Every car I’ve ever been in makes a steady ticking noise when the hazard lights are turned on. It’s not a very loud or obnoxious sound. So far as I can tell, the sound exists primarily to remind the driver to turn the hazards off when the crisis has been averted or dealt with. During the Race Across America, the official racing rules stipulate that the hazard lights must always be on when the support crew is in direct follow, meaning when the support van sits directly behind the racing cyclist (GEAR, 2019). The support van follows the rider all night, from sunset to sunrise, using the headlights to light their path down back-country roads. The hazards are meant to warn passing drivers about something unusual. The lights shield precious cargo. With their blinking, those of us in the support van watch our rider slowly pedal away 3,070 miles. That’s over three thousand miles of staring at someone’s butt. To pass the time in June 2019, our crew listened to music and told stories and tried to make each other laugh. When the van grew quiet, we listened to the steady ticking of the hazard lights. In the spaces between their beats I asked myself why our rider, my father, would do this to himself.
The 2019 Race Across America (RAAM) started on June 16th at 1:15PM. Kevin, Allen, and I began the race in the follow van at the start line in Oceanside, California. Kevin Bernstein works as a personal trainer and played rugby for the University of California at San Diego. Allen Formoso also works as a personal trainer and he runs ultradistance marathons for fun. Together we three drove down a road that separated the beach from a rec center and a complex of white-washed terraced apartments. I sat at the wheel, Kevin sat in the passenger seat, and Allen sat behind us. The breeze off the Pacific came through the open windows and mixed with the smells from the overflowing public restrooms. The ocean was to our left and a stand advertising a traditional Hawaiian ice drink in bright neon lettering was to our right. Tanned beach goers wandered by, giving us a quick once over. Maybe they wondered why our van had ‘TEAM TARLTON’ written in block letters on the side and ‘CAUTION CYCLIST AHEAD’ in fluorescent yellow between our break lights. Maybe they wondered why the vans three occupants were not talking but looking straight ahead with unfocused eyes. Maybe they didn’t care about us at all.
We three wanted to start the race with my father for symbolic reasons, I suppose. We were the three crew leads. We were the most knowledgeable and experienced team members. We knew the route, and my father best. If my father’s body were a machine, Kevin and Allen would be the designing engineers. Kevin lives in a cottage in my family’s backyard. He is one of my father’s closest friends, and he comes over to eat dinner with my parents almost every night. In the last few years, my father sleeps how much Kevin tells him to sleep, eats what Kevin tells him to eat, and works out the way Kevin tells him to work out. Allen goes on runs with my father, takes him on training rides. These two have crafted my father from the ground up. And I’m his son. I know my father.
Amongst us there was a definite air of bravado. Anything worth doing is worth doing right. If you want something done well, do it yourself. That sort of thing. So we sat in the new Mercedes-Benz 2500 Sprinter van (with the optional sound system upgrades) in silence and watched my father stand next to his bike at the start line. He was eating a slice of a vegetarian pizza. The racers stood in a pack off to the side as they waited for their turn to launch. They didn’t talk to one another much. Behind the racers the follow vans were arranged in a ragged line. Every five minutes a racer would be called to the start line. The announcer would say the racer’s name and mention the racer’s sponsors. The announcer would wish the racer luck. Then the racer would pedal down the chute, ultradistance cycling fans cheering from behind barriers on either side. Racer after racer passed under the red and blue balloon arch at the end of the chute and began their races. Some tried to work off nerves by beginning at a brisk pace. Some took it slow and steady.
Eventually my father was called, racer 510. “John Tarlton, racing out of Palo Alto, California! John is supported by Tarlton Properties and CP Construction. Good luck, John!” My father shook the stubby announcer’s hand and took off over the line. I put the van in gear and started after him down the chute. The boxes of food, extra water, spare clothes, and spare bike tires rattled around in the wooden cabinets behind me. Kevin touched the Bluetooth headset that connected the navigator to the speakers in my father’s helmet.
“Ok John, just another day in the park. This is a cake walk. We’ll be across the finish line in Annapolis before we know it,” he said. Kevin’s voice sounded distracted and distant. As he spoke, Kevin was flipping through a thick spiral bound route book. Each turn was printed alongside elevation changes and significant landmarks to help monitor the rider’s progress. Kevin laughed at something my father had said into the mic, but remained hunched over the route book. He began scribbling notes in the margins while he traced the route on Google Maps with his phone. Still, I was glad my father had said something funny. At least one of the four of us was in good spirits, I thought.
