Nothing unusual here — one guy waiting while his buddy addressed a mechanical problem on his mountain bike. Except that we were in a race. “Go on!” Steve yelled. “You’re in second place!”

We were about a third of the way through Sunday’s Huck-A-Buck mountain bike race at Lake Crabtree when Steve Rodgers hit a tree root. He bounced on the back of his seat, causing the front to tilt — and stick — painfully skyward. There were five of us competing in the Cat 2 Men’s 50+ category: Two were somewhere behind us, Peter Hollis was well ahead. Barring the heart attack someone at the start advised us not to have in the 100-degree heat (the mercury at RDU would hit 102 an hour after we were done), Peter had a lock on first place. Steve had hung with him for a while, then drifted back. I had slowly drifted forward and had been riding behind Steve for 15 minutes or so when his seat rebelled.

When I mention this side of my life to others, I’m careful to avoid saying that I race mountain bikes; rather, that I ride in mountain bike races. I have made the podium three times in my mountain biking career; all three times I have also come in last. (Translation for those of you annoyed by brain teasers: There was no one to come in behind me.) I’m competitive, but mostly against myself. At the time of Steve’s seat mishap, I was beginning to realize how hot it was; the fact that I was hanging with Steve, who is legitimately familiar with the podium, was more than I had hoped for at the Huck-A-Buck. When he stopped, it seemed natural to stop with him. And then his perplexed look and admonition to go on.

When Andy Schleck’s chain dropped as he attacked in the Pyrenees during Stage 15 of Le Tour de France, Alberto Contador was skewered for taking advantage of the situation and, it was speculated, taking an insurmountable lead in cycling’s premier event. For while the yellow jersey is one of the grandest prizes in sport and the competition for it is unparalleled, cycling has a curious subsystem of gentlemen’s agreements that eclipse battle. One of them is not to take advantage of a competitor’s mechanical misfortune. That in itself seems curious because isn’t having your bike in top operating condition as important as having your physical self likewise prepared? And if dumb luck intervenes and an external force causes a breakdown, well, isn’t dumb luck as critical to the outcome of a sporting event as skill and sweat? (Just ask Lance Armstrong, who’s seven years of good luck came back to bite him on his goodbye tour.) Further, in the case of Andy Schleck, it’s debatable whether his dropped chain resulted from a mechanical malfunction or human error. Video of the mishap has undergone more scrutiny than the Zapruder tape; none other than Lennard Zinn, the Zen master of wrenching, suggests that improper shifting may have been to blame. Regardless, was Contador wrong to take advantage? Should a wide receiver racing toward the end zone stop if the cornerback in hot pursuit trips over a shoelace that comes untied? Where do you draw the line between healthy competition and something beyond?

So, I continued. At first, with a twinge of guilt. I was happy riding with Steve, content to take 3rd place if I could hang on. Guilty, and then …

I quickly warmed to the notion of standing just below Peter on the podium. (Figuratively, for there is no  formality of an actual podium at the Huck-A-Buck.) Despite the heat, despite being low on water on a miserably hot day, I picked up the pace. Periodically, I would hear someone coming up from behind. Assuming it was Steve, I picked up the pace even more, only to be passed (lapped, for the sake of accuracy) by a Cat 1 expert racer. Steve wasn’t able to fix his seat issue and had to ride the last two-thirds of the race with his seat jabbing into his … him. I crossed the finish in 1 hour, 43 minutes and 41 seconds; Steve was three minutes behind.

Bikes break, racers crash, slower riders sneak in and grab the glory. In the world of competitive mountain bike racing, mine was a legitimate second place finish, with all the congratulations and recognition (in this case, a rain poncho and a set of collapsable bike fenders) that go with it. In road cycling, the finish would have been tainted, my move perhaps viewed as crass and unsportsmanlike. When I mention to anyone who seems vaguely interested (breathing qualifies) that I finished second, I’m quick to include the asterisk that Steve had a mechanical.

That detail may disappear from my account as time passes.

* * *

Find the complete results of Sunday’s Huck-A-Buck here.

* * *
Greeting the racers at the start line: the number 103 duct-tapped to the pavement. 103 — the forecast high for Sunday. Officially, it only reached 100 at neighboring RDU.

* * *

What do mom and dad do when their son is busy becoming a national-caliber mountain biker? They decide to race as well. Last weekend, 15-year-old wunderkind Luke Vrouwenvelder of Chapel Hill competed in the USA Cycling Mountain Bike Nationals in Granby, Colo. The experience (not to mention Luke’s prodding) prompted mom Angie to compete in today’s Cat 3 Beginner Women’s race and dad Adrian to race in the Clydesdale category. “I spent yesterday in out the sun pulling the head gasket. Adrian said before his race. “I’m not sure what to expect today,”

* * *

This was the 9th Huck-A-Buck and, alas, the second to last. Early on, the Phil Liggett of Huck-A-Buck announcing, Pat Lundergan, announced: “There will be only one more year of the Huck-A-Buck. Pat and I are grownups now. We’re getting too old for this.”

