Excerpt.

I was called to ride. To ride a bicycle down city streets to corner stores, to coffee shops through jungles, across deserts, and over mountains - day and night, night and day. As a recreational cyclist turned commuter, turned pedal junkie, I dreamed of victories immortalized by history: Miguel Indurain’s unprecedented, impossible fifth consecutive Tour de France victory, or Jan Ullrich’s glorious, courageous charge to the podium. I dreamt of chiseled legs, of breaking away and crossing the finish line to raise my arms in the exalted celebration of winning. Like Musk, I sought a new world.

Well, it imagined great, but reality kept getting in the way. Funding? A lack of crew, equipment, sponsors, cycling ability, and a million other illusionary problems. Yet, in spite of a thousand rejections and an endless array of pessimists, I found a way to enter The Race Across America or RAAM - 4900 kilometers - one stage.

My team was unique to RAAM because it was the first time a two-person relay team had entered the race. The usual team entry had 4 riders. We further snubbed the status quo by opting to ride full-suspension mountain bikes, another first for The Race Across America. My teammate, Jeff Estes, was a downhiller that shunned precipices in favor of traffic and trucks. Our crew was a cross-section of Americana.

Early on a California summer morning, seven of us in two race support vans, adorned in decals, spotlights, caution lights, and seven roof-mounted glimmering tricked-out mountain bikes, rolled quietly into pit lane to make final preparations for the 17th annual running of The Race Across America, billed as the toughest race on earth. Just months earlier, I had never heard of the race. RAAM was my first organized athletic contest in approximately two decades.