Our story resumes in a hotel parking lot and just keeps getting fancier as we follow our intrepid racers to the end of their second day of racing and end up in another, even nicer, parking lot at the Cameron Trading Post.
Note: this tome is peppered with equal parts intentional misspellings, unintentional misspellings and unintelligible prose, please laugh and pity your writer at the appropriate times.
Docking Metal1
Around midnight we arrived at the Comfort Inn at Ponderosa Pines in Prescott, Arizona (pictured below). Captain Ron piloted METAL1 in his inimitable, fully-engaged, driving style: hunched forward, face pressed against the windshield, hands squeezing the sawdust out of the wheel and under diligent observation of the posted speed limit. Man.
In defense of the following section detailing the overly-elaborate task of parking: METAL1 is a long beast at 18.5 feet before you add the enormous Thule 4-banger bike rack. You can't see out the back window past all the baggage and bike wheels. Also, this particular parking lot was, as they say in the real estate euphemism department, "quaint." Non-real estate people, who don't get paid to convince folks that living next to a pig farm produces a "charming bucolic aroma that beckons one back the simpler time of knights and kings," would simply call the lot "tiny." What fun is that?
Below is a secret aerial drone reconnaissance image of the hotel parking lot. The yellow line represents the 2500 centimeter backing up odyssey we completed in far less time than it would have taken to build a truck from the surrounding pine cones and rocks.
We inadvertently sent Ron down that dead end in the hotel parking lot. Obviously, there was no room to attempt a 3-thousand-point turn. Back up alert! All hands on deck. In time, Ron found that stick that causes reverse to happen but was stricken with equivocation and paralyzed in the face of the nefarious forces potentially to be unleashed by moving, uh, not forward. Who are we to judge?
Ron was surely thinking, 'if we were in Europe, with their superior public transportation and lavish social services, none of this would be happening!' It was. In the freezing mountain air, Jeremy and I posted up like those airport flashlight guys behind METAL1. Ed was literally co-piloting, seriously, with actual obligations and responsibilities. As you know, the co-pilot in CARS is a strictly symbolic and ceremonial designation bestowed in a bloodless coup (but much ill-will) upon the first asshole that yells "shotgun" like five hours before a beer run.
So that was the scene, four people fully engaged in...backing a truck up...80 feet...in a straight line...with no traffic...in a well lighted area. Against all odds, drama mounted. Just another classic case of: park, park exceedingly slow or send Ron to find ice while we park. High stakes.
I was on the driver's side, in mirror view, and started flashing the universal signals for "back it up." I tossed in some verbal assurances to prompt Ron, who was now popping his head out. Soon his torso was emerging like some kind of Parking Cobra with no fangs but armed to the teeth with an opinion on everything.
Nothing.
I hear cows can't go down stairs though apparently going up presents no problems, something about their legs. Driving a car in reverse is Ron's Stair Descent or Waterloo, depending on whether you see him as more Bovine or Bonaparte. I moved closer and closer to Ron until the absurdity reached its crescendo.
Ron graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Louis Agassiz School of Glacial Backing Up. No longer off the rear bumper, I ended up standing right next to the driver's door, face to face with Ron...close enough to reach in and grab the steering wheel. "Go backwards...now...no, you are not going to hit anything...seriously...step on the gas pedal and release the brake." I walked along side METAL1 relishing my new role as the Tony Robbins of backing up. Jeremy and Ed both cracked weary grins.
Once again, Ron took a routine activity and replaced it with a mysterious ornate rococo performance art masterpiece, paradoxically painted with but a single stroke of genius and eccentricity. Regrettably, while Ron would join us again in Ohio, this little parking Magnum Opus marked the last time he EVER sat in the driver's seat. Sleep well Ron, that was a hell of a show packed into one day.
Hotels
As you know, the hospitality industry is improbably staffed by the inhospitable. City folk are hardly shocked with indifferent service grudgingly meted out with an eyedropper by put-upon miserble's. I actually anticipate inflexible adherence to rules, "no you cannot check in early, no you can't have food early/late." Small town USA does better.
A polite young man briskly checked us in and invited the preternaturally efficient Toro to grab any of the food he was already foraging from the darkened and quite-closed adjacent dining room. In a flash, Toro snapped up two arms full of sundries and durable foodstuffs to sustain his incessant eating. Basically, just a guy throwing coal into a locomotive furnace.