* * *

HAB MC Pat Lundergan.

Pat’s running commentary has been a big part of what makes the Huck-A-Buck … well, the Huck-A-Buck. For example, shortly after the elementary race (with a strong showing of a dozen racers), Pat announced: “Parents of elementary kids be sure to grab a Red Bull shot for your kids on the way out. That’ll really help with the rest of the day.”

* * *

Pat again, as a podium finisher walked away with a gift certificate: “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

* * *

And again, encouraging racers to return their ankle-mounted timing strip at the end of the race: “Please be sure to return the chips. Otherwise, we’ll have to pay for them and we’re broke. We will hunt you down. Happy Fun has done it before and we’ll do it again.”

* * *

In a conversation last week with Chapel Hill coach and yoga guru Sage Rountree, among the bits of sage insights she shared: Make every workout count. That’s what Hillsborough’s Peter Hollis thought he was doing Saturday when he drove to Lake Crabtree to do a pre-race lap in the blistering late afternoon heat. “I thought it would make me realize I had no business coming back to race today.” Apparently, it just egged him on. Hollis, who is 58, won the Cat 2 Men’s 50+ category, beating his nearest competitor by 8 minutes.

* * *

Look for results to be posted … sometime, somewhere (hey, it is Happy Fun Racing after all).

I flinched. “That’s the one we’re doing today?” My grip on the steering wheel tightened.

It was early Saturday and Alan and I were headed to Blowing Rock for a mountain training ride. Our objective for the day was the 57.1-mile Blowing Beech route, which begins and ends in picturesque downtown Blowing Rock, with a mid-way detour up Beech Mountain. Just three and a half miles, but in those three and a half miles we would gain 1,700 feet.

Why?

We were training for the Roan Moan two weeks out. The Roan Moan is a popular mountain century ride that goes along civilly enough for 71 miles. Then it begins a 7-mile, 1,700-foot climb up to Carver’s Gap, elevation 5,512 feet.

“And the climb up Roan,” Alan said paging ahead … . I let my mind intentionally drift, tuning back in as Alan was putting his Phil Liggett on the ascent, “really, it’s only the first two miles you need to worry about. After that, it, well, it doesn’t level out. But you can start using gears again.” I pictured myself wearing Phil’s renowned “mask of pain!”

Alan waits out a rain delay on NC 194.

Doing a mountain century is one of my two goals for this summer. For years, my adventure accomplice Alan Nechemias has been gently encouraging me to try one. At the start of every cycling season, I’ve proclaimed, “This is the year.” At the end of every cycling season I’ve found myself saying, “Well, dang, maybe next year?” This year, after extensively discussing the merits of the various mountain century rides — the Blue Ridge Brutal, Bridge-to-Bridge, Hilly Hellacious, Assault on Mount Mitchell and the Roan Moan among them — we concluded that the latter might be the best for a first-timer. I made the ultimate commitment: I got out the plastic and registered online.

Alan’s oration from John Summerson’s “The Complete Guide to Climbing (by Bike) in the Southeast” worried me. I hadn’t romanticized doing a rigorous mountain century (easy to do watching Contador, Shelck, et al pumping their way up the Alps and Pyrenees) but I was starting to realize that, with two weeks to go, I wasn’t adequately prepared, either. I’d been riding, three times a week, mostly two-hour rides on the mountain bike at hilly Umstead. I’d even done a couple mountain training rides. But my longest ride of the year was 62 miles, and the toughest climbing I’d done was the Triple Hump — and of the three humps I’d had to stop briefly going up Pilot Mountain and I’d cramped climbing Hanging Rock. I had been training, but not training smart.

That was in stark contrast to my preparation for Summer Goal #2: running a half marathon. For it, I plunked down $125 and joined a training program through FAST (Functional and Specific Training) Coaching. The program included a day-by-day training schedule for the 12-week program, two organized training runs a week (one to work on pace, the other distance), and access to two coaches. When I went into the program, my goal was to simply finish a half marathon. After four weeks, I had little doubt I could finish; My thoughts had shifted to how fast I could finish. I didn’t need a list of 10 reasons why coaches help, I had physical proof.

Left to my own devices on the bike, I was still worried about simple survival.

We pulled into Blowing Rock a little before 10 under an unsettled sky. The forecast called for a 30 percent chance of rain in the morning, increasing to 60 percent by mid-afternoon. After years of getting suckered by bad forecasts, we had no second thoughts about pushing off.

After a gorgeous 5-mile descent down Shulls Mill Road, we jogged briefly onto NC 105 before heading southwest on Broadstone Road. Shortly after passing through Valle Crucis, we began a 4.5-mile climb up NC 194 that’s not in John Summerson’s cannon, but could be. (A MapMyRide profile shows the climb ranges from 6 to 9 percent.) That’s when the sky turned from ominous to overflowing. A little spit at first, and then — with about a half mile to go to the top, with our glasses fogged and bodies soaked through, Alan steered us off the road and under the meager eve of a small building.

