleep when I feel like I need to not when I manage to get to a control point. My first thought was great, I’ll sign up for the Traditional category now that it is going to be a real category with prize money.
But reading through all the information, I found one little detail that I haven’t seen anywhere else. The Traditional category isn’t the rules from the last few years but rather the original rules. The key thing is you have 48 hours after the winner to finish. I really don’t know if I can finish within 48 hours of mutants like Robic and Trevino. The Enduro category gives 12 days 2 hours to finish. That’s hard but seems a real possibility for me but in the Traditional the cut-off could be under 11 days.
My coach didn’t want me back on the bike until Sunday after having the flu last week. Even on Sunday she only wanted me to do an easy spin. That gave me Saturday to make another attempt at installing the remote car starter and remote door locks on my wife’s van. In the time between my last attempt, I had soldered up the required resistors and connected the wires to the relays so that it would reduce the risk of me getting stuck with the vehicle unusable for a few days. The short story is everything is working now including the horn honking and the lights flashing before it starts up. I’ll leave the painful details for another post.
Sunday evening I thought I’d hop on the trainer for an easy spin after we went over to a friends house. The kids were downstairs with their kids when we heard a big bang. About right away Danielle and Cassidy started crying. Danielle was lying on her back on the floor. They had the carpet torn out so it was just bare concrete. She was kind of limp but screaming. Cassidy’s face was bleeding.
We got them upstairs were I got the full benefit of Danielle throwing up. She was like a rag doll in my arms and we were having trouble keeping her from going to sleep. We called 911 and they ended up taking her to the hospital in the ambulance. For the first couple hours her heart rate and temperature were low and we couldn’t get much response out of her.
They finally took her for a CAT scan and that woke her up. After that she started talking and told us that Cassidy was on the stairs and started falling and so she had tried to catch her. Cassidy doesn’t weigh much less than Danielle so that was a bad idea. After a little while the doctor came back in and said the good news was there was no sign of brain bleeding or bruising. The bad news was her skull was fractured. They went ahead and sent her home since the brain was alright. Yesterday she was running around the house as though nothing happened. Cassidy’s face is pretty beat up looking.
Since I spent Sunday evening in the ER, yesterday was my first day back on the bike. I just did an easy spin for about 45 minutes on the Santa Fe Trail. My legs felt good so today I plan to ride a little longer but still keep it easy.
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Tags: Bike, RAAM, Race Across America
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Wow … close call with the kids. I’m glad they’re OK.
So, they give you only 2 days to finish beyond the winner? That seems really tight. I thought there would at least be a weeklong spread. What do you do if someone finishes and you’re still in, like, Oklahoma, or something? That’s a long sprint. 🙂
Quite a scare, eh?
The fact that you used to work at Agilent caught my eye, as I currently use their microarray slides in my research. You still in the biotech industry?
Botched
Respone to Jill’s comment: The original RAAM cut-off was 48 hours after the winner. A few years ago it was changed to 12 days and 2 hours so the cut-off wasn’t dependent on how good the winner was. Some people complained that made it too easy to finish but the finishing rate still is about 50%. Crews can find out at the checkpoints where other riders are so it won’t come as a surprise if a rider gets too far behind. I’d rather deal with required time off the bike than be worrying about not finishing because somebody is riding really well. In the past some riders have finished unofficially when they missed the cut-off. I’m going to go with what I think gives me a chance at finishing officially.
Response to Botched: I was actually doing network test related work while at Agilent. I’m still doing the same thing at Fluke Networks. We’ve just hired some more guys that I used to work with at Agilent. The 2 guys from here that I ride with the most at lunch are guys I used to work with at Agilent.