When Leah Goldstein sets off from Oceanside, California on Tuesday morning to begin this year’s Race Across America (Raam), it will most likely be 40 hours before she is next able to grab some sleep. And that’s if everything goes to plan.
“In the practice ride,” says the ultra-endurance cyclist, “I left at 10 [in the morning] and I went down the next day at midnight for about 45 minutes … in [Raam], we’re going to probably do the same thing. We’re going to go through the first night and into the second night as much as I can.”
Were somebody else to compel Goldstein to stay awake for that long, it would be illegal – in 1944, the US supreme court found sleep deprivation to be “the most effective torture” and observed that being forced to spend 36 hours awake is “inherently coercive.” For Goldstein, however, the ability to put herself through such agony is an advantage.
“Everyone has a different approach,” she says. “I’m trying to avoid these little micro-naps throughout the day. I know a lot of riders like that approach, of doing little sleeps.” To Goldstein, however, the hidden logistics of napping make it inefficient. “You got to stop, you got to get in the [follow] car, you’re going to sleep in an awkward position. I’d rather just sleep in one shot and [race] continuously for the next 20-22 hours.”
Owing to the race’s timekeeping rules, such nuances in sleep strategy can mean the difference between victory and not finishing.
Although Raam is less famous than the Tour de France or the other grand tours of European cycling, it’s arguably more grueling. Among other metrics, RAAM is 700 miles longer than the average Tour de France (as the name suggests, Raam competitors race from America’s west coast to its east coast). Raam’s longer distance alone, however, is not what makes it such an arduous event. In the Tour de France, riders’ overall times are the aggregation of distinct, (almost) daily stages. Conversely, once RAAM’s clock starts in California, riders race until they cross the finish line about 3,000 miles away on the Maryland coast. The fastest competitors complete the journey in a little over a week, while there is a 12-day cut-off for riders to finish the race.
It would be inaccurate to claim that Raam’s around-the-clock nature make it more difficult than the Tour de France – among other differences, the Tour is raced at a much faster pace overall. Raam does, however, present its own challenges. In many ways, Goldstein is the perfect person to explain them. Prior to focusing on ultra-endurance events, she was a professional cyclist with Canada’s national team and previously competed in the Grande Boucle Féminine Internationale, the predecessor to today’s Tour de France Femmes.
“It’s different. Look, Raam is more of a mental thing,” the 54-year-old explains. “I’d have a hell of a time doing the Tour de France because it’s that high-end kind of thing. You’re going super fast, super hard, but you’re not going 24/7, right? You know there’s a finish … You’re going to sleep for eight [hours], you’re going to eat properly … Raam is non-stop. It’s a mental thing, and that’s why the playing field is even with men, because it’s not physical any more.”
Goldstein is being modest – she doesn’t just compete with male cyclists at Raam. In 2021, she beat them.
In fact, Goldstein is one of many women who’ve defeated male competition in longer-than-marathon races over the last decade. In 2016, Lael Wilcox finished more than two hours ahead of the fastest man when she won the 4,200 miles Trans Am Bike Race. In 2017, ultrarunner Courtney Dauwalter won a 240-mile footrace in Utah, beating the fastest male competitor by 10 hours. The list of ultra-endurance races in which women have outperformed men goes on.
Goldstein, a Raam veteran who had also won the race’s women’s division in 2011, doesn’t appear to place too much extra importance on her overall victory in 2021.
“I thought it was kind of cool,” she says, “but honestly it was just another day on the bike for me … it didn’t sink in until, like, 24 hours afterward. It was so funny, when I was coming to the finish line and I saw, like, hundreds of people there and I thought there was a [different] event going on, like some show or something. And they were there for me, which was pretty cool.”
When asked for a theory as to why women have been beating men in these events, Goldstein pivots back to the mental aspect of ultra-endurance racing.
“It’s not a matter of ‘if,’ but a matter of ‘when’ you’re going to experience every element of pain there is [in a race like Raam]. Back, neck, knee, constipation, diarrhoea, swelling. You’re going to have saddle sores. You get to a point of pain that is just intolerable for the average person, and I think women – we tolerate pain pretty good.” Although scientists are intrigued with this “mental toughness” Theory, it remains under-researched.