If my father finished, 2019 would be his second time. In 2014, the race took him 11 days, 21 hours, 17 minutes. He became one of 544 people in history who have finished RAAM. And while many people attempt the race every year, less than half finish.
RAAM is a grueling cycling race that requires participants to ride from Oceanside, California to Annapolis, Maryland in under twelve days. RAAM began in 1982 with only four participants. Lon Heldeman won with a finishing time of 9 days, 20 hours, and 2 minutes. Back then the race went from Santa Monica, California to the Empire State building in New York City (Records, 2019). Since then the race has expanded. It now covers over 3,000 miles, crosses 12 states, and contains over 170,000 feet of vertical gain. Riders cross the deserts of Arizona, the freezing mountains of Colorado. One night on the plains in Kansas I got out of the van and was struck stupid. The unrelenting flatness and the ceiling of bright stars made me feel like a strong wind could pick me up and carry me away into endless space.
The race is physically hard, but the sleep deprivation is what gets to people the most. Riders need to be on their bikes at least 20 hours a day. The sleep debt racks up fast and riders start seeing things or hearing voices in the night. The goal is just to get to the finish line before the crash, physically and metaphorically. Racers will do some heinous shit to finish. My father would sometimes see how long he can go without sleep, trying to stay awake for days at a time. Meeting ultradistance cyclists, it’s not uncommon to see their hands curled into claws from the nerve damage of hundreds of cumulative days on the bike. They walk bow legged and shuffling as though they look uncomfortable without a bike’s saddle between their legs. I was talking to another crew at a gas station in Missouri and they told me that the current RAAM record holder, Christoph Strasser, sleeps only an hour a night, drinks only Ensure, and doesn’t get off the bike to pee. The other crew finished pumping gas and left before I thought to ask them how someone could pee from a moving bike. Whatever Strasser does, it works. The record Strasser holds is 7 days, 15 hours, and 56 minutes (Records, 2019).
Not everyone leaves RAAM unscathed. Three people have died. Brett Malin was hit in 2003 by a tractor-trailer towed behind an 18-wheeler on his way into Pie Town, New Mexico (Race, 2019). Bob Breedlove was hit in 2005 by an oncoming vehicle near Trinidad, Colorado (Prendergast, 2006). Anders Tesgaard was hit in 2015 by a West Virginian truck driver going 60 mph who just wasn’t paying attention (Race, 2019). Bob Breedlove’s crew wasn’t with him when he got hit. RAAM rules say the follow crew can’t be directly behind the rider during the day. Breedlove’s crew was a few miles behind. They had stopped to refill water bottles at a gas station. They didn’t know he was dead for maybe fifteen minutes (Prendergast, 2006).
So every rider in the race needs to be a little obsessed. But no one would be able to tell that about my father just from looking at him. He stands a couple inches over six feet tall with thinning black hair that has just a sprinkling of grey at the temples. My father exclusively wears Patagonia puff jackets over blue button-down dress shirts. The blue button-downs are always tucked into jeans and he only wears running shoes – even to church. My father runs a commercial real estate company that caters to MedTech startups. He is quietly proud of his reputation as an honest businessman. He cuts his nails every week and is always clean shaven (except for those few months when my mother thought he looked cute with a goatee). He looks fit, but not ripped. He has a small butt from the hours on the bike. He smiles a lot with people he knows and likes but rarely with strangers. Even with strangers he gives a firm handshake. He rides his bike everywhere he goes.
When I was a junior in high school, my father gave me one of his old leather jackets. At six feet, four inches I was already two inches taller than my dad, but the jacket hung loose from my shoulders. He used to be kind of tubby. He rediscovered cycling around 2009, but it was mostly just a hobby. My mom told him he needed the exercise. And he was depressed. In college, he had been on the UCLA cycling team but focused on work and parenting when my siblings and I were really little. As we kids started to get older, we stopped being enough of a distraction. My father drew in on himself. He would stay quiet for days at a time. He would give a small smile only when I asked what was wrong. My father started riding again and something clicked, I guess. The cycling became a central part of his life around 2012.
That’s when he started training for his first RAAM in 2014. The riding ramped up. He cut out sugar and simple carbohydrates. My father started riding hundreds of miles a week. When he crashed his bike or was hit by a car he would be back in the saddle as soon as he could clip his cleats into the pedals. He would be gone every weekend on training rides to Santa Cruz and back. The riding became almost an obsession. It consumes his free time and energy. When I came down to the kitchen for a midnight snack I could hear the whirring of his stationary bike in the basement, and when I woke the next morning, one of his bikes would be gone from its place by the front door. His hair started to thin and his back started to stoop and every ounce of fat drained from his face so that his cheek bones poked out tight against his skin. I would say that he became addicted, but he was happier than ever. And addiction is a bad thing, right?
