OUTDOORS

Highways to Hell

by Dimity McDowell

Note: In the summer of 2000, Dimity McDowell was a member of Mark Patten's support crew for the Race Across America bicycle race.

Just after midnight on a Tuesday morning, Mark Patten pedals through mile 2,262, leaves Oklahoma and crosses the Arkansas state line. The smell of armadillo roadkill hangs in humid, 83-degree darkness. Ten miles later, he pulls into the driveway of a dilapidated, drive-up beer shack. With the exception of the headlights of the pace van following him, the building's one bug-swarmed light is the only brightness he's seen for hours. "I'm fine if I look about six feet in front of me. I can see the asphalt. But if I look further up the road, it's almost -- ah, fuck -- like the trees form a Deliverance kind of thing," he says, as he dismounts his $5,000 titanium Litespeed bike, takes a pee, honks a huge air snot, and stuffs himself into the back of the air-conditioned Minivan. "Just give me ten minutes. No more." Seven minutes later, Patten slides open the door, swigs back two cans of Ensure, pops a couple Tissue Rejuvenator pills, gets back in the saddle, and slowly, slowly, slowly starts turning the pedal crank, barely mustering enough momentum to spin up slopes smaller than bunny hills.

If Patten were riding the Race Across America according to his plan, he'd be humming around 18 mph now. Conditions are perfect: the temperature has dropped about fifteen degrees, and just six hours ago, he slept his daily allotment of ninety minutes. But this race isn't about plans. "More and more I'm starting to think that the ground is spinning and I'm just sitting still. I can't tell what's real," he says into a walkie-talkie, rigged to his jersey, as he wobbles around.

"The sun will be coming up soon," says Darryl Chase, Patten's crew chief, over the van's PA, "Keep pedaling, Mark. That's what it's all about."

0 miles; Portland, Oregon. "During this entire race, I'll be thinking how I would be riding if I were in the best shape of my life. How fast I'm going is never fast enough."

In essence, The Race Across America (RAAM) is simple. Twenty-four ultra-cyclists (23 men, one woman) line up in Portland, Oregon, ride southeast for 2,975.1 miles until they reach Gulf Breeze, Florida. The clock stops for nothing -- not for sleep breaks, or for broken down pace vehicles, or for medical airlifts. "This is a time trial, a race of truth," says Patten, a San Jose, California, resident competing in his third consecutive RAAM.

Bicycles may be the only thing RAAM, which began in 1982, has in common with other bike races. It is to the Tour de France as the WWF is to Olympic wrestling: a bizarre spin-off that requires its own subset of talents and skills. Speed isn't as vital as sheer endurance. While competitors go off the starting line between 20 and 25 mph, the average speed of the winner -- who usually sleeps less than three hours a night -- hovers just below 15 mph by the end. Because a good day is seeing two riders and a typical day is seeing one or none, motivation to withstand the monotony of pushing one pedal, then the other, with no end in sight, is key.

Money is also a huge factor in finishing RAAM. In addition to the $1,000 entry fee and outfitting at least two high-end bikes, racers spend around $10,000 feeding themselves and their crew, paying for motel rooms (or renting an RV), and stocking two vans full of everything from jumper cables -- in case vehicles break -- to bungee cords -- in case neck muscles fail. (The cord is somehow rigged from a rider's helmet to his shorts, and the set-up usually keeps him in the race.)

0 miles; Portland, Oregon. "If I have to start thinking about pedaling, I'm in trouble."

Pierced Out in San Jose, one of Patten's sponsors, gives him free jewelry for his nipples, tongue, lower lip, and ears, both of which are pierced five times. A carpenter who has collected over 200 pieces of John Deere paraphernalia and whose favorite saying is, "quote unquote," Patten doesn't have, "many 'quote unquote' friends," and is "one of the more 'quote unquote' normal" ultra-marathon cyclists. The field this year features seven Europeans, most notably Wolfgang Fasching, an Austrian, whose Website promotes his 5.5 percent body fat and resting heart rate of 30 beats-per-minute. Among the 16 American men are Reid "The Flamingo" Finfrock, who raises microscopic wasps in Springville, California, rides a pink bike, and wears a pink helmet and spray-painted pink shoes; Rob Kish, a fifteen-year RAAM vet and its only three-time winner, who listens to everything from John Philip Sousa marches to taped Star Trek episodes while riding alone, then cranks Native American tribal chants as he passes other riders; and Danny Chew, a two-time RAAM winner, who has two claims to fame: he's planning to ride a million miles before he dies (he's around the 500,000-mark now) and he's a 37-year-old virgin, a fact that landed him on Howard Stern show in a "Guess the Virgin" game.

