StephenH

I think there's a couple of other aspects to this. Suppose, for example, that the Solo RAAM Record was 30 days. Heck, I could do that, you could do that, lots of riders could do that. But, if that was the case, how many people would cough up $50,000 to put together a RAAM solo effort to actually do the ride? I think probably no more so than do it right now. The fact is, a serious desire to do solo RAAM is a pretty rare quality. There may be all kinds of pro racers and endurance riders out there that could be competitive, that just have zero interest in doing this event. Right now, you or I could establish a new course, a new race if desired, and set off setting the record for the first Diagonal RAAM or whatever event, but we just don't really want to do that.

A second point is that it is not just a matter of pain tolerance to do stuff like this, it's a matter of avoiding that pain in the first place. I ride with two ladies in the local club. Both have done long-distance riding, 1200k's, etc. One of them has had a lot of trouble with fit issues, with knee pain, with neck pain, etc. She's got the kind of determined attitude it takes to do RAAM, but it's hard to imagine that she'd ever get very far with those kinds of issues. The other lady just doesn't have those issues. So yes, she's had saddle sores and what all, but she's just avoided a lot of the physical pitfalls that would prevent a person from even considering RAAM. She's not a superwoman or anything, just another rider when you're out riding with her. But I once asked her if she had ever ridden a 600k straight through, and she said, "Well, I DID complete solo RAAM..." And yes, she did.

I think in your original example, the difference is that baseball and music are VERY popular activities that nearly everyone has a go at to some extent in school. So when you get the "cream of the crop", you pretty much have the best people out of several hundred million. When it comes to long-distance bicycling, there are very few people, relatively, that have ever tried it, so you're getting the best people out of several thousand. Which is to say, they may be better than me, but the difference is less pronounced, I think.