Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Tinker Juarez and RAAM



Tinker Juarez is one of the many amazing people who is competing in the Race Across America (RAAM) right now. Tinker's a total rider, most well known for his many mountain bike victories, but he's currently hammering his way across the country. There are some interesting reports here:

http://forums.mtbr.com/showthread.php?t=200788

This is a small excerpt:

During his massage his crew swarmed about; mother Rose feeding him, Trevor calculating estimated times for the miles to come, Ed and Jim attending to his bike. When Ed commented that when he cleaned the drivetrain, he found absolutely no sign of grime on the small chainring, Tinker’s nonchalant answer was, “Well, I haven’t been out of the big chain ring yet. Not at all. But that little ring, it’s coming. It’ll have its day.” Incredible! Tinker has amassed 816 miles since Sunday, has climbed thousands of feet, and from the 8000’+ town of Durango he declares that he’s done it all in his 53!


Which isn’t to say that these first days of the Race Across America have been easy. Far from it. “This is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he admits. “It’s so much harder than I ever could have imagines. But I could go home and cry about how hard this is, or I can keep on going and cry on my bike. Crying on my bike sounds better.”


Full coverage of RAAM is here:

http://www.raceacrossamerica.org/

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ken, the pic you posted of Tinker only shows up if the user is logged into mtbr.com

Just thought you should know.

Thank you for all the write ups.

- Joe

Kent Peterson said...

Good catch Joe. I manually grabbed the image and then uploaded it from my computer so things should be working fine for everybody now.

- Kent

Anonymous said...

Hi Kent:

Found your site by technocrat'ing RAAM. I wanted to let you know about another RAAM racer's site, Bryce Walsh. He's behind Tinker, but Bryce is a friend of mine and I'm doing the updates on Bryce's site, so as you can tell, I'm excited to promote Bryce and his site. Good luck to you, and nice blog.

Regards;

David Carter

Anonymous said...

I noticed in a few different photos that he is sitting up in a more upright position than the other racers. Also, he does not seem to have aero bars. I wonder if his long term comfort and performance will be better with the more relaxed position. Without the aero bars his hands are bound to start hurting without a break though.