“Females have to give birth and it’s intuitive that they might just have this natural proclivity to endure physical pain,” says Dr Nicholas Tiller, an exercise scientist at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center who has previously studied the subject. “But it’s really all just speculation. We don’t know enough about it at this point.”
That isn’t to say, however, that there is no scientific explanation for the recent surge in female ultra-endurance excellence.
“Females may be more fatigue resistant owing to more slow-twitch [muscle] fibres and differences in neural control,” says Tiller. “If you electrically stimulate the muscles of males and females before and after an ultra-run, the females seem to maintain their contractile properties more effectively.”
Interestingly, the studies Tiller mentions are designed to remove (or at least reduce) the effects of “mental toughness” as a variable.
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“When you stimulate the muscles with some kind of electric device, you’re taking ‘effort’ and you’re taking ‘motivation’ out of the equation. This is a really gold-standard, objective way to study the muscle’s contractile properties.”
When coupled with the in-competition success of female athletes like Goldstein, these types of biomechanical observations can lead to the inference that women have a physical advantage over men when it comes to ultra-endurance racing. Tiller says that such interpretations are one-sided.
“Most [non-scientific] articles on this subject only discuss the potential advantages,” he says, adding that there are “several factors that also inhibit female performance, like lower O2-carrying capacity … Most experts in this area agree that, in any given race, the 10 fastest males will always outperform the 10 fastest females.”
Results further corroborate Tiller’s calls for balanced analysis of the data. For example, men have gone on to win every subsequent edition of the races Goldstein, Dauwalter, and Wilcox won in 2021, 2017 and 2016, respectively. Despite the nuances involved, what can be said with certainty is that women are able to compete with men over ultra-long distances in a way that has proven impossible so far at sprint distances, or even in standard marathons.
The increased incidence of external, unpredictable factors in ultra-endurance racing may play a role. In the same way that rain or heat can affect a football match, so too can extreme weather affect an ultra-endurance race. In a race over several days and thousands of miles, the opportunities for external interference are much higher. Indeed, such environmental stressors played an important role in Goldstein’s overall victory in 2021.
When discussing her 2021 Raam triumph, Goldstein frequently mentions the “heat dome” through which she had to cycle. Although it’s become a bit of a historical footnote (there has been a lot of wild weather out west since then), 2021’s heat dome was big news at the time. Conditions were not conducive to high-performance racing – only 20% of solo racers even finished Raam that year.
“Temperatures were insane,” she remembers. “52C or 53C [about 125F]. I couldn’t even touch the cockpit of the bike without dousing it with water every 10 minutes. I had to get pulled three times just to get IVs … It wasn’t just in California and Arizona. In Colorado, climbing Wolf Creek Pass, which is 11,000 ft in the air, it was 30C [86F] … Usually when I climb that mountain, I’ve got every freaking piece of clothes on – a parka, a tuque, whatever – it’s [normally] freezing.”
This year’s competitors are not expected to encounter such extreme conditions. Even the most complication-free version of Raam, however, is still exceptionally difficult. Goldstein describes a condition called “Shermer’s neck,” common among ultra-endurance cyclists who must crane their head up to see ahead of the handlebars for days on end.
“The muscles in the neck that hold your head, they completely collapse and your head drops. Your head is now resting on your chest, basically, and you have no control of your head – you can’t lift it.” Goldstein’s (and other racers’) solution is to rig devices which make it physically impossible for their heads to lower below a certain point. Goldstein’s version includes kinesiology tape and tying her braided hair to the heart monitor strap on her back. She says it’s like having your hair pulled for 3,000 miles.
Descriptions of such pain prompt an obvious question: why do Goldstein and her fellow cyclists put themselves through it? After all, there are no fortunes to be made in ultra-endurance racing. Goldstein offers a thoughtful explanation – it’s almost as if enduring the difficulties of Raam is her way of putting a mental down payment on life’s potential for pain.
“The motivation of doing something that is so unusual and so difficult – it’s just so satisfying,” she says. “I think it’s the challenge – pushing yourself beyond your limits and going, ‘Wow, this is what we are capable of doing.’ It makes other things in life, really quite simple.”