When my father began to ride seriously, he developed a simple life mantra: There is nothing that can’t be fixed. When I have a problem, he will tell me that eating a healthy meal, sleeping, taking a shower, and exercising will fix it. No matter what ‘it’ is. When I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder, my father didn’t seem particularly concerned. I had a panic attack during 2nd period biology in my freshman year of high school. The school counselor referred me to a psychiatrist who referred me to a psychotherapist who gave me a barrage of tests and questionnaires and interviewed me for hours. Mostly I was just happy that I didn’t have to go to school for a week. My mother and father came into my room that Saturday night to read me the email from my new doctor. They stood together at the foot of my bed and my mother cried while my father talked. I can’t remember how I felt. Numb, probably. Or maybe I didn’t really understand what they were saying. I just remember my father’s face. He was staring at me like he was trying to send me something through the air. He didn’t cry the whole time and when my mother came to hug me, he just squeezed my foot tightly. “We can beat this thing. You’re going to be fine. Let’s go for a run,” he said. He crossed to my closet and grabbed the running shoes from my top drawer. We ran side by side through the darkness and didn’t talk. The route we took became a favorite of mine. Out of Palo Alto, across El Camino Real and onto Stanford campus, under the oaks and through the redwoods. It’s about a six-mile loop. We stopped by a dried lakebed to catch our breath and take a drink from a water fountain. I remember the sound of the crickets echoing off the hard-packed dirt.
To hear my father tell it, depression has a cure named diligence. He thinks he’s just being diligent, that diligence means doing what’s necessary to achieve a goal. It’s hard to break free from that kind of extreme optimism. Nothing is impossible for him so long as he does what he needs to do. He needs to cure himself of depression, and all it takes is diligence. Working compulsively, diligently, every day. For him a healthy meal and sleep and a shower and exercise works. Like therapy and antipsychotics work for some people. “Exercise is our therapy,” he tells me. There is no problem that a two-hundred-mile bike ride and a full night of sleep won’t fix. The climb up Old La Honda road in the hills behind our house is his dispensary. “Just let that mix of exhaustion and endorphins wash away bad thoughts.” To hear my father talk about his exercise routine is like listening to a preacher. He believes in it. Exercise is freedom from his own mind.
“If I ever am stuck in a wheelchair, you go find a shotgun and shoot me in the head,” my father told me once. I laughed when he said it like he had told a joke.
But this miracle cure only briefly for me. It’s a treatment that requires religious adherence. “People like us,” he told me once over the phone, “can’t afford to take a break.” He’s on his bike three-hundred days a year because he loves to ride, but also because we can’t afford to take a break. I’ve grown to believe him. In the years since my first run through the Stanford redwoods, I’ve slipped up plenty of times. I’ll stay up too late to finish a project or I’ll have one too many drinks with a friend. Then the emptiness in my head begins to feel more real than anything else. When the depression catches me and smothers my mind, the voice that cuts through the fog is my father’s. You should go for a run. But I know as soon as I step foot in the driveway after a run or the final whistle blows on a practice, the negative thoughts meander back. Usually only one or two at first. In the landscape of my mind, the fears and anxieties are loadstones that can only be moved by diligent effort. The bigger fears aren’t washed away, but simply shifted to the periphery. Experience has taught me that. When I take a break from exercising. When I don’t go for a run every day. When I don’t do push-ups before bed. When I don’t plan my day around exercising. We can’t take a break because the ticking clock towards emotional paralysis never stops. The clock never stops but is simply reset. When I asked, my father told me that drugs weren’t necessary. “Why put all the crap in your body? Have someone mess around in your head?” My father doesn’t believe that negative thoughts should be reset by drugs or therapies. For him, maybe the clock hands slow for one reason or another. The drugs have side effects. The therapies don’t always work. And hard work works. Exercise works, so we can never stop.
In summer of 2018, my father asked me to be one of the three leads for his support crew for his second RAAM attempt. Essentially, he was asking me to be his brain during the race. The riders who finish RAAM sleep less than three hours a day. With too much sleep deprivation and physical exhaustion, the body begins to shut down non-essential functions. When my father rode RAAM in 2014, he stopped being able to see color after seven days. He started hearing voices after ten days. The rider can’t focus on anything other than riding. To use my father’s words, “The rider pedals and the support crew does everything else.” So I decided when my father ate, when my father drank, when my father pooped, when my father slept. I became my father’s keeper.
