RAAM

Mo and I finally made it to Oceanside CA where Race Across America started on the 12th at 2:30pm. Upon the race starting the chaos started (just like every year) as the next five days was full of instantaneous decisions, thousands of directions, rider exchanges, team changes, crew changes, gas station stops, sleep deprivation, etc. In short Mo and my job during the race was to live in a van (with 2 other friends, Bob and Ron) for 5 days while following the racers in an effort to keep the 8 athletes of Team Type One (a type one diabetic cycling team) going in the right direction at all hours of the day and night.
Over these 5 days we logged a combined total of 523 hrs of time in the van, 12 gas stops, 1 dairy queen stop, 3 wrong turns, 12 hours of sleep each, 3,320 miles of driving, an average speed of about 23.5mph, countless road side or bottle filling bathroom breaks, 2 stuck vehicles, one rider getting hit by a car (he is ok thankfully), 2 teeth brushings, 3 wet wipe showers, the ideas for about 10 new businesses (my personal favorite is “Body by Bob” which is all about weight loss through atrophy caused by sitting in a van for 5 days and eating gas station food the entire time!), and in the end 1 first place finish in a time of 5 days 10 hrs and 43mins (the 3rd fastest time any team has ever crossed the country!)
So, all in all it was a whirlwind trip that leaves me wondering why I subject myself to that every year and how that can possibly be fun, but at the end of each day I get to smile knowing that we are inspiring individuals with type one diabetes and help them to understand that they can do some truly extraordinary things even with this disease. In fact, one of the best moments of the trip was having a guy pull up to us on the freeway and tell us how much he admired the team and followed them closely. We proceeded to pull over to deal with something in the rider vehicle and the man pulled over to shake the hands of all the athletes. By the time he took off again, he was almost in tears.
As I am writing this we are currently sitting at the airport in London waiting for our connecting flight to Milan where we will continue on with the rest of the European portion of our trip. The part of our trip where we will be touring on our tandem for 4 weeks! So, if all goes well and as planned tomorrow we will get to spend our first day riding out of Milan and the surrounding cities toward the mountains in Northern Italy and Switzerland.
Luckily, even after one supervisor said she would not take our tandem on the plane, she caved and it actually ended up only costing $50 to take our tandem and bob trailer!!!! We were something of celebrities walking through the airport with a humongous bike. Now we just hope the bike will get there in one piece and that we will be able to transport it to the hotel somehow. After all, tandem bikes don’t fit very well in compact cars.