Relay teams make sure wheels keep on rollin'

By Matt Peters -- Special to The Bee
Published 6:00 a.m. PDT Wednesday, November 7, 2001

As the "designated descenders," Steve Rex and Jim Frink had known for weeks that the backside of Towne Pass was waiting. They also knew they would be making the descent in the dark.

Rex and Frink were part of a four-tandem relay team from the Davis Bike Club that went down to Southern California last month to participate in the Furnace Creek 508. The 508-mile ride from Valencia to Twenty Nine Palms began in 1983 as a qualifying ride for individuals looking to participate in the Race Across America. While the ride remains a qualifier for RAAM, the addition of relay teams in recent years has given an extra flavor to the event.

"If you ride it as an individual, it's hellish," said Dan Shadoan, who with Craig Robertson manned another of the four tandems. On the other two long bikes were Daryn Dodge and Rich Boettner and Dave Taillon and Rick Humphreys. "But the relay-team way is a way to have a weekend full of fun."

The goal of the Davis Bike Club tandem team actually was to do more than just participate. Shadoan said he put together his "dream team" with an eye toward breaking the course record for tandem-relay teams, which had stood at 23 hours, 20 minutes.

The Davis team had one support van for each tandem. Each van was manned with two volunteer crew members, except for legendary sag driver Lee Mitchell, who handled his team by himself. Shadoan said each tandem would ride as hard as it could for 15 minutes, then pass the torch to the next tandem and climb inside for a brief rest while the van raced ahead to leapfrog the other tandem/van combos.

Mitchell's tandem was Rex and Frink, which meant it would be his job to follow the tandem down the hill in the dark, staying as close as he could to provide the bike with extra illumination with the headlights. As the tandem dropped down Towne Pass, they hit a five-mile stretch that averaged 8 percent. "I could tell we were going fast," said Rex.

At one point Rex took a quick glance at the speedometer and saw they were doing 66 mph. "If I had tucked, we would have done 70, easily. Could have been faster -- in the light."

Frink, who had crashed recently in the Winters road race at 30 mph, remembered looking down at the road, noticing that the bike was going very fast and thinking, "Going down (crashing) at this speed would really suck.

"Glad we didn't hit any coyotes or ground squirrels," said Frink.

"Lee Mitchell did a great job of driving behind us," said Rex. "I don't know how he got the lights around so quickly on some of the turns. I guess because he was following so closely."

In addition to the steep grade and the darkness, Rex said they also encountered a portion of road that was a little like a roller coaster. With the beams from his helmet light and Mitchell's van pointing up and the road turning down, the bike was "just jumping off into total darkness," said Rex. "There was one point where (the bike) got pretty light."

The hair-raising descent notwithstanding, the ride went relatively smooth for the team, said Shadoan. And the eight riders now hold the record for tandem-relay teams, knocking nearly 35 minutes off the previous record while finishing in 22:45. That's an average speed of more than 22.3 mph, on a course with more than 30,000 feet of climbing.

Shadoan, who in 1999 with Robertson and DBC members Wayne Woodside and Pierre Neu completed the Furnace Creek 508 on a four-man relay team in about 26 hours, said he would like to go back to the Furnace Creek 508 in a couple of years and attempt to break the four-man relay-course record, which is about an hour faster than the tandem-relay team's time.

Davis Bike Club member Ken Holloway, 49, of San Jose, qualified for RAAM by finishing in 35:11:45. And Davis Bike Club member Anne Schneider, 53, again successfully completed the ride solo, finishing in 45:18:00.

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