“Now it’s just unsafe,” he said.

If we had $20, we agreed that we would have flagged down one of the ubiquitous pickups passing by and caught a ride back to Blowing Rock. Instead, we until the rain let up, reversed course and headed back. We wound up doing three good climbs over 38 miles, but it was far short of the 57-miler with the mettle-testing climb up Beech Mountain that I felt I needed in preparation for Roan Mountain. My schedule precluded a return training trip this week, next week is too close to the race.

Had I sought out a cycling coach, I doubtles would have more mountain miles in the saddle. I’m sure I would have done more long rides, probably a couple in the 70-mile range, and I likely would have done weekly interval work. And I know I  would have put in far fewer junk miles, or miles basically just for the sake of riding.  At this point, for this ride, it’s too late for a coach, even a Chris Carmichael. Now, it’s desperation time.

Anybody know if Tony Robbins is still around?

“That’s it,” Gavin confirmed. “Now we just have a couple hundred meters to go.”

Not what I wanted to hear on this steamy (92 degrees, 85 percent humidity) evening training run. We’d already done three mile-long fast tempo miles; this was No. 4 and I just wanted it to be over — now, not 200 meters from now. But I was running with my coach and my training group, and so, despite the militant protests by my gasping lungs and cramping legs, I poured it on for another 200 meters.

Once again I realized how much I need — and yes, enjoy — my half-marathon training program.

Tonight, for instance, not only would I have not run those last 200 meters, I probably wouldn’t have run, period. It was hot and muggy, I was feeling lethargic, I had a good book I wanted to finish on the couch. But not running really wasn’t an option because of my training program. For one, there’s the peer … pressure, I guess, for lack of a better word. I’m not pressured by the group, I’m pushed to run because I enjoy running with them. And, every week I realize how much the program is helping me as a runner. Helping me by pushing me, as it did this evening, and also by helping me to train smarter.

At the end of tonight’s run, Gavin said this would be the last of our speed workouts. The goal in the first half of our 12-week program had been to build speed; after tonight, we’d cut back on speed and start running longer — at a pace faster than we could have imagined six weeks earlier. It made sense, but I would never have come up with that game plan on my own. And he was certainly right about building speed: Tonight, my miles had all been at 7 minutes, far faster than I could have envisioned at the start of the program. When I signed on in May, I just wanted to be able to finish a half marathon. Now, I assume I’ll finish and am starting to think about a target time.

I didn’t dare entertain such aspirations six weeks ago. And I wouldn’t be now if I was preparing for a marathon on my own.

Gavin Coombs and Sean Kurdys coach the half-marathon training program I’m in. Like other running programs that have sprouted the last few years, it’s intended to get you from Point A (the starting line) to Point B (the finish) in 12 weeks. Our program, designed by Sean’s FAST (Functional And Specific Training) Coaching and run through The Athlete’s Foot in Cameron Village, is roughly divided into two more specific A-to-B programs: Sean coaches first-time half-marathoners whose goal is to simply run and finish 13.1 miles, Gavin coaches experienced half-marathoners who want to improve their times.

At the start of the program we were given a sheet with 12 weeks worth of workouts. Some days call for speed work (six sets of 800s on a local track, for instance), some call for tempo work (running at race pace for 30 minutes), some for running a given amount of time.  Last Saturday, Gavin’s group, the one one I’ve gravitated to, was scheduled for a 9-mile run on greenways fanning out from the N.C. Museum of Art. One thing I especially like about the program is that Gavin, Sean and several mentors from The Athletes Foot racing team act as pacers. That’s how, three miles into Saturday’s run, I found myself running with Gavin, who tried to help me set an 8:20 pace.

“So,” I asked, “what’s your marathon experience?”

“Actually,” answered the tall, lanky, 24-year-old, “I just began running marathons this year.”

Over the next mile or so I learned of Gavin’s varied running past: Started out running the mile and two-mile in high school, got to N.C. State where they were flush with distance (5K) runners, so he switched to steeplechase. What he didn’t tell me and what I Googlediscovered later was that in high school he was a three-time national champ in the indoor mile, two mile and outdoor mile, and a 17-time state champion in Connecticut. He also neglected to mention that he was three-time All-ACC. Had I known all this, I might not have been quite as surprised by our next exchange. Getting back to the marathon discussion, Gavin mentioned that he had run in the inaugural Tobacco Road Marathon in Cary in March and the KeyBank Vermont City Marathon in May.