My father’s name is John. During the course of the race, I referred to him as ‘John.’ I call him ‘Pop,’ or, ‘Dad,’ to his face. I refer to him as, ‘my father,’ when describing him to others. But during the race he was just John. And John was just a piece of meat.
We recorded how many calories John was intaking, how many grams of carbs, fats, proteins. How many water bottles he drank. I sat in the passenger seat of the follow van and watched John make his way across the country. I would call him to tell him about upcoming turns on the racecourse or to remind him to drink some juice from his bottle. Towards the end of the race, when his mind began to fail, I would call him just to talk. Talking made him think and thinking kept him from crashing. My job was to keep John’s body from crashing into the pavement.
The rest of the support crew consisted of four of John’s coworkers, three of his personal trainers, and my younger brother and sister. Twelve of us in all. Three coworkers drove a 28-foot RV that served as the team’s mobile base. The rest were split up into the support teams. Kevin, Allen, and I each led a team of three. Each team had a driver, a person in charge of monitoring John’s food intake, and a crew lead who served as navigator. The support teams worked on a simple shift basis. Each team had seven hours on, fourteen hours off. When a team was relieved of duty, they drove down the race route and found a motel to get a few hours of sleep.
We stopped outside of Trinidad, Colorado. John had been riding for a little over four days. It was 6:23AM. I’d been on duty since 3:47PM the day before. We had been at nearly ten thousand feet of elevation at some points in the last sixty miles. With the winds, the car’s thermometer showed outside temperatures near freezing. John had on several jackets and a battery powered heating pad taped to his chest. We had been filling socks with rice and microwaving them to stick around his neck but still John shivered so hard that he couldn’t keep the handlebars straight. Kevin knew a little bit about massage, so we pulled off the road to try and work some blood and life into John’s cold, suddenly clumsy arms and feet. The follow van parked at the mouth of a bridge with frozen green pastures to our left, mountains to our right and mountains behind us. The white stone of the mountain reflected the spare morning light and the sky was cloudless and blue. As soon as the van rolled to a stop, I jumped out and jogged over to help John from the bike. I put an arm around John’s shoulders and steered him towards the van. He smelled like dried sweat and as we walked the caked mud on his legs cracked and fell to the earth. Together, Kevin and I pushed him into the van’s passenger seat. He sat with his eyes half-lidded. A shiver would arc down his spine every few seconds. I stood in the road and reached across him to turn the heater on high. It felt like all I could do. Kevin took my place and grabbed John’s hands, working them roughly to try and restore circulation. I just watched. The air seemed to cut the inside of my nose and mouth as I breathed. John groaned as Kevin pressed his thumbs deep into the tissue connecting John’s thumb and pointer finger.
We were only a third of the way through the race and already the strain showed on his body. He had shambled from his bike to the van without picking his feet more than two inches off the ground. Kevin’s fingers dug into John’s hands and John’s eyelids flicked open wide. His eyes were normally the clearest blue but now the whites were bloodshot and the eyes were dull. They saw but didn’t register what was in front of them. I stood and watched John whimper and I prayed that the sun would rise faster to warm us. It felt like a futile prayer. I was angry at myself for not doing more. Angry at Kevin for hurting John. Angry at John for being in pain. Angry that there was nothing I could do. But never angry at John for racing. We can never stop.
Crunching gravel behind us signaled the arrival of another of our follow vans. Someone touched my shoulder and I turned to see my mother standing there. “What’s happening?” Her voice croaked like she had just woken up. She peered in the new daylight over my shoulder and into the van.
“It’s too cold. We need to get some life back in his arms,” I said. “We put all the clothes we had on him.” We did as well as anyone could have done, is what I meant. I’d been awake all night, after all. Watching John’s endless pedaling was hypnotic. I had drunk a Red Bull every two hours for the last day. The sleep debt was starting to build. My eyes were open, but it felt like my thoughts were compressed into their most simplistic forms. How is John feeling? Bad. Why? Cold. What can I do about it? Nothing. How do I feel? Tired. Bad.
