During the previous night, Jon and Coz passed the halfway point of RAAM (time taken: around 3 days and 10 hours). Unfortunately, Jon had taken a wrong turn at one point and, during the confusion, had been passed by the German team. Still, the tussle between our two teams was helping to keep us all motivated.

I woke at around 5.00 am to a clear and, at least for the moment, relatively cool morning. There was a small daschund-like dog lying in the middle of the road and the girls informed me that its friend had been killed by a passing car during the night (it hadn’t left its side since). Fortunately, a passer by was able to coax it to the side of the road out of harms way.

Tom and I ate some breakfast and prepared the bikes for the changeover. I raided the freezer for some ice pops, which for the last couple of days had been the only thing that I really enjoyed eating. Towanda was a small town and, as with most places at 5.00 am, was completely lifeless. We watched on as the German team came through, unaware at that point of what had occurred the previous night. Still, Corinne appeared shortly after and I was on my way again. As usual, Jon had arranged the changeover at the foot of a climb, though the ascent was only 150 ft and nowhere near as severe as the route profile suggested. I missed the first turn of the day (about ½ mile after the changeover), but recovered my error relatively quickly thanks to the GPS. There were a few turns and traffic lights in that first leg (particularly in the town of El Dorado) which slowed my progress, but I felt pretty good as I made my way towards the sunrise. Tom finished off the last real climb of the stage and we were soon tapping along on relatively flat Kansas terrain. What’s more, the landscape had changed from the relatively featureless one of the previous day, to a greener and more forested one. Part way through my second leg, and with the temperature starting to get uncomfortable again, I realised that I’d left my water bottle in the SUV. Tom had done the same thing the previous day and I’d managed to hand him a bottle as he sped past, with machine-like precision I may add. Needless to say, this wasn’t the case on this occasion with me nearly ending up on the floor as a result of trying to execute the same manoeuvre. In the end, the SUV drove ahead and I just stopped momentarily and collected my bottle. I needed the bottle for the cooling and hydration strategy that I’d fine tuned over the previous couple of days. It basically consisted of having one bottle half full of sports drink, and another full of water. About every 10 minutes, I would sip some sports drink and then squirt copious amounts of water over my head. The cooling feeling from the water as it ran over my face was fantastic, although the combination of the high temperatures and the rapid evaporation meant that the feeling was relatively short-lived.

I handed over to Tom, shortly after crossing Homer Creek (Doh!) and he sped along as we passed through the Toronto Wildlife Area. Kim was doing a great job of driving and navigating on her own (girls are good at that sort of thing, I hear!) and we made the next changeover at a stop sign in Batesville. Changing at stop signs was the most effective way of making a change as the incoming rider had to stop anyway. However, for some reason, Tom couldn’t get his head around the concept (much to my amusement). The next few miles were lovely and fast and involved crossing lots of river bridges. As I handed over to Tom again in the town of Iola, Kim spotted a MacDonalds and, remembering my craving from the day before, bought me a large vanilla milkshake (perfect!!). As we were ahead of schedule, we decided to break the last 20 miles into two chunks, although we got a little confused during the process as to whether we were doing this based on time or distance. In the end it worked out fine and we arrived at TS29 at around 2.30 pm. I had a chat with Jon about how things were going, as we waited for Tom to arrive. Jon was keen to try to minimise changeover time and heat exposure by having the changeovers precisely at 8.00 pm and 6.00 am (the times between which SUV needed to follow the riders). While this made sense, the logistics, coupled with the prospect of 10-hour night shifts every other night, made the idea impractical. Anyway, within a few minutes, Tom appeared and the guys once again disappeared down the road. I was desperate for a shower and a shave as I hadn’t had either since the end of the first stage. In desperation, the crew used the cold water outlet at the gas station at TS29 in the shadow of the RV so as not to be spotted by the attendant. I was going to do the same, but in the end I used the one in the RV and Mike topped up the tank afterwards. It was nice to feel clean again as I crawled, as usual, into bed and we travelled to our next changeover in Missouri.