“How’d they go?” I asked

“Well,” he said, “I won my first race.” By “won” he didn’t mean that he’d won his age group or won some kind of first-timer trophy. He’d won the whole race, with a time of 2 hours, 25 minutes and 50 seconds — fast enough to have won the Boston Marathon as recently as 1958. That’s a 5 minute and 34 second pace, meaning he ran each of 26.2 miles at a pace most people can’t keep up with on a bicycle going downhill.

“My second race didn’t go so well,” he said. And he wasn’t talking about the fact he’d only come in second in Vermont, shaving nearly four minutes off his Tobacco Road time. He was talking about winding up in a medical tent on an IV afterward. “We went out way too fast on that race,” Coombs said of he and fellow TAF teammate John Crews, who won with a time of 2:17:51.

We talked more about the races, about his training (his long runs are 18 to 22 miles), about what a great resource Umstead State Park is (“The hills are the best preparation for races. Hill miles count for a lot more than flat miles.”), about his next race, the Twin Cities Marathon in October. He hopes to break 2 hours and 19 minutes in Minnesota, and not for some arbitrary reason: 2:19:00 will qualify him for the 2012 Olympic trials.

“Really, though, I’m shooting for the 2016 Olympics,” he said. “I’ll be 30 then,” he said, a peak age for marathoners.

And I’ll be 60, telling anyone who will listen that I used to train with Gavin Coombs.

Photo: Gavin Coombs at the KeyBank Vermont City Marathon.

For a bike race with only five contestants, event organizer Eva Oberdoerster was having one devil of a time getting it under way.

Simply gathering everyone at the starting line had taken a good 20 minutes, what with the riders drifting off this way and that. Then there was the fact that no one — Oberdoerster included — was quite sure where the starting line even was.

But that was nothing compared to the woes encountered once everyone was assembled. One contestant couldn’t keep her bike upright and another was having trouble figuring out how to put his feet on the pedals. A third couldn’t get pointed in the right direction, and then there were the two riders whose rear ends kept floating off their seats.

“It was mass confusion,” Oberdoerster later admitted. But certainly understandable, considering that none of the five had bothered to train — or had ever raced before, for that matter. Understandable, too, considering this particular race happened to be on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Thirteen years ago, when dive shop owner Debby Boyce thought up the idea for an underwater bike race the concept made a modicum of sense. The old steel girder bridge linking Morehead City and Atlantic Beach had just been replaced with a modern, four-lane concrete span. Rather than disassemble the old bridge, the engineers simply sank it, sending the structure — marked roadway and all — to a new home on the bottom of Bogue Sound, in about 50 feet of water.

Roadway? Underwater bike race? Made sense to Boyce, who was always looking for offbeat ways to promote her business, Discovery Diving of Beaufort. The roadway may have made sense to Boyce, but it didn’t always make sense to the biking divers. “Some stuck to the actual road, but most preferred to ride along the top of the steel framework.”

Enthusiasm for those early races was hampered by Bogue Sound’s limited visibility, typically less than 15 feet thanks to the turbidity encountered when river and ocean meet. So when Boyce heard that the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries was planning to add a surplus military ship to an artificial reef not far offshore, she decided on a change of venue.

The race’s gain marked an ironic end for its new host, a 320-foot landing ship/repair freighter called the Indra, which managed to survive three wars — World War II, Korea and Vietnam — only to be scuttled as a peace dividend. In 1992, the 47-year-old vessel joined several boxcars, an F-14, two C-130 aircraft and some concrete pipe as part of Artificial Reef 330, about 10 miles off Emerald Isle. The reef is one of 38 such man-made fish habitats created by the state for the benefit of sport fishermen and divers.

Relocating to the Indra gave the already quirky event another twist. It also gave Boyce a better platform for promoting what few people realize is one of the world’s premier spots for wreck diving. Before the advent of sonar and modern meteorology, more than 600 ships fell victim to the coast’s violent weather, surreptitiously shifting shoals and warfare. (During a particularly deadly stretch of World War II, from January through June of 1942, German U-boats sank at least 29 ships off the North Carolina Coast alone.)

Add to these wrecks the coast’s proximity to the Gulf Stream, a river of warm water that snakes up the coast from the Gulf of Mexico, bringing with it the tropical fish and other marine life that make Caribbean diving so popular, and the Graveyard of the Atlantic was actually a playground for scuba divers.

Two years ago, the race took on a sense of purpose when it hooked up with Mile of Hope, an Atlantic Beach charity that sponsors a weekend beach vacation every May for about 40 juvenile terminal cancer patients at East Carolina University’s Medical Center and their families.

Through it all, though, Boyce has tried to keep the annual Fourth of July event fun and noncompetitive, and Thursday’s race appeared to be no exception.

That is, until someone broke out the WD-40.

A couple of hours before race time, two women were sitting outside Discovery’s shop on the Intracoastal Waterway, waiting for a morning charter to return. Their conversation eventually turned to the race. “How will it work?” one asked. “I mean, how do you ride a bike underwater?”