"A place where you're very vulnerable, both mentally and physically"

Indeed, it takes a special breed to not only cross, but actually race the width of the country. "You don't have a sergeant barking at you or have a death threat to finish," Patten says. "You yourself push your body way past its normal limit to a place where you're very vulnerable, both mentally and physically." The average age of the competitors is 40. "Although young guys are strong, they're typically not very good at dealing with the brain torture of RAAM," the 40-year-old rider says. "It's still a great accomplishment to do this as a ride, but when you go out and race the thing, it's a whole different realm."

Mile 654; Burley, Idaho; in 7th place. "At night, my whole world exists in the headlights. I can't see the stars or even twenty feet in front of me." But he can see nearby frogs and field mice, which he purposely pegs under his wheels. "Yes, I have power. I dominate over something."

Although this race is one of the most athletically challenging tasks in the world -- one former competitor figured completing RAAM was the physical equivalent of swimming the English Channel 18 times straight, or running 56 consecutive marathons, or doing over one-million push-ups in a row -- it is also one of the most infantile. "I'm going to be like a selfish child out there," Patten warns his crew during a pre-race meeting, Instead of sleeping, he "goes down," instead of eating, he "gets a bottle." The crew massages him, tells him when to stop and where to turn, slathers him with bug spray and sun screen, changes his clothes, draws his shower, shields him with a blanket while he takes a dump off the van's front bumper, and applies ointment to saddle sores and various rashes. Most of his 9,000 daily calories come from Ensure -- a caloric, nutrient-rich formula intended for seniors, and Cytomax -- a carbo-loaded sports drink. But he also eats occasional treats including turkey sandwiches with Miracle Whip, Jell-O pudding, cheeseburgers, Sprite, graham crackers, and orange-mint Ricola cough drops. "You'll get sick of me. Call me a prima donna when you're in the van," he says. "But when you're around me, put on your best face."

Mile 984; Manila, Utah; 6th place. "Last year, a biker chick, wearing black jeans, yellow polo shirt and a vest, had a rack. Just absolutely huge. She rode up next to me and asked what I was doing. I told her, and she tilted her helmet up and gave me a smile with the grossest smoker's teeth ever. Anyway, my crew came up, I asked if they saw the girl and they're like, 'No, dude.' So I said to myself, if I'm going to hallucinate crap, I'm going to have some fun. There will be naked chicks in front of all the houses I go by."

Although seventeen pages of detailed rules preface the 120-page RAAM route book, only a couple of unofficial rules matter. For the crew, the golden rule is this: don't get lost. In previous years, the route has gone through San Francisco, Las Vegas, Washington D.C., and New York -- traffic-signal and navigation nightmares. No worries on the 2000 route, which, with plenty of 100-mile straight stretches, is "a cyclist's dream," according to Lon Haldeman, the race director and one of the original four masochists who dreamt up RAAM. "You won't see another car for 10 or 15 miles on many roads." (You will, however, see plenty of logging trucks on roads with minimal shoulders. "Those drivers must have NASCAR licenses," says Patten, as one whizzes by him at 75 mph.)

The route isn't dreamlike for Patten, who thrives on heat and despises elevation. His plan was to survive the hills of the West, then reel in riders on flats of the South, where he figured the heat and humidity would slow the Alps-trained Europeans. But with over 100,000 feet of climbing, there seem to be no flats, and the thermometer rarely rises above 100 degrees, a given in previous RAAMs. After slamming up and down the Sierras and the Rockies, where nighttime temps chilled to 33 degrees, the competitors ride rollers -- an uphill and downhill coupled together -- through the entire width of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi. "I never got a break," says Patten afterwards. "By the end, all I wanted was one lousy stretch of flat land."

