Goal: To complete the toughest bike race on the planet – RAAM
Adventure Status: Not Complete
Read the Blog: Race Across America
Details:
RAAM is a 2921.7 mile, coast-to-coast ultra marathon cycling race. First run in 1982, 2010 is the 29th year of the race. For a week+, contending solo cyclists pedal an average of 350 miles per day, while sleeping as little as 1 hour per night. Burning 8,000 to 10,000 or more calories per day, racers will have to contend with searing heat, frigid cold, gale-force winds, thunderstorms and sleep deprivation. For team riders, RAAM constitutes one of the most challenging competitions in cycling averaging 500+ miles a day. Two, four & eight person teams work to utilize each other’s strengths in completing this cross-country journey in record time.
To give you a better idea of the magnitude of the kind of effort required to finish Raam, here is Pete Penseyres’ 1986 solo RAAM statistics:
| Day | On Bike Time | Mileage | On Bike Ave Speed | Actual Sleep |
| 1 | 23:56:55 | 448.7 | 18.7 | 0 |
| 2 | 21:22:40 | 370.8 | 17.3 | 2:00 |
| 3 | 21:48:02 | 390.3 | 17.9 | 1:40 |
| 4 | 21:57:40 | 362.7 | 16.5 | 1:30 |
| 5 | 21:48:13 | 358.0 | 16.4 | 1:30 |
| 6 | 21:50:15 | 349.8 | 16.0 | 1:20 |
| 7 | 21:52:25 | 344.7 | 15.8 | 1:30 |
| 8 | 21:27:10 | 328.9 | 15.3 | 0:00 |
I am interested in exploring the possibilities of entering Raam in the solo recumbent division. The Raam record for the solo division was set by Rob Kish in 1992 in 8 days, 3 hours and 11 minutes at an average speed of 14.91 mph. The bike that I will use is my Nocom lowracer