As the competitors began gathering mid-afternoon, none of them seemed to have an answer — at least one they were willing to share. And even if they did have a particular strategy in mind, it likely changed when they got a look at the selection of bikes.

Largely unnoticed to this point was a pile of mud-encrusted metal framework heaped at the far end of the nearest dock. Dive shop employee Dion Viventi had been poking through the mess, which from a distance looked like a tangle of crab pots, or maybe salvaged reinforcing bar. “Come on and pick out your bikes,” he finally yelled.

The offering was a motley collection of 10-speeds, three-speeds, three-wheelers, balloon-tire cruisers and a various kids’ bikes. The handlebars were askew on most, missing on some. Rims were impossibly bent, chains rusted to sprockets. The primary determination for race-worthiness: Whether they could be extracted from the pile.

Viventi had already undertaken this process. An orange three-speed, a green 10-speed with curled-under handlebars turned up, a banana bike and a once-proud baby blue Schwinn Le Tour appeared to be the best prospects. Pam Williams thought so as she went directly for the banana bike. Low to the ground, much like herself, she thought; perhaps she could bypass that cumbersome pedaling and simply scoot it along.

“That one’s spoken for,” Viventi informed her, nodding toward a tall, long-legged competitor walking back to the dive shop. About then Pam’s husband, Johnnie, caught up to her. “This one looks good,” he said, wiggling the bike’s butterfly handlebars.

“It’s that girl’s,” Pam snapped. ” ‘That girl’s’ — listen to me!”

Pam settled on the Le Tour, a curious choice considering the large frame would be impossible for her to straddle, let along ride underwater. Curious, unless she was expecting help. Immediately, the Smithfield couple, both of whom are certified dive instructors, began trying to straighten the bent rear rim and free up the rusted chain.

Johnnie was joking about the chain — until he noticed Gordon Thompson generously applying WD-40 to his own selection. “Let me try a little of that when you’re done,” Johnnie asked. Then, as if the lubricant was equally effective at freeing inner thoughts, Johnnie confided, “I’m planning on pushing her.”

It takes about an hour to reach the Indra, and after the dive boat, Outrageous IV, had cleared the Beaufort Inlet and reached its cruising speed of 17 knots (about 19 mph), a calm settled over the boat. Including riders, race officials and spectators, 19 were aboard.

Word from a previous charter was that conditions on the Indra were good: water temperature about 80 degrees and visibility about 50 feet — a statistic of particular importance since that was roughly the length of the race course.

The calm seemed to cause other riders to drop their guard. Gordon Thompson let slip that he and Lori Ezman planned a strategy similar to the Williamses, while rumor had it that Renate Eichinger was using some sort of newfangled underwater walkie-talkie. She and Viventi would be in communication throughout the race, though it wasn’t clear how this might aid their effort.

Pam Williams, meanwhile, appeared to be meditating, her eyes shut behind clouded sunglass lenses. “She getting psyched for the race?”

Johnnie glanced at his wife. “She’s sleeping.”

At the race site, two crew members unceremoniously heaved the bikes overboard as Discovery’s Bill Thompson offered the lone pre-race instruction: “You can cheat, but it’s gotta be fun.” Then, one by one, the divers plunged off the back and left side of the boat, looking something like penguins waddling off an ice floe.

With so little formality, the chaos at the starting line wasn’t surprising. And when Oberdoerster finally got everyone pointed forward, their butts as firmly planted in their bike seats as buoyant salt water would allow, it wasn’t surprising either that when she flashed the “OK” sign to see if everyone was ready, Pam assumed the race had begun. Johnnie emerged from the wings, grabbed the bike seat with his left hand and started pushing Pam’s back with his right.

In the slow-motion way that events take place under water, Oberdoerster motioned them to stop, but had second thoughts as the other riders stirred to life. Fins began thrashing, bringing up silt from the Indra’s deck. The few spot and spadefish that hadn’t been scared off by the initial ruckus now scattered, the thousands of finger-long bait fish that had been circling 20 feet overhead fled, and even the 4-foot barracuda — which never threaten, but rarely give ground, either — backed off. It was roily mayhem, but mayhem for naught: the Williamses’ fast start provided an insurmountable lead. Within about four minutes, their relatively effective technique spirited them across what was believed to be the finish line.

Despite the dubious nature of the start, there was no heated scene at the finish line, no getting in Oberdoerster’s face mask, no kicking sand on her fins. Instead, the also-rans as well as the spectators scattered across the Indra, some exploring her hold, some content to swim among the gradually returning sea life. Still, the competitive juices prevailed for some, and their persistence may have yielded the winning technique in next year’s race: hands on handlebars, body horizontal to the bike, flippers in full kick — something akin to E.T. beyond gravity.

Topside, as the divers slipped out of their gear, Boyce made it official: despite their questionable team approach and early start, Pam and Johnnie Williams had won Discovery’s 1996 underwater bike race. She also announced that the event had raised $100 for Mile of Hope.