Staying on the bike

Mile 1,488; Walsenburg, Colorado; 6th place. Down at 5:10 a.m. and up at 6:20 a.m., Patten has a thick green film coating his tongue and can barely swallow. Lack of sleep -- six hours so far, in almost five days -- has broken down his mouth's lining, impairing its ability to dissolve stomach acid. "I don't know, guys. This race is brutal."

Other crew rules: at night, you pee only when he does, you sleep only when he does. During the day, don't run out of ice, which cools drinks, swollen knees, blackened feet, and, in extreme heat, can be stuffed down a rider's back, into his helmet, or into a tube sock to be hung around his neck. Don't directly douse him with water, which Patten's crew learned in 1998. ("I felt like I was riding in a diaper.") A rider's shorts, saddle, handlebars and gloves, shoes, and anything else that touches him, will eventually irritate him.

For the riders, only one thing matters: staying on the bike. Dawdling on pee breaks, eating a burrito while standing instead of pedaling, stealing an extra bit of shut-eye or taking a shower longer than one minute are all wasted seconds that quickly add up to hours.

Mile 1,642; Clayton, New Mexico; 7th place. "Why do I do this? I find it quite fun to take my body, push the limit and find -- oh, that really hurts. But what if I go a bit farther? Oh, that doesn't hurt as bad now."

As a child, Patten and his brother would fly off dirt jumps and plywood ramps on Sting Ray bikes, which they decorated with white and blue stars, like Evil Knievel. When that got boring, one would lie on the road while the other jumped over him. "We tried putting a motorcycle shock on one bike, but it didn't work," he recalls. Patten also suited up for everything from Pop Warner football to his school's bowling league. "I never got any affirmation from coaches about my skills," he remembers. "They just said I was intense." That much he knew. "The coaches would tell me that I didn't need to kill my teammates in practice. I thought, 'Yes I do.'"

As an adult, he dabbled in snowboarding and jet ski racing until some idiot t-boned him and broke his tibia, which is when he took up cycling seriously. After riding the Davis double century (200 miles) with crew chief Chase on a tandem in 1993, he found out about a series of double centuries and rode in all of them. "On the last one," he says, "there was a 400-mile option, so I did that." He continued to be a regular on the long-distance circuit, where RAAM is a hot topic, and after crewing for three years, he wanted to ride it himself. At the 1998 24-hour world championships, an event in which competitors ride as far as they can in a day, Patten rode 457 miles, 32 more than the cut-off for RAAM entry.

Mile 1,773; near Hardesty, Oklahoma; 7th place. "When you hold your finger over a flame, it's warm, warm, warm, and then all of a sudden it hits that stinging point. That's what my saddle sores feel like. A cigarette lighter is always under my butt."

Unlike most other ultra-marathon cyclists, Patten's preparation for RAAM centers as much around weightlifting as it does riding. Most of his days start at 5 a.m., squatting 800-pounds on the gym's Smith machine to build up his quads, which measure about 26-inches around. Patten then rides his bike to work and spends the majority of his day tearing down and rebuilding bathrooms. "It's a dusty, dirty job that beats the crap out of me," he says. "I'm not whining -- it's my choice. I tried to work indoors and couldn't do it." In contrast, many of Patten's RAAM competitors are professional cyclists, desk jockeys, or are privately funded. At the end of a day, Patten usually steals a nap and then rides the rollers, an indoor set-up that duplicates the balance, cadence, and boredom of road riding, for a couple hours. Even if his unique training philosophy has yet to propel him to the top, the idea of piling on the miles doesn't sit well with Patten. "If two people are running a long race neck-and-neck, the one who has been lifting weights will have more kick at the end," he argues.

From racer to participant

Mile 1,880; Mooreland, Oklahoma; 7th place. "I see Ren and Stimpy floating around the pavement. I wish they'd stop drawing those things."