Behind us Kevin must have done something, because John screamed. I turned around and John’s eyes were fully open, unseeing. “Jesus,” my mom said. She turned abruptly and walked across the road to stand facing the fields of frozen grass. John whimpered again and I didn’t want to stand there empty handed anymore so I followed her. I could hear my mother crying. Her knees were pressed against the metal railing. My mother’s shoulders were hunched, and her head sagged against her collarbone. She too had been driving all night. Shuttling one of the other support crews to a hotel. I hugged her, and we stood there and listened to the sounds coming from the van. “Is there anything we can do? Maybe let him sleep for a few minutes in the warm van? Just a little while to get warm?” Her voice was muffled in my shoulder.
“We have to keep going. We’ve stopped for too long already.” We’d stopped for too long already. Time stopped was time wasted. We needed to get going.
“We can do something. Get him more jackets. Get him something hot to drink. Just give him a second to warm up,” my mother’s tone was quietly pleading. Like I was torturing John. Like I was the one putting him through this. As if he wasn’t doing it to himself. John was quiet now.
“We’ll be out of the mountains soon. John knew what he signed up for. This is part of RAAM.” Everything I said was true. The faster we went, the faster John would be out of the mountains, the sooner he would finish. And we had to finish. That was more important than anything else. Otherwise all his Saturdays going out to Santa Cruz and back, all his late-night runs, all his exercises and stretches, all that time beating back the relentless depression would be for nothing.
“Jack, let’s go,” Kevin’s voice was sharp. I ran back over to the van and helped to prop John back onto his bike. Then we were rolling.
Why would someone take three unpaid weeks to drive across the country at twelve miles an hour without stopping anywhere interesting or getting any sleep? ‘For love’ seems the obvious answer. All three of the crew leads love my dad.
But someone who loves my dad would never help him do this race. Last time he finished the constant jarring impact from the rough roads gave him nerve damage in his left hand. During the race this summer he fell asleep on the bike twice, once flipping over a guard rail and sliding down a small slope into a muddy bank, once swerving into oncoming traffic.
The deaths of Brett Malin, Bob Breedlove, and Anders Tesgaard were fresh on my mind during the race. At midnight in the Missouri fog with trucks flying by at what felt like 80 miles an hour, inattentive or not it’s hard to know, and John’s neck collapsed from the constant strain so he could barely lift his helmet to see the road in front of him. It was hard not to think of Bob Breedlove, hit with his support crew too far away to give him any help. Would I have been able to help? I’d call John and periodically ask if I could give him caffeine to keep him awake. “No,” he’d say, because it would cause indigestion and then he’d have to stop more frequently. And so all I could do to keep him alive would be to call his Bluetooth headset to chat: about Harry Potter, about Rush’s Moving Pictures album, about Disney’s Cars. I prayed it would keep his brain moving. Prayed for attentive drivers. Someone who loved my father would have pulled him off the road. But I didn’t, and I do know that I love him.
We stopped on our way towards Chillicothe, Ohio. John had been riding for a little less than ten days. It was 4:41AM and we pulled into the wet clay driveway of a farmhouse in the foggy backwoods to give John a place to nap for ten minutes. Ten minutes flat. The clock starts when the bike stops and stops when the wheels start turning again. John’s weaving forced us to give him a break. When we called him over the headset to ask how he was doing, he told us that he needed to swerve in order to avoid the faces pressing themselves against the pavement under his tires.
We had eight minutes until John needed to be up and rolling. Kevin, one of my father’s account managers, Vidya, my sister Cloe, and I stood outside the van. Fireflies blinked in and out in the darkness. It was in the sixties and humid, but we were wearing pants and rain jackets to try and fend of the mosquitos that seemed impervious to the repellent that we had splashed over ourselves. Cloe and Vidya went off somewhere to find a place to pee. Kevin got a call from another crew member and wandered further up the driveway. Probably someone from our relief crew, I thought. I hoped they had gotten a few hours of sleep.
I hadn’t slept more than four hours a day for the last ten days. My brain felt starved. Caffeine kept my body awake but it felt like my mind would drift to sleep randomly and without warning. Thoughts slipped through my fingers. There was a fruit tree at the head of the driveway. In the moonlight I couldn’t see what type of fruit the tree held. I looked closely at the closed screen door of the farmhouse. I couldn’t quite see Kevin up the driveway, but I could hear his replies whispered into the phone. If I was tired, Kevin was worse. He smiled so easily back in Palo Alto. And now dark crescents bloomed under Kevin’s eyes and his mouth frowned as he ground his teeth. Kevin was in charge and the burden of leadership made him dumb. He barely slept. He did double shifts almost every day. He would sit in the back of the van and watch my crew do our work, speaking only to correct my driver’s driving or my cook’s cooking. John’s finishing or not finishing was entirely Kevin’s responsibility, he had decided. John and Kevin had trained together for so long. They’d been training for RAAM for years. So Kevin was killing himself to make John’s goal a reality and the rest of the crew just watched the work slowly crush him.