As Outrageous IV headed back to Beaufort, the Williamses had that contented, reflective look of competitors basking in the glow of victory. “Nope,” Johnnie corrected, “we’re just watching the sunset.”

Surely, though, they had plans for some sort of celebration. After all, how many people can claim to have won a bike race on the bottom of an ocean? Asked how they planned to observe the occasion, Johnnie replied like you might expect a self-respecting Smithfield celebrant: “I’m gonna have a barbecue sandwich.”

Photos by Dale Hansen. For more photos of the race by Hansen, go here.

The following post on Team Bandwidth.com’s winning of this year’s Race Across America originally appeared in the Work & Money section of The News & Observer on Sunday, June 27. I’ve written more on the team’s experience here.

In 2004, Bandwidth.com had the kind of experience that sends shivers down the corporate spine. The Cary telecom company provides phone and Internet service to businesses, some of its own creation, some created by other companies that it resells. It got word from a supplier that one service Bandwidth resold was being discontinued. Bandwidth had 45 days to create and implement a replacement of its own.

“It was audacious,” company co-founder, CEO and president David Morken says of the challenge. “We attacked it.”

Sean Matt takes five on the team bus.

A challenge, Morken was to realize six years later, not unlike that of riding a bike 3,004 miles across the country in six days.

This month, a Bandwidth team won the 29th annual Race Across America (or RAAM as it refers to itself with acronymic license). The arduous race with its many obstacles was, in the end, the perfect challenge for a tech company that has been dealing with a constantly evolving market since it arose from a spare bedroom in Morken’s Park City, Utah, apartment in 1999. (Bandwidth.com moved to the Triangle in 2001.)

In 20 years, the telecommunications industry has evolved at breakneck speed from phones tethered to the wall by cords to services the Jetsons couldn’t have foreseen. Similarly, Race Across America is a two-wheeled sprint across the country – from Oceanside, Calif., to Annapolis, Md. – in which cyclists ride around the clock, battling electrical storms, blazing heat, dust devils and the demons inherent to riding through the endless Great Plains at 3 in the morning.

Morken, 43, has a long résumé of epic competition, including the Ironman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii (swim 2.4 miles, bike 112 miles, then run a marathon), and the Wasatch 100 Ultramarathon (a 100-mile foot race). So it wasn’t surprising when he started thinking of Race Across America five years ago. He began preparation for the race two years ago after reading an article about three-time solo winner Wolfgang Fasching.

Joe Parke on the bike.

Morken opted to race as a team, for two reasons. One, the company’s fitness culture – employees get an hour and a half for lunch and are encouraged to join an active intramural program as well at a location across Weston Parkway from Umstead State Park – has helped attract some formidable cycling teammates: General counsel John Murdock, 46, is a Category 1 bike racer (one level below pro); director of strategic sales Joe Parke, 34, races in a variety of USA Cycling events; and Sean Matt, 43, a Seattle-based adviser to Bandwidth.com, is a Category 3 racer.

Morken also recognized the race’s team-building potential.

While the cyclists were racing across America, Bandwidth.com’s roughly 175 employees in Cary would be charged with meeting a fitness challenge of their own. A point system was set up offering employees an equivalent number of miles for a variety of activities. Play volleyball or basketball for an hour, for example, earn 10 miles. If the folks back home could best the mileage logged on the road by Team Bandwidth.com, they’d get a day off.

The challenge began when Team Bandwidth left Oceanside on Saturday, June 12. “They beat us by Tuesday,” says Morken. (Bandwidth.com employees – more than 70 percent participated in the challenge – would log more than 6,000 equivalent miles.)

“It was like our own little Amazing Race back here,” says Lisa Mangini, an analyst with the company. “First thing every morning we’d check the Web sites to see how they were doing. It really got everyone motivated.”

John Murdock, leading a support car uphill.

Operations manager Jerry Jeske says the cyclist’s competitive zeal was contagious.

“The feeling was, ‘Let’s not just match ‘em — let’s accelerate and really beat ‘em’,” says Jeske, who topped the employee leader board with 335 equivalent miles, doing four workouts a day during the challenge.

Meanwhile, the race was good test of Team Bandwidth.com’s strategic nimbleness.

Initially, the plan was for all four riders to share 30-minute pulls. That is, Matt would ride for 30 minutes, then pass the baton to Morken, who would ride for 30 minutes before handing off to Murdock, and so on. But it wasn’t long after Matt left Oceanside that the team saw a problem: its closest competitor was rotating riders every 15 minutes, which provided a huge advantage on the hills immediately outside town. With shorter pulls, the competition could push harder, go faster.

“Even though we were at the beginning of a 3,000-mile race, it sounds insane, but we had to react,” says Morken.

