Memories of RAO: from Spray to Maupin and Time Station 6.

My pace van rolled up along-side me. The passenger window was down. Justin was driving and leaning across to yell.

“Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

“Give me the good news,” I shouted back.

“Eric is right behind us,” he said.

That wasn’t good news.  I looked over my shoulder. Eric was coming down the road like a locomotive with a full head of steam.

In another moment, he was riding with me.

“Hey man,” he said. He was smiling but the lines in his face showed he was worried. “It’s gonna be close.”

What is he talking about? Does he mean ‘how’ we’d finish, or ‘if’ we’d finish?

Either way, Eric was hammering and I was running on empty. I couldn’t hope to match his pace. I’d won my battle with nausea, but I had lost interest in eating and my rolling speed showed it. More threatening, though, was my head-space. Watching Eric pull away crushed me.

It didn’t take long before I recognized what was happening. I decided to stop the bike and let him go.

“I’m bonking, big time,” I told my crew. “Break-out the gel.”

We’d been keeping the Hammer Espresso in reserve. It was to be my source of caffeine if I needed it. No one argued. Bert went into the van and came back with a flask. I took a long pull on the bottle. My throat was raw and it burned as it went down.

This strange elixir has resurrected me before. I prayed it would do its magic again.

I took another pull on the flask. 270 calories down the hatch. I clipped into the pedals and started rolling.

Now it was time to start working on my attitude. The thing to do when your head’s in the dumper is to take stock of the reasons you’re out here in the first place. I have pulled through some really rough patches this way, when my knee has blown-up so bad that I’ve cried.

This time, my issues were mostly mental. Eric and I are buddies. We’ve ridden thousands of miles and pulled each other over 100 mountain passes on the road to RAO. I beat Eric to the first four time stations. The gap I cracked-opened on Battle Mountain endured for 16 hours. But here, on Bake Oven Road – less than 80 miles to the finish line – Eric was putting the hurt on me in a way that Ibuprofen couldn’t touch.

I recited my goals:

• Finish in time

• Finish in less than 40 hours

• Qualify for Race Across America.

Beating Eric was never on the list. Let go of it.

Finishing in less than 40 hours was out of the question. But finishing within the time limit was still do-able. It seemed like I was setting the bar too low when I set that goal, but with more than half the field out of this race, finishing in time seemed noble and worth every bit of effort I had left.

As for qualifying for RAAM, initially, the goal seemed so audacious that I didn’t share it with anyone. But now, miraculously, it too was in reach.

The calories and the caffeine were doing their job. I felt a renewed sense of purpose, which would stay with me for the rest of the race. It was a damn good thing. My most difficult battles were still in front of me.

Tags: Eric Ahlvin, Goals, RAO

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.