Each hotel politely bore witness to four bikes, a bunch of baggage and four dirt bags whizzing by in the first 120 seconds. They accommodated our odd requests for rags and food at inconceivable hours. While still made of stone, my jaded heart warmed to all the helpful folks who eased our journey with patience and consideration. Now let's get back to my dissertation exploring petty annoying things normal folks utterly fail to complain excessively about.
A few words about Snoring and why Darwin was a bearded unreliable turd/troll
Our hotel room was neat and decent with a staid ambiance of green accents, flamboyant floral flourishes and tastefully muted cat barf hued carpets. Its that post-rummage-sale decor that defies an accurate description without sounding mean. Shit.
I took a few photos of my road rash and posted them to assure my mates METAL was just getting warmed up. Its not blood...its molten LAVA!!!
As ever, Ed managed to get to sleep before me in order to start his daily Snore Affrontery. SnoreMagnums always doze off before evolved bi-pedal humans. During this trip, I divined Ed is some kind of Mullah or religious leader of the proto-hominid species known as the Head Rumbling Ogres. Once all snugly and asleep (with his head facing East) this Muezzin blasts out the clarion Call to Snore to the diaspora of worldwide HRO's. I declare a Fatwa.
How do HRO's sleep faster? Do they have thicker craniums which shield their tiny brain stems from life's complications? Eventually, Mother Nature should step in any of a thousand ways to rectify this harmonic dissonance. She doesn't.
First, the aggrieved victims of these quasi-anthropomorphic sleep-robbers should eventually become too exhausted and actually sleep FIRST. Never happens. Second, archeologists and science-ific peer-revenued type-written papers have recently unearthed the ancient practice of preventing the "head rumbling ogres of tribal insomnia" from taking wives and making more little offensive baby HRO's.
Though this was Hammurabi's Law carved in cuneiform on ancient Formica tablets, all the Village People (even the cop) were too tired to enforce the edict and the sneaky HRO's, being all fresh as a daisy (from yet another great night's sleep) ended up looking, by contrast, all charming and engaging and, in so doing, easily impressed all the furry exhausted proto-womankind who were wearily smitten (each edition will feature a run on sentence of some magnitude, I'm not always gonna mark it like this). Natural History then records the grave misfortune that HRO's are, in fact, prolific breeders. This all happened before anybody even heard of Bin Laden.
Oh, before you start questioning me by bellyaching and dancing around like a baboon with a new Polly Pockets Easy Bake Oven, as you are so prone to do, you should know that "oven" is just a light-bulb and METAL went to great lengths to fall asleep first.
I always rushed to eat, shower, organize and park it on my 50 thread count sheets before the HRO. I wore seal-out headphones with an audio book playing AND drugged myself with Ambien. Even the exhaustion from the five-hour bike drubbing did not deliver sleep to me in due time as each night Ed (sn)roared across the finish line. This room now had the dubious hotel amenity of "en suite roaring cave bear."
Scholarly Abstract of this Section: snoring beasts rob sleep with blissful impunity and reveal the inherent fallacy of Natural Selection which utterly fails operate when the entire flora and fauna are too tired prevent propagation of the mutantly flawed genomic snoring noise imposition nuisance phenomes.
We Woke up in Third Place!
Ed sets like three staggered alarms to replace his snoring noise with 'wake up now' noise. This sets the room in motion to get online race updates, make phone calls to the follow and team cars. Once you locate the live racers and calculate their distance and pace, you have an idea of how much fur needs to fly. It could be anything ranging from two peaceful hours to that lightning bolt of "uh oh" that an hour ago was too late. This morning, we could easily track the guys down as they crossed Prescott Valley. The hotel location was perfect. We'd have time for a leisurely breakfast on the hotel sun porch and a chance to double check equipment with tranquility BUT our first look at the standings was a shocker.
4Mil had passed ViaSat during the night. What? I turned into George Bush senior, "this aggression shall not stand." Brad and Tynee reported 4mil had some "skinny" climbers who flew up the hills. 4Mil had built a lead of about 8 minutes. The mission was to avenge this offense and vault ViaSat up in the standings. We'd seek our prize under a glorious sunny sky and in the impossibly beautiful environs from Prescott, through Jerome, Sedona and Flagstaff. Game on.