Team Bandwidth switched to 20-minute pulls, which they stayed with for much of the rest of the race, through a hailstorm on Wolf Creek Pass in Colorado, through a two-hour dust storm that followed on the plains. For six days, 3 hours and 9 minutes, each team member’s routine went pretty much like this: Ride for 20 minutes, get off the bike and into the team bus and down 300 to 500 calories (power gels and bars initially, PBJs and other “regular food” when their digestive systems rebelled), sleep for 20 minutes, repeat.

“I slept about six hours total during the week,” says Murdock.

Due as much, perhaps, to their ability to adapt on the fly honed in the telecom industry as to their physical prowess, Team Bandwidth.com rolled into Annapolis at 8:15 on the evening of June 18, more than four hours ahead of its nearest competitor in the four-person team division. Morken credits the victory to that decision moments after the race began to alter their game plan.

“We built our margin of victory at the beginning of the race,” he says.

Sweet as the victory was, Morken is hopeful that the experience will have a lasting impact on the company. As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for.

Upon their return to the office on Monday, Morken, Murdock and Parke said they were uniformly greeted in the halls with congratulations, followed quickly by one question.

“What’s next?”

• Top speed achieved during RAAM: 60 mph, by John Murdock descending the “Glass Elevator” near Lake Henshaw, Calif. It’s a stretch of road that drops 3,000 vertical feet in 10 miles.
• Lowest point on the race: 189 feet below sea level, in the Salton Sea (which is where the 10-mile descent down the Glass Elevator winds up).
• Team Bandwidth.com’s average speed during the race: 20.42 mph.
• RAAM race registration fee for a 4-person team: $7,745.
• RAAM riders and crew must adhere to a variety of rules filling an inch-thick binder. Team Bandwidth had two infractions during the race, both worth 15-minute penalties: one for not reporting in to one of the 50 time stations across the country in a timely manner and one for a rider who inadvertently ran a stop sign. Of the RAAM officials patrolling the course, Kade Ross, Bandwidth.com executive VP/Team Bandwidth.com crew support member, said: “They’re like the state patrol. Some are in marked cars, some are in unmarked cars.”
• Team Bandwidth.com’s training for RAAM consisted mainly of daily 1.5 hour crossbike rides (“We’d go all out,” says company co-founder, CEO and President David Morken) at Umstead State Park, located across the street from Bandwidth.com’s Cary headquarters, and once-a-week, 24-mile lunchtime rides with a group of hammerheads from nearby SAS Institute.
• Morken says the company’s physical location was determined by two things: it’s proximity to both RDU International Airport and Umstead.
• Team members each had two bikes: carbon tri-bikes for flatter stretches, more traditional road bikes for hillier riding. Perhaps “traditional” isn’t the ride word to describe their road bikes: John Murdock’s bike for the hills is similar to the Specialized S-Works Tarmac ridden by recent Tour of Flanders winner Fabian Cancellara. (Murdock did not have the motorized version.)
• The team worked on aerodynamics before the race at the A2 Wind Tunnel in Mooresville (the same wind tunnel Lance uses).
• All the sweating wasn’t done on the road by Bandwidth.com employees during RAAM. While the team was pedaling its way across the country, Bandwidth.com employees were engaged in a competition back home. Employees were awarded a mileage equivalent for a variety of activities (an hour of basketball or volleyball, for instance, was worth 10 miles, a mile swam was worth 4); if the employees could surpass the riders’s 3,004 miles, they would get July 2 off. More than 70 percent of Bandwidth.com’s 175 employees participated, logging more than 6,000 equivalent miles.
• Bandwidth.com Operations Manager Jerry Jeske topped the employee leaderboard with 335 equivalent miles. He averaged four workouts a day, starting the day with a P90X DVD workout and ending it between 10 p.m. and midnight with an hour or two on the stationary bike at Durham Cares, which had and 8-person team in RAAM.
• Bandwidth.com employees get an hour and a half for lunch. They are encourage to use their lunch hour and a half playing.
• For most of the race, Team Bandwidth.com’s four riders shared 20-minute pulls. In hillier areas, they shortened their pulls to 400 meters. For three nights, they lengthened their turns to 2.5 hours so the racers could get extended Zs.
• Team Bandwidth.com had 18 crew members and four support vehicles, including a charter bus where team members slept and ate while they were off the bike.
• The team encountered hail climbing Colorado’s 10,863-foot Wolf Creek Pass, made semi famous by C.W. McCall.
• Most of the team agreed that sleep deprivation was the biggest challenge they faced. For him, John Murdock said it was staying biomechanically sound — that is, not altering pedal stroke, posture, anything that could cause him to slow or worse, lead to an injury. “It’s the little, tiny things that can turn out to be huge limiters.”
• What’s next? That’s the question the team faced from fellow employees upon their return to work last week. How do you top a 3,004-mile race across the country? Morken says he’s discussed the future with Murdock — Murdock shakes his head and smiles when the topic arises — but he’s not willing to publicly commit just yet. “You’ll be the first person I call when we’re ready,” he said following several not-so-clever attempts to trick a response out of him.