One more rule, this from a pre-race memo: "Play Mark's music. You might learn to like it." Pumped at full volume out of bug-speckled speakers on the top of the van, Patten's music ranges from "The Best of Earth, Wind and Fire" to "War: the World is a Ghetto," to techno. Chances are, his crew isn't going to rush out and buy "Techno: Funky Breaks" after the race, considering three members are over the age of seventy. While other riders have deluxe Motor Homes outfitted with everything from showers to hot pots and crews of at least six (many have upwards of ten) filled with doctors, masseuses, nutritionists, and loving spouses, Patten, who is single, has two mini-vans, a rechargeable blender that only works sometimes, and a crew of five. His father Frank Patten, 71, his uncle Henry Schnell, age 74, and family friend Auggie Binder, 74, compose the day crew. Before leaving Portland, Chase holds how-to sessions on the bike rack and Discman to bring them up to date on RAAM and the 21st century.

Chase, owner of Evergreen Bicycles in San Jose, is the only member of Patten's team with RAAM experience. Frank and Henry have followed Patten previously, but were never directly responsible for him. In Patten's first race in 1998, Chase, as crew chief, oversaw a tenth-place finish. In 1999, Chase was responsible for driving the van and tending to the bikes.

I came into this assignment thinking 20 miles was a decent bike ride. I'm assigned to Patten's night crew with Chase. "If I weren't such a loser and an asshole, maybe I wouldn't have such a hard time rounding people up," Patten says while huffing up a pass in Colorado one night. Perhaps, but a bigger reason for his lack of crew is last year's finish, or lack thereof. He quit with 112 miles to go.

Mile 2,053; outside Cushing, Oklahoma; 6th place. "I looked in the mirror today. I'm one skinny motherfucker."

On the scale of RAAM afflictions, the physical are relatively minor. Patten endures, with just a few "Ah, fucks," the loss of 30 pounds, aching kidneys, bloating that makes him sympathize with pregnant women, blistering skin and heat rashes, and peanut-size saddle sores.

This year, the biggest problem for Patten is listless legs. He fries them around mile 836, on a 9,000-foot climb out of Ogden, Utah, because he doesn't switch to his bike outfitted with a granny gear, which makes it easy to spin up hills. Consequently, about 400 miles later, while creeping up the 10,400-foot Tennessee Pass into Leadville, Colorado -- "the longest, hardest climb I have ever seen in RAAM," said Rob Warren, lead official with 12 years experience -- Patten can't go more than 100 yards without stopping. "I couldn't believe I wasn't being passed by anybody," he remembers, "I told the old guys I just wanted to make it to the finish line. Right then, I gave it up as a race and turned it into a ride."

The mentality from switching from a high-key racer to a lower-key participant is surely a let-down for Patten, but it's also a huge relief. Toning it down means the danger of losing his mind is over. "Pushing yourself so hard puts you on a such a fine mental edge," he says, "You want to ride it for as long as you can, but once you cross that line, watch out." He speaks from experience. "They could've sent me to a loony bin last year. That's how far gone I was."

Mile 2,226; Talihina, Oklahoma; 6th place. "Last year, I was frustrated because I started out so slow, then things turned around. But in the end, the thing caught up to me. I just couldn't control it. I wasn't strong enough to control it."

In the 1999 RAAM, once Patten conquered the Rockies, he found his zone, where physical output is minimal and cruising speed is around 20 mph. Normally not one to accept or ask for compliments, Patten asked his crew if he was riding well. He most definitely was. So, in Arkansas, he began his assault toward meeting his goal of a top-five finish. He moved from tenth to seventh in 24 hours. Despite the fact that he had only slept three hours during the first 1,500 miles of the race, his body was humming. His mind, however, most definitely was not. "The heat, humidity, and those bugs that make weird noises -- Cicadas, I think -- really started to get to me. God, I just wanted them to shut up."

"I wave up the van, tell them I'm wigging out."

Surround-sound chirping was compounded by Fresh-Kills smells. "The stench from the burning rice fields ... I can't imagine anybody living in this smell and the swamps stink and they don't pick up the dead carcasses, so those are just rotting," he remembers. "RAAM is kind of like that joke about marriage. It can withstand major events, but minor details, like leaving the toothpaste cap off night after night eventually break it down."