Seven minutes until John needed to be up and rolling. Now Cloe and Vidya stood under the fruit tree, reaching into its branches. Kevin’s voice cut through the air, “Well what the hell am I supposed to do, man?” He sounded tinny and panicked, like he was asking for help. Cloe, Vidya, and I glanced at each other in the silence. I leaned against the van as if preparing for Kevin to come sprinting out of the darkness. We watched the fireflies dance on the warm air. The second hand on my watch seemed to skip between numbers then freeze then start again at random.
Jonathan, another crew member, called me. When I brought the phone to my ear he was already yelling, his words coming out together with pressure, “You tell Kevin that we’re done. Three shit shifts in a row. We haven’t slept and he doesn’t either. He is my brother man; all love but we can’t keep doing this. He isn’t a superman man. Delegate, I told him. Did you know that he has been pulling double shifts? And he doesn’t sleep when he’s off. Tell him that if he tries to get back in the van this morning, I’m going to punch him in the fucking face. Tell him.” Jonathan hung up.
My sleep deprived brain tried to rally a thought in response to Jonathan’s words. Jonathan and Kevin were friends, I thought. I’m their friend, too. Why are they yelling? Why are we fighting? Are we that tired and worried about finishing? Jonathan called Kevin. Jonathan is angry. Kevin and Jonathan are friends. Kevin must be sad that Jonathan is angry. My brain ticked slowly, slowly through the thoughts. Cloe and Vidya each had two or three crabapples in the slings of their shirts. The air was full of the smell of the earth and the wet clay beneath our feet. John hadn’t made a sound from inside the van. The fireflies didn’t give enough light to see much clearly. I squatted low to find Kevin’s silhouette against the lightening sky and walked up the clay driveway to him.
We had five minutes until John needed to be up and rolling. Kevin stood just off center in the driveway, his head tilted back as if stargazing in the overcast sky. I walked to his side and put my hand on his shoulder. Kevin was at least six inches shorter than I am but broadly muscled like a power lifter. Without moving his shoulders his pulled me into a two-armed sideways hug. “I just want to finish this race with my friends.” His nose sounded plugged.
“I know man.”
“Why does it feel like everybody hates me?”
“They love you,” I said. Jonathan had said the same just a few minutes earlier, but when I said the word “love,” it sounded lifeless in the humid air. The way sound is muffled and crushed in a heavy fog. Why would you yell at someone that you love? Why would you make someone you love go through any part of this stupid race? It felt like every minute held the weight of all those days of training, all those long bike rides. Three hundred miles a week. We had to finish. For John. We held his dreams in our hands and we had to make him get back on that stupid fucking bike when all he needed was sleep.
“They have a funny way of showing it.” The knots of muscle under Kevin’s arms twitched and jumped as he breathed and talked.
“They’re just worried. You’re taking on too much, they said. They’re worried that you’re hurting yourself.” Over Kevin’s shoulder I could see my watch face. We had two minutes until John needed to be up and rolling. We had to go. I needed to talk Kevin down so we could get going.
“I’m just doing my job. Just trying to do it right.”
“They don’t see all the good you’re doing. Just all your shortcomings. No one else could do what you do.”
“He needs to finish. If I have to be the asshole that helps him finish, then I’m an asshole.” Kevin had frequently been an asshole, if the right kind of asshole, over the last few days and so I didn’t disagree.
“That’s almost ten minutes. What do we do if he starts swerving again? There will be more traffic on the road.”
“No more naps. They take too much time.”
“Would caffeine help?”
“Not if it makes him shit a lot. We can’t spare that time,” then, louder, to Cloe and Vidya, “Let’s get this show on the road. Open the van and get him up. Ask him if he needs his shoe covers. It’s a little dewy out here.”
As we rolled out of that driveway, a firefly flew through the car’s an open window. We turned off the lights and watched its light flick on and off again. In the warm and heavy air John pedaled away diligently. He would pause every twenty strokes or so to stretch out a calf muscle or to adjust his grip on the handle bars. Our stop did the trick. John was able to stop swerving long enough to let the rising sun’s rays wake him up, and he kept riding.