You heard it here. Or you’ll hear it here.

For those of you not familiar with the world of insanely-long bike racing, Race Across America, now in its 28th year, is a 3,000-plus-mile bike race across the U.S.. This year’s race started Saturday (for teams, solo riders started the middle of last week) in Oceanside, Calif.; for Team Bandwidth.com, it hopefully will end sometime today in Annapolis, Md. RAAM bills itself as the World’s Toughest Bicycle Race. Tour Divide covers some 2,700 miles of mostly dirt roads and trails (some of which remain under several feet of winter snowpack) as it traces its way along the Continental Divide from Banff, Alberta, Canada, to the U.S./Mexico border at Antelope Wells, N.M.. Of it, Outside magazine declared: “The World’s Toughest Bike Race isn’t in France.”

The Team Bandwidth.com RAAM effort was launched by Bandwidth.com co-founder, CEO, President and racer, David Morken, who has an impressive endurance race resume that includes the Ironman World Championships in Kona (2005) and back-to-back Wasatch 100 Ultramarathons (2007, 2008). That Team Bandwidth is likely to finish the round-the-clock relay ride in five days isn’t surprising considering who rounds out the team: John Murdock, 46, Bandwidth.com’s general counsel, who is a Cat 1 racer; consultant Sean Matt, 43, a Cat 3 racer; and Director of Strategic Sales and Services, Joe Parke, 34, who also races.

Team Bandwith.com’s entry in this year’s RAAM, however, isn’t about four competitive cyclists seeking their next challenge. For one, the team is racing to raise money for DurhamCares, a nonprofit founded by the 40-year-old Morken and fellow Bandwidth.com co-founder Henry Kaestner. The goal of Durham Cares: to get Durham residents involved in the community. The race is also a health and fitness challenge to Bandwidth.com employees, who can compete against the team by running, swimming, cycling — whatever involves moving, and lots of it.

Team Bandwidth.com’s four riders share pulls on their 3,000-mile, round-the-clock sprint across the country. (Conceivably, each racer will put in 750 miles over the 5+ days of the race.) They’re being supported by a crew of 14 friends, family and coworkers, many of whom are traveling with the team.

Matthew Lee.

Matthew Lee’s race along the Continental Divide is a different ordeal. More than 250 cyclists participate in RAAM; 48 signed up for this year’s Tour Divide (that’s about twice the number who have entered previous races). There are no support crews; Tour Divide is entirely self-supported. RAAM has 53 time check stations across the country; Tour Divide riders call a toll-free number to check in when they get a chance. RAAM racers have to contend with American motorists; Tour Divide racers must negotiate the occasional grizzly bear.

Lee has won the Tour Divide five times. He holds the course record of 17 days, 21 minutes, 10 seconds (that’s about 150 miles a day). During this year’s race he’ll be doing a lot of his dining at backroad convenience stores. He’ll get up at 4:30 a.m. to ride, finish up shortly after dark (which at the start of the race, in Canada, pushes 11 p.m.). Most nights, he’ll sleep under a makeshift tarp/tent. This year, his goal is to finish the race in 16 days. If he does, he said at a screening earlier this month of “Ride the Divide,” a documentary on the 2008 race, he may retire. As of late yesterday, Lee was about to enter Wyoming and had a comfortable lead on the rest of the pack.

You can monitor Team Bandwidth.com’s progress and see if they meet their “5 and Change” challenge by following them on their Facebook page and on the Race Across America leaderboard. I’ll also be writing about the team’s experience in a couple week’s in The News & Observer.

Follow Matthew Lee as he makes his way south along the Continental Divide on the Tour Divide Web site’s leaderboard. At the site, you can also hear podcasts of the racers as they check in with Tour Divide’s answering machine.

Top photo: Team Bandwidth.com passes through eastern Missouri.

• The Cannondale bike he rode for 2,700 miles (200,000 total feet of climbing) weighed just 35 pounds. “Just,” because the Ride the Divide is a self-supported race — Lee had to carry everything he would need on the race.
• Lee won the 2008 RTD, the focus of the film, finishing in 17 days and 20 hours.
• He averaged about 150 miles a day.
• His typical day: Wake up at 4:30 a.m., ride until just after dark. In the northerly lattitudes of Canada, that didn’t occur until around 11 p.m.
• Fifteen racers started the 2008 Ride the Divide, six finished.
• About 40 racers are signed up for this year’s RTD.
• Since the race started in 1999, a total of 100 riders have started, 40 have finished.
• The RTD route is not “super technical,” says Lee, who is also the race organizer, though more singletrack trail may be added in the future.
• Lee has won the race four times.
• “The heavy headwinds will drive you crazy.”
• Lee’s goal for this year’s race: 16 days.
• If he does this year’s race in 16 days, he says he’ll probably retire.