How To Train For The World's Toughest Race

With full-time jobs and calendars full of commitments, how do amateur riders find the time and energy to compete over epic distances? David Bradford meets two time-starved cyclists preparing for Race Across America

What does it take to ride 3,000 miles across the full width of the USA non-stop? That is the challenge taken on by those hardy, if not foolhardy, souls who enter Race Across America (RAAM). With a strict cut-offtime of 12 days for solo riders, 250 miles per day is the bare minimum. No time for sleep, just the occasional nap. Those riding in teams, sharing the workload, must ride almost 350 miles per day to finish within nine days. As the race’s homepage prominently states, RAAM is 30 per cent longer than the Tour de France and covered in roughly half the time. Hardly surprising, then, that the drop-out rate hovers around 50 per cent.

How do amateur riders with jobs, families and social lives manage to squeeze in the necessary training? The question applies not only to RAAM, of course, but any event — be it ultra, sportive, Audax or stage race — where the duration pushes competitors into unknown territory, over distances that literally cannot be rehearsed or practised. We visited two hard-pressed amateurs squeezing in as much training as they dared around demanding full-time jobs as they prepared to compete as a two-man team in RAAM 2019.

What stood out as truly exceptional about the endurance challenge facing James Harvey and Tom Allen? It wasn’t just the fact they were amateurs with fulltime jobs; it was the nature of their work. How could a cancer surgeon and deputy CEO find the time, as well as the mental and physical energy, to get themselves fit enough to race non-stop across the USA? To find out — as they were hitting the peak period of their training in early May — we went to Manchester to follow them over the course of an action-packed day.

6.30am: High Peak, the day begins