Our shift was to begin at 11AM. Riding first rotation is perfect in its balanced demands. Even though the vast majority of the rough climbing fell on us, we don't race at strange hours the first few days of the race. This is different that any other rotation, I'll give you a few examples.
Second Rotation: Day One, they woke up by mid morning, went to the Oceanside parade start, drove out to Borrego, raced 8PM to 1AM, drove to a hotel and got to sleep around 6AM I'd guess. Welcome to RAAM, you just stayed up nearly 24 hours, now sleep for 5 hours and get back out there.
Forth Rotation: Day One, up in the morning, Time Trial for 11 miles starting around 2PM, drive a million miles into Arizona (sleep?) and race 14 hours later...or something...honestly, I don't even know.
So what did we do? Day One, rode from 3-8PM. Five hour ride on Saturday, yeah that's pretty much what we do. Day Two, get up around 9AM to ride in the sun from 11AM until 4PM. Tough riding, normal time of day. No ride at 3AM with restive sleep at noon, for us, that would come later.
METAL1 transformed like Optimus Prime (if you even know what that is: with this plastic light saber I hereby dub thee, Knight of the Lonely Table) into race mode for our second shift. METAL1 growled East across the wide expanse of the Prescott Valley and the day's first climb was readily apparent as the wall of mountains blocking our path. Yeah!
We wanted to jump on road bikes and steal the climb from Tynee and Brad even if that meant starting a few minutes early. They would not mind. In fact, an in-car interview during this exact time period has Tyner hoping for as much. Hell, we wanted ALL the climbs, everybody wins.
The Four Nations of ViaSat RAAM: Frat House
Each of the four ViaSat race units (two riders and their driver) is a mini nation with its own culture and social mores. That unique culture encompasses the things you'd encounter in any weird foreign nation that was unfortunately compressed into a truck populated by only dudes. By now, you know the bylaws of the METAL1 nation: Max effort, brutality, efficiency, healthy food, high tech gadgets and anything else to ride fastest. The rotating crew validated these tendencies of METAL1 but they also reported to us what was going on in the other cars. The variance between vehicles is hard to over state.
We drove past Brad "throttling" his bike and looking like a raging bear hunting down 4Mil. As planned, we set up a few minutes early so our flatlanders would not have to drag their heavy carcasses up another big hill. I raced at 142 pounds and Jeremy was 172 which means we added up to about 315 pounds, or one super-fat guy. Before we peek inside the bizarre world of Rotation Four, I'll say a word about the Gorilla.
The Gorilla does not really "ride" his bike. It looks more like attempted murder as he strangles and mangles his frame, waiting for it to stop breathing as life slips away. Gorilla kills things, animals, bikes and possibly humans (I don't ask). He's a Marine which, as I understand it, is permanent. Inquire about his knife and this sword looking thing is instantly brandished, blade down, ready to strike (I don't ask, anymore). On a bike, he's so huge his limbs have to angle back in as he kills it, this is quite distinctive, even from a great distance. The choke is delivered by both arms and both legs, either of which is sufficiently fatal as the guy has actually fractured three frames. It was inspiring to see Brad's four-pronged frame-mashing and Tynee's pasty pallor as evidence these guys were throwing down. They rode tough not pretty.
Time to Race
My turn to ride first, Ed pulled my roadie and I monitored race radio for any chatter. I knew Tynee was on the road so I peered around a bend in the road and waited.
"Ed do you hear that?" Over the radio, there was some kind of bizarre, high-pitched screaming and blathering in some unintelligible dialect. Had somebody gotten drunk, forgotten to pass out and instead got on a ham radio? Was this a child calling for help or were we eavesdropping on some nearby trailer and their creepy version of domestic tranquility? "Seriously, Ed, what the hell IS that?" Reality was better than my guesses.
Apparently, Brad jumps off his bike, grabs a radio and taunts, cajoles and screams like a baby at John while he rides. Incredibly, John leaves his radio on. This was my introduction to Rotation Four's truck operations which Michele aptly compared to a rolling "frat house" with incessant verbal abuse, trash talking, flatulence and spontaneous irrational explicative-laden tirades. The fireworks were not just a few moments a day, they blasted all day and all night. Here is a dialogue sample delivered to me from the crew. Note: the actual exchange was far longer.