During my freshman year of college, on one of my biweekly phone calls with my little sister Cloe, I asked her, “How are things with Mom and Dad?” Her answer, “Not so good. Mom threw away Dad’s protein powder,” left me feeling unexpectedly furious. I knew that my mother throwing away the powder was about his exercising. My father would be away from the house for hours at a time. Gone with the rising sun and returned in the late afternoon, exhausted and ready for bed. My mother would say that she was being left to act as a single parent for the weekend.
But my father needed that time. People like us can’t afford to take breaks. The depressive thoughts will always keep creeping back. My mother should have known better. She shouldn’t be so selfish. That’s what I thought during the phone call with Cloe. Now, years later, my family’s powdergate seems one of the first signs that my father’s ultradistance racing has a larger cost than the physical toll that the exercise takes on his body.
When the topic of my father’s racing comes up in social situations, my mother is fond of saying, “As far as midlife crisis go, it’s better than a sports car and a mistress!” which most often gets a chuckle or two from the collected forty-something-year-olds. But that line contains an uneasy sense of grasping. Grasping at straws. Trying to render a shitty situation in a flattering light. Like the captain of a sinking ship telling her crew, “You guys need a good bath anyway! At least there are no sharks.” My mother only makes the joke when my father isn’t around. On a summer day in early high school, as my father was preparing to leave for a bike ride, I heard my mother tell him that when he closes the front door on his way out for a ride, she assumes he will never come back. She fears he will be killed out there on the road. He may be killed by some high school kid who is texting and driving, “You could die, and we wouldn’t know for hours,” she said to him then, “We would just be here while you died. We could be watching TV and we wouldn’t know.” My mother sounded like she was crying. I remember being angry with her in that moment. How could she be so weak? My father needed this. This was his therapy. How dare she?
But therapy takes an hour or two. Swallowing a pill every now and then is a thirty second process, beginning to end. Ultra-distance bike riding takes days and weeks. Buying the new $10,500 bike, keeping up with the latest training technologies is expensive and time-consuming. When I call my father now to check in from college, he wants to know how much I’ve been exercising. Eight years since my diagnosis and he still wants to know. “How is training coming?” I don’t know what to ask him in return other than more of the same. What are your mileages for the week? How are you liking this particular piece of new training gear? How are you feeling about RAAM? Like a business meeting. What are your goals for the quarter? How are you progressing on your way to meeting those goals? Is there anything you need from me in order to achieve those goals? Be a part of your support crew? Easy enough. Make sure you don’t take any wrong turns and eat the right foods at the right time. Stuff ice bags down your shirt in the desert. All good.
Ultradistance athletics have a well-established relationship with escape. Escaping one’s own mind. Escaping a shitty situation. Running or cycling or swimming provide a meditative tempo that can smooth away those pestering thoughts. The endorphins and physical pain make the mind’s diseases feel manageable. In the summer after my freshman year of college, when my then-partner called to tell me that they had been raped, I had to run. I finished the call and I grabbed my shoes and I ran and ran and ran until my lungs burned with clean fire and I could no longer imagine a faceless guy rutting on top of them. I don’t know how long or how far. That night I ran along the same streets my father and I ran the night I was diagnosed. I ran further and faster and harder and I couldn’t see properly because of the tears and I couldn’t breathe properly because of the snot dribbling down my throat. Eventually I ended up back at home, too tired to think or to be sad.
The 2014 RAAM was a big achievement for my father, the culmination of years of training. He rode every day. Weekdays, weekends. Hundreds of miles a week, all year long. My grandmother, my father’s mother, died in 2011. My father had his first major ultra-distance bike race in 2012. He told me once that in the whole world, he was the only one who really knew how my grandmother was feeling. When my grandmother died, my father spent days by himself in his basement workshop. He made her urn from cherry and rosewood.
On the night of the eleventh day we had to pull John off the road because he couldn’t stop swerving into oncoming traffic. The daylight was fading, and we couldn’t count on every driver to come to a horn-blaring stop. One swerve was concerning enough. John’s neck had collapsed a day ago and he had to sit tall and straight, his spine propping his neck up, just to see the road in front of him. The other riders stayed low to the bars and cut through the wind. The lead on the fourth-place rider we had been building since Durango, Colorado was slowly disappearing.
When John swerved into the oncoming lane a green pickup truck was forced to slam on the breaks, horn screaming. Kevin and I jumped out of the follow van and ran across the road, signaling apologies to the driver. John seemed vaguely embarrassed, like an elderly person who had lost bladder control. “I was trying to find a good flat spot to pull over. This place seemed right,” he said by way of explanation.
