pacalolo

Just had a brief conversation with a guy who is capable of riding for 24 hours. He made 365 miles at Sebring recently I believe. I mentioned doing RAAM as a relay team and said I thought it would be good to rotate on three hour shifts. But he thought it would be better for each person to ride 24 hours and then have a week off.

What's the thought here? I know I would have fresher legs if I just rode three or four hours a day and then could rest/sleep. But I've also never ridden nearly as far as this very experienced rider.

StephenH

I was thinking they normally did much shorter shifts, but whatever works. I was also thinking that 8-person teams need to be fast, but not necessarily good for riding 24 hours. Anyway, my thinking would be to split it into Team A and Team B, with each team on for 12 hours, off for 12 hours, with rotation within the team as needed. Or possibly 4 pairs, run 6 hours per pair. Anyway, seems like I've heard of them doing very short pulls on the mountains, something more like 5 minutes. See if you can google up some ride reports, they should be out there.

Hopefully, your team would be done in less than 8 days, so with the 24-hour plan, you wouldn't have a week off, you'd just go home after you rode.

DennyV

I've ridden a RAAM 8 twice. Both years we split into 2 4 man squads, and rotated them about every 160 -180 miles. We were an older team of all type 2 diabetics, so we didn't have real hard core riders. Another team I was associated with still did the 2 4 person squads, but did about 220-240 miles. Squad transitions were usually done at or very near a time station. Squad Riders rotated every 20-30 minutes on average. Sometimes due to road conditions Long downhills were longer, long uphills were shorter, sometimes only 5 or 10 minutes, but riders rode balls out. The big trick is keeping the speed up with so many transitions. When you're doing 50+ every 24 hours loosing 10 seconds a transition really adds up over the course of 6 or 7 days.
I've been associated with RAAM since 2009 either as a rider (2X) crew 2X or official 3x this year. It's an amazing experience, no matter how you experience it. If you have the opportunity, I highly recommend it.

ThermionicScott 

Paging @Homeyba.