Brad: John, Fuck you
John: Oh yeah? Fuck you Brad
Brad: Fuck you
John: Fuck you
Brad: Fuck you
John: Fuck you
Brad: Matt, fuck you
Matt: What did I do? ...and fuck you John
These guys ate pizza and yelled at each other for 3000 miles. Shift changes were a hoot. We seemed like silent assassins by comparison taking over from a rumbling hoard of stone tossers. Another persistent source of hollering matches was Brad's constant assertion that he was faster than John despite weighing much more. Interestingly, Tynee conceded the speed and nobody disputed the weight. Gorilla, wins?
Levity before 5-hours of gravity: The Gorilla telling the world why, how and when he is better than Tynee moments before my first pull of our second shift.
So Tynee came roaring up the hill looking all pasty and nauseous. I fired out of the blocks but the first pull is never fun, no warm up and you've got some junk in your legs from the previous day. You also have the sensation of being slow and always, in the back of your mind, there is the notion that you might have a bad day or the body is not going to respond to the brain's demand to floor it. Fortunately, we both ended up having big power that day. We'd need it.
We shredded up the first hill which topped out at about 7000 feet elevation.
First Pull: Heart Rate 180BPM, motivation 200%
Toro got a HUGE descent of about 11 miles which dropped through Jerome and plummeted from 7000 to 3500 feet elevation. Jerome is a tiny city perched on the side of a mountain not unlike the little hamlets the Giro 'd Italia traverses in the Alpine region of the Northern Italy. Toro's breakneck descent stood in sharp relief to the creeping sloth-like gaggles of septuagenarians gathering piles of knickknacks their heirs would have to throw away in like a year. As they say, I'm going to hell but so are you for laughing.
While Jerome and Jeremy hardly noticed each other, I felt fortunate to see and mock America on these terms, racing a bike with a great team, at full throttle. I'd surely never be taking the antique-ing route.
He was flying down the hill and passing cars which raises the real possibility that we would not beat him to the bottom. Jeremy and I make a point of harming ourselves on descents which often surprises folks who seem to assume going downhill is break time, its not. For once, Ed's race radio worked and he successfully requested our ViaSat Media to pull off so we'd have one less vehicle to pass. We got in front and either bravely or foolishly stopped for photos as he whizzed by.
This caused an avoidable adrenalin rush as we piled back in and were forced to overtake the Bull-et a second time but having a few images from our journey is worth the worry. We raced across the valley floor through Cottonwood towards Sedona with a second set of mountains dead in our path.
Arizona Valley between Climbs: Toro's headed this way, generally sooner than you'd think.
Rider Exchange in Sedona: care to guess who has overcooked himself and who is tapping out 500 Watts and making sure his little Garmin705 data is accurate?
With Red Rock cliffs and towering buttes Sedona is surely endowed with natural beauty but in contrast to the sparse moonscape of Monument Valley the place is loaded with Ponderosa Pines and lush vegetation.
You might reasonably expect one or the other, to have both in spades just gave us more inspiration and an embarrassingly gorgeous backdrop for our day at the office. It felt like we were stealing all the RAAM treasure. The next evening we would drive into a headwind across a dreary, flat, nondescript stretch of the earth that leads to Kim, Colorado. While Kevin and Larry soldiered that section we had nabbed yet another day of a scenic, hilly, violent riding with the added charm of hand-to-hand combat with another team, 4Mil.
Like Zoolander, Sedona is ridiculously good looking.
Past Sedona, Jeremy and I were trading off pulls in this rider's paradise of long hills and radical switchbacks.
Oak Creek Canyon: breathtaking, even when Breathkilling in RAAM
I tried to drop this bus just to give Ron a coronary
No way 4Mil's eight minute lead was gonna hold up against a Murder Train hill assault. It was not clear I would hold up against this Murder Train hill assault but that is the reward that accrues from training and racing with Toro. I'm pushed to my limit and by some combination of stubbornness and luck, I soar to new heights. I'm just a renter but I like it up here.
Before passing a team's active rider, you see their crew and support vehicles leapfrogging around. 4Mil had their Randy Macho Man Savage Pickup parked on the climb. Seemed like one of their crew was sleeping in the truck. No idea about their tactics or sleep schedules but this truck passed us a little later and I was certain 4Mil got word: we were hunting them down.
