In today’s The News & Observer, I write about Team Bandwidth.com’s experience in Race Across America, the 3,004-mile bike race from Oceanside, Calif., to Annapolis, Md., that TB.com won (competing in the four-person team division), covering the distance in 6 days, 3 hours and 9 minutes. Here are more details on TB’s experience. (Probably makes more sense if you read the main story first, then come back here for more insights.)

• 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.