RAO News From Ben..

Here's a quick note I wanted to share with all of you. I just finished tallying up a spreadsheet of exchange points, times, and temperatures for this year's race. I figure this will be great for future reference. I also was curious to see how we varied our pull lengths with respect to temperature and terrain and how it affected our riding. Kenneth and I will need to get together on that one more later. For now, though, here is the amazing piece of info: in totaling up our pull times I found we spent the same amount of time on the bike! 14.5 hrs each! There was one point where I don't have the exact times (Bakeoven) so I guessed best I could there. I also don't have ride times going up Timberline where we blew everything apart. I'm glad no one was recording there but the times have to be about even there as well. The time difference overall was perhaps a 5 minute spread. This is incredible given we had pulls as short as 7 minutes on Fossil (shorter on Timberline) and as long as 72-90 minutes around Monument. If someone can tell me how we did this, let me know. I'm pretty much floored. You guys all rock! I'm working on a race report and putting together this statistics spreadsheet. I'll send it along as soon as it's finished. Don't hold your breath though - there's a lot to write. Anyway, I was super excited about this tidbit and wanted to share it right away.

- Ben Larson