While I ride a bike nearly everyday, I'll truly never forget this ride. Once Jeremy blasted out of Sedona we were treated to stunning vistas across verdant valleys and twisting grades up inspirational switchbacks. We were in a cycling cathedral on a perfect day with a mission: Operation Metal Storm. I've never had more fun mashing up hills. It was transcendent, Toro is an animal, Ed is nails, the crew was dialed in, it just leaves no room for me to tank it...my bike was jumping up hills, not sure I exercised any volition in the process. It was mostly a culmination of forces that were meant to be that day. We were meant to be there, doing exactly that.
We shortened up our pulls through some steeper sections and started seeing 4Mil regularly. Again, Toro was calling the shots and he was right on. One thing I admire about Toro is his realism and fast calculations. He digests road conditions and divides them up instantly for max speed. No ego, no BS, no concern about looking weak. Ed and I leaned on his leadership not just because he's done four RAAM's, not just because he'll rip the legs off almost anybody but because he's smart and proposes, first draft, the fastest way to get from A to B. I never wondered what Toro was thinking, or if I was doing my share, it was all an unspoken agreement: kill yourself, throw in what you can and we'll be the fastest. This gave me legs I may never see again. We tore up those hills, as brothers, with not a care in the world.
4Mil was caught...We had them. Jeremy navigated some funky two-lane slower roads as we entered Flagstaff and I eagerly awaited our chance to decisively dump them.
I should point out that while we were out to obliterate 4Mil and TT1 on the road, this quest was truly done in a sporting fashion. All three teams exchanged shouts of encouragement and there was a sense of a shared experience out on the road. We hunted with the belief no team could ride as fast as our riders and no crew was as precise, meticulous and nails under pressure as ours. Team ViaSat raced with that mindset, ready tip our hats if and when somebody dumped us. We made sure today would not be that day.
I took over in Flagstaff proper which has big, open six lane roads with a generous shoulder. I could see 4Mil just ahead, the kill would be mine. I missed a big stoplight and saw 4Mil take off over a rise in the road, pretty frustrating but missing lights is part of RAAM. In that same section I made a few big lights by nanoseconds resorting to full gas sprints. I laughed knowing the follow vehicle missed the light. Yep, that's Ron driving who had specifically mentioned before the race how the riders should not "gas it" when lights were changing...hehe. Day time rules so I did not actually require a direct follow vehicle.
Making that last big stoplight was my springboard to reel in 4Mil. They missed the next light so I immediately shut down the max-power to begin a mini-recovery. The 4Mil guy was clicked out and I gave a courtesy waive to his follow as I track-standed and got ready to seal the deal.
Light turns green and with the power of our entire ViaSat team and crew I flew off the line. I was sitting between 30 and 35MPH and it was my clear intention to send a message to the 4Mil rider: you are NOT going to hang with ViaSat. Its a mental game both with me managing my impending collapse (which must be hidden from rivals) but also the intent to lower that rival's expectations. I want him to recalibrate his ambitions and realize he cannot hold my pace and must accept some lower sustainable effort.
No idea if my mental daggers found flesh but 4Mil never saw a ViaSat wheel for the rest of RAAM. Jeremy and I broke out the TT bikes and spent the rest of our shift distancing ourselves from 4Mil, highly motivated and dead-set determined to dump them: permanently this time.
San Francisco Peaks Climb
Outside Flagstaff there is a sneaky long hill which traverses a pass near San Fransisco Peaks that I ended up pounding out on a TT bike. It was no joke, 400 feet of climbing in about 1.5 miles, and we were in ground and pound mode so I felt like I was going backwards. This is where a heart rate monitor is priceless. I put my HR up around 180BPM and tried to ignore my frustrating ground speed. Race experience helped here and Toro took over at the top. More good news, DH1 had showed up and started taking photos. We had reached the last hour of riding and our relief was in the area. Now we simply had to keep up the pace and straddle the line between top performance and flaming out. We would mash it out to the end at this pace but not before we weathered a couple surprises.