Which is exactly what Patten did in '99. After riding 2,826 miles, he was in sixth place, just one (very short) hour behind Italian Fabio Biasiolo, who he had been trading places with all across the country. But he wasn't going to chase down Biasiolo. "I was on the bike, but I felt like I was on rollers. I was pedaling and balancing, but I wasn't going anywhere. The ground was moving underneath me, I wasn't moving. My brain was in a dream state, but my eyes were open. I was thinking, 'This is real. No it's not real. Am I doing RAAM? Of course I'm doing RAAM. But what if I'm not?'"

"I wave up the van, tell them I'm wigging out," he recalls. "The A/C is blasting in there, and the crew all have these smirks, like they're out to get me. They just say I'm riding along fine. Maybe I am, but they don't understand, I have to think about pedaling. You fuckin' assholes, you don't know how hard I am pushing myself out here. Don't just crack the window."

Mile 2,487; Monticello, Arkansas; 8th place. "I'm sitting here, pedaling my ass off, and I feel like you're playing a joke on me, like you have a little rope and you're holding me back. I know it's not true, but that's the sensation I'm getting."

Taking things into his own hands, Patten tried to crash into the bushes few times to pseudo-hurt himself. That didn't work, but his crew, hoping rest would bring sanity, did put him down. Soon after waking up, he was passed by Kaname Sakurai, a Japanese rider in a neck brace, lurching along and steering with upturned handlebars. Seventh place was too much to digest. "I didn't need to go across the finish line. My race was over."

The crew spent twelve hours hugging him, shaking him, yelling at him, hitting him in the back of the head, trying to get him to continue. "We ran along side the bike, told him how to shift and what foot to pedal with," remembers Chase. "He was totally passive, his head hanging low. He'd go 100 feet and stop again."

His father offered to walk the 100 miles with him. "It was the biggest mental meltdown I've ever seen in RAAM," said crew chief Steve Born after the race. Says Patten of the end of the '99 RAAM: "I felt like I was a prisoner of war, where they make you do something over and over without any sleep. You get to the point where you say, 'I'm not doing it anymore, you can do whatever you want to me.'"

Finally, after forcing him to sit naked in the back of the van for hours (Born wouldn't give him his street clothes), the race was really over. "I asked him if he'd be fine with this decision in the morning. And next week. And next year," says Chase. "He said yes. We turned around and went home."

"I could've ridden my bike in the other direction," says Patten.

Mile 2,600; outside Ebenezer, Mississippi; 8th place. "Five miles before the finish line, we should throw my bike down, put me in the van and pretend like I'm not going forward. Let's see what my dad would do."

During the last fifty miles of the 2000 RAAM, Patten gets hit with sheet-like downpours and gusting winds, followed by a scorching heat so intense he lets Chase pour water over his head, a feeling he can't stand. Low blood sugar has him pounding Ensure, pudding, and Mountain Dew at every stop sign. About eight miles before the end, his rear tire goes flat. Patten takes the opportunity to crawl into the back of the van and rest, until Chase finally forces him out and back on the bike. "My head is so dizzy," says Patten, as a traffic jam of cars, the first he's seen in days, crawls by him, "I can't even tell how long a mile is anymore."

Around five o'clock a Wednesday afternoon -- ten days, eight hours, and ten minutes after Patten rolled out of Portland -- he crosses the finish line in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn in Gulf Breeze, Florida, where an uncharacteristically large crowd of 75 applauds him. Winner Wolfgang Fasching, who completed the course two days ago, has already packed up and gone home. Officially, Patten came in seventh place among the solo men, but he was the eighth solo rider to finish; Cassie Lowe, the lone female rider, crept up on Patten slowly, then slept only 25 minutes in the last 30 hours to beat him by five hours.

Eleanor, Patten's mother, has flown in to greet him and reunite with Frank. While waiting for him to arrive, she chats up a masseuse whom Patten might try and recruit for next year's crew. "Compared to this year, I felt way more gratified last year. Last year's race was my race," says Patten. "But my parents were all happy I finished."

RAAM 2001, which follows the same route as last year, begins on June 17th. At press time, there were 18 registered riders: 15 males, including Patten, and three females. You can follow the race at www.raceacrossamerica.org

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Read stories I have written about my races:

• Do's and Don'ts of Ultra Team Racing - Team 508 '99
• Have Legs Will Travel - UMCA 24-hr. Championships '97 & '99