“Yeah. Ok, I get that, but we have to remember to check for traffic. Right?” Kevin’s voice had a note of tinny panic.
“Right. Yes, of course. I know that. I’m good,” John shrugged Kevin’s and my hands off his shoulders and pushed off down the road. We never asked why he wanted to stop in the first place, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. Ten minutes later John swerved again towards the double yellow. We pulled him from the bike, no room for argument. He sat slumped in the passenger seat as we shuttled him towards a Honda dealership for a rest. His eyes were bloodshot and empty, his hands curled into claws. He moved like each motion was agony. With his chin tucked against his collarbone, John sat staring through his eyebrows at the winding road our headlights illuminated.
We set up a makeshift bed in the back-parking lot of the Greencastle, PA dealership. It was closed for the day and the display cars sat in empty rows with shiny black tires. My phone lay open beside me on the asphalt. A map of the race course showed each rider’s location as a ragged string of dots strung out along the route. Two small dots stood alone in the digital Pennsylvanian expanse. It was 9:06PM and racer 499 was fifteen miles behind us. Every minute or so I would refresh the page and watch the red racer number 499 creep towards our sedentary blue racer 510.
Jonathan mentioned that he had seen a bedbug on his pillow at our most recent Best Western, and so my little brother Cooke and I made a small pile of our clothes and started checking for tiny black specs under a flickering streetlamp. Mosquitos circled on silent wings and I alternated between slapping at them in a rage and ignoring their approaches. The air smelled faintly like pizza from the strip mall down the road. How in the hell is anyone supposed to find a tiny black bug on black boxers? I resolved to start buying more colorful underwear.
The yellow headlights of a support van swept over us. My mother jumped out of the van’s driver’s seat and jogged over. I was suddenly conscious that I hadn’t washed my face in several days. The phone on the asphalt now showed two nearly overlapping dots, one red and our blue. My mother sat next to Cooke and started to rub small circle into his upper back while she looked in my direction. “How is everyone doing?” With her words I heard implied questions. Why had we stopped? Was something wrong? I squished a mosquito that had been sitting on my forearm.
“Jonathan said that he saw a bed bug at the Best Western. Cooke and I are just checking our clothes. It’s no big deal! All part of the RAAM experience!” My voice got a little brighter right at the end and I forced a smile on my face. I felt like I was about to cry. An argument paced back and forth in my mind. Fourth place was about to overtake us. Who fucked up? No one had fucked up, but we couldn’t keep him on the bike. We could have kept him on the bike if we just talked to him in the right way. If we gave him the right food. Even if he was swerving, we needed to push him! It would all be a waste if he didn’t finish. But no race would be worth it if he died. I couldn’t stop thinking about Bob Breedlove’s crew fifteen minutes too late outside Trinidad, Colorado.
“Bed bugs! Nasty!” My mother brought her eyebrows together in a picture of concern. We sat together in silence.
Our trio sat under the streetlamp for fifteen minutes and watched videos on the best ways to kill bed bugs. A flashing headlight came slowly down the road from our left, followed by a white van with “Racer 499” on the side. The van was blasting Aerosmith over loudspeakers for the whole neighborhood to hear. I hoped that the music wouldn’t wake John. The racer rolled to a stop in front of our trio. He was small. Wiry and light. Easy to climb hills when you weigh twenty-eight pounds soaking wet, I thought. “One of my crew members was up ahead of us and noticed that your guy’s neck is all jacked up,” he said. He sounded concerned, which was nice of him. He also looked fresh, which was pretty rude of him. His eyes were bright like he hadn’t been on the road for eleven straight days. “Hate to see another rider in pain. We have a massage person on our crew. Maybe take a look at your guy?” He looked down at my mother, Cooke, and me and gave us a thin smile.
“We’ve got it under control. Thanks. Our people are taking care of him.” I wanted my voice to sound pleasant. Diplomatic and friendly. Of course, we were taking care of him. Why did he think John wasn’t on the road? Did he think we didn’t care? He was an ass, I decided. John needed to do this. Depression has a cure called diligence. This is his cure. We were doing this because we love him. Did this ass think we didn’t love John? He wasn’t on the road because we love him. Because he might die if he kept riding.
“Hate to see someone hurting. We’re all in this together. Anyway, got to go. This race isn’t going to finish itself.” He chuckled and nodded and pushed off, making his way out of town. The van followed him, playing classic rock and roll the whole way. They made it look easy.
“Fuck that guy,” my mom said.
I swallowed. “Yeah, fuck that guy.”
Race for the Cure
By Jack Tarlton