Violent Cross Wind
Jeremy put the SF Peaks in the mirror and started pounding the rolling flats that would finish our last hour. I got word from Ed that Toro was using his TT bike but switched to a low-profile regular road wheel. He said "Andrew can keep riding his TT wheels if he doesn't mind getting killed." There was a stiff cross wind that was easily gusting over 40MPH. TT bikes are like sails from the side, add that to severe cross winds and 35MPH forward speed and it gets dicey. It is entirely possible to have your wheels swept from beneath you and lighter riders are more susceptible. Toro is neither chatty nor prone to hyperbole so any mention of fatality has my undivided attention.
Note the low profile front wheel which saves lives in 40MPH cross winds
Unfortunately, I did not have time to switch wheels before my next harrowing pull but, as usual, Toro was right. I utilized a wide-grip modified TT position to keep up my speed and avoid diving onto the pavement at speeds that often topped 40MPH. The gusts were grabbing onto to my wheels and frame and pushing the whole rig wildly toward the ditch off the road. It was Mr. Toad's Wild Ride without the assurance of a peaceful ending. After the exchange, I immediately changed front wheels. No way I was gonna repeat that.
4Mil was exacerbating the hazards with some overly obtrusive rider exchanges. Even though the shoulder was huge, they were setting up just inside the white line which meant to go past their stationary rider and team car I had to bunny hop the rumble strip and expose myself to freeway speed traffic. Once past, I was forced to bunny hop a second time to get back onto the shoulder. Just doing bunny hops in a cross wind on a TT bike at 142 pounds for no good reason. 4Mil seemed like good people but their failure to pull over and let us keep rocking on the safe side of the rumble strip exposed our riders to an avoidable risk. As a rookie team, I'm pretty convinced it was unintentional but they might also have wondered what the hell the ViaSat guy was screaming about.
Last Minute Surprise
DH1 reported they would take over a few minutes early so I promptly ignited the remaining fumes in the tank and finished my last pull. Toro got the last pull so I jumped into the front passenger seat to get some rare race footage and yell meaningless stuff out the window. Toro was RIPPING down the road, no need to hold anything back and we wanted to finish strong. Empty the clip, were done!
So I'm recording some video, reviewing the days adventure when I spot DH1...hey that's a little early...uhhhhh...why are they having a yard sale? ...they have a flat...I'm riding again.
I won't recreate the dialogue from the next few minutes because this is a family blog... you know, that's not really true. Anyway, use your imagination. You've been told to give it all you got, you did, and then you are told to give some more. Its typical RAAM but we got faked out by the fact that those guys had been hanging around for more than an hour. Even in the case of a flat we were expecting them to put somebody, anybody, out there and take over at the spot they had called in. They did not, cussing ensued. Oh well, time to dig deeper.
My cold, wet and slimy socks and helmet were grudgingly foisted upon my empty shell. Where would I get the energy to even throw my leg over the frame, much less race? Well, I've had the misfortune to attend a "Spin Class" at the Gym where the "teacher" plays dance music and helps attendees win the "Tour Day France" by yelling helpful tips and shaming people into working harder. In furtherance of this superfluous externally-provided motivation, these ass clowns instruct spinners (Who are often men, haha) to 'go all out for 30 seconds' and when that time is up they gleefully add 15 seconds. Wrong. I'm not so good with math but utilizing "All" of something leaves a remainder of approximately zero. I will conjure the energy to raise a middle finger but pedaling is not in the cards. My wife has stopped inviting me to the gym.
So I decided DH1 was a truck full of Spin Teachers in Richard Simmons shorts which made me laugh and paved the way for the combination of training, anger, pride and competitive desire that somehow dragged my withering self through that last pull.
After all that,The Jazzersizers in DH1 took over at precisely 4PM. Just like we planned it, right? Spin teachers!
Mission Accomplished
We pulled into The Cameron Trading Post parking lot about 25 miles this side of Tuba City and welcomed Zack onto METAL1 as our rotating crew. Zack was coming off five hours of navigating and getting his skull jarred by riding "dead center on the rumble strip" in the follow vehicle which, as you know, had been piloted by Ron.
Time Station Data showed us both leaving 4MIL behind and again we were faster than TT1. We earned the right to eat tons of food and reflect on a job well done. Not sure exactly why Ed was eating like a racer but grab a plate big fella, you earned it!
The four of us would drive to Pagosa Springs Colorado and prepare for the next battle in the Rockies and across the Continental Divide. During the drive to Pagosa we exchanged stories and shed actual tears of laughter as the Legend of Ron Grayson began to cast its shadow across a continent.
