Cacti Talk With Uneasy Rider : Exhausted Cyclist Hallucinates During 548-Mile Arizona Race

Steve Born had been riding his bicycle through the Arizona desert for many hours, and his fatigue was reaching major league proportions. Suddenly, his sagging spirits were rejuvenated when he noticed spectators standing alongside the road, their arms raised overhead in what he thought was some sort of traditional desert salute.

He waved back. He said hello and inquired as to how they were doing this fine morning. He began brief, fleeting conversations with some of the people as he pedaled rapidly past them. Later, he began to notice that all of these folks who had left their homes to stand in the desert and watch this marathon bicycle race were wearing green Windbreakers. And all of them had severe complexion problems.

Born had spent the past hour waving and talking to cactus. Giant cactus, some towering 10 feet, their limbs permanently fixed in that field-goal-is-good position made famous by football referees.

At this point, 400 miles and 26 hours into the race, Born realized that tired was no longer an appropriate description of his condition. He was hallucinating from lack of sleep and physical exhaustion.

“Sleep deprivation can do weird things to your mind,” said Born, 28, a sound-effects editor at Columbia Pictures in Burbank and a resident of Thousand Oaks.

“I remember slowing down and conversing with the cactus. Honest. They looked pretty strange, but I was sure they were people. I don’t know how long I did that before I caught myself.”

At that point, you reason that even the toughest guy would decide to ease up and get some rest, right? A bicycle race is one thing. Dropping dead is a little more serious.

Forget it.

“Right then I shifted into a bigger gear, a harder gear to pedal against, and just started hammering,” Born said. “I alternated sitting in the saddle and then standing up, really hammering as hard as I could. I just wanted the whole thing to be over.”

More than nine hours later, the race was over for Born. He had covered 548 miles, a neat little trip from Tucson to Flagstaff and back, in 35 1/2 hours. In the Oct. 3-4 race, his first attempt at an ultra-marathon, he finished second behind veteran distance racer Kirk Freeman of Newhall. And for his effort, Born qualified for a race that will make the Arizona ride seem like a trip to the market for a quart of milk.

Next June, Born and about 35 others will saddle up in San Francisco and race across the country, finishing in Washington, D.C., in the seventh annual McDonald’s Race Across America, a 3,117-mile test of something-or-other.

There should be plenty of plants and other inanimate objects for them to talk to that week.

“At the finish in Arizona, all I could think about was the Race Across America,” Born said. “That’s something that’s really got my attention.”

For most of the more than 35 hours that Born pounded away on his pedals in Arizona earlier this month, however, his mind was preoccupied. Funny thing about 548-mile bike races. If you’re not exchanging pleasantries with prickly cactus, you’re slumped alongside the roadway, weeping.

“Near the end I saw a sign that said I had only 28 more miles to go,” Born recalled. “So I just started hammering again. After what seemed like a couple of hours I was starting to worry, wondering if I had gone by the finish line and had just kept going or something. I knew I had gone a lot more than 28 miles. And then I looked up and saw another sign that told me I had gone just nine miles since that last sign. I still had 19 miles to go.

“At that point I broke down. I stopped, got off my bike and just began crying. That’s when I realized what that race was all about. I had given this race everything I had, every ounce of myself, and now it was still asking for more. I didn’t have any more to give.”

All of which made Born angry. Angry at himself. Angry at the road. Angry at the length of the race. Angry at the cactus that wouldn’t even give him the time of day. But he turned the anger into energy, enough energy for one final burst to the finish line.

“The last few miles I was screaming at the road, things like, ‘OK, hill, let’s see what you’ve got! This is all you’ve got?’ When I turned into a park for the final mile at 9:30 at night, all I could think of was, ‘How should I finish? Should I put my arms up in triumph? Should I keep my head down and just hammer past the line? What should I do?’ ”

Born opted for the arms-up celebration, which was fine until he glanced down and saw the finish line rapidly approaching and noticed a giant white speed bump stretched across the road. For a flash of a second he imagined his triumphant finish being turned into a screamer-over-the-handlebars finish. He snapped his hands back onto the hand grips and held on for the impending crash.

It was a crash that never came. What his panting-dog-tired mind saw as a foot-high asphalt speed bump was actually just a thin white stripe of paint that signaled the end. He was very relieved.

Born began riding seriously a few years ago, but only for physical conditioning. When he learned about the Race Across America, however, he had a goal. He began training for the qualifying race last winter, and the regimen was nearly as remarkable as the race it was leading up to.

Four or five mornings a week, November through February, Born would slide onto his bicycle seat at 6:30 and head for work. The trip from Thousand Oaks to Burbank was 40 miles and would take as long as three hours as he weaved his way through the side-street traffic in Simi Valley, Chatsworth, Northridge, Granada Hills, Pacoima, Sun Valley and North Hollywood.

He enjoyed this ride so much that he would do it again at the end of the day.

“A lot of people began to recognize me after a few months and they’d honk their horns at me,” Born said.

That’s easy enough to believe.

During the summer months leading up to the race in Arizona, Born was cranking out 500 and 600 miles a week on his $2,500 bicycle. And if you think riding a bike 80 miles to and from work each day in the winter is a good time, you’d burst with joy over the prospect of spending upward of 150 miles a day in the heat of the summer glued to a seat, which, despite giant leaps in cycling technology, remains as comfortable as sitting astride a chain-link fence.

Through all the grueling hours of training, Born’s heavily muscled legs were kept in motion by one thought: The Race Across America.

It will take him through Northern California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia and into Washington.

The 1987 winner covered the nation in 9 1/2 days. Born has calculated that he can average 350 miles a day, riding for 21 or 22 hours and then staggering into a motor home for two or three hours of sleep each day. He has been sponsored by friends for the past year, including the owners of The Bicycle Mart and Mar K Custom Cycling Clothing in Glendale and Dave’s Bike Sport in Santa Rosa. But he knows he has to add to that list to be able to afford the expected $10,000 price tag for his coast-to-coast ride.

And he knows it will be worth the effort.

“I’ve learned that you can get the body to do most anything,” he said. “If you put your mind to it and learn dedication, anything is possible. You can push the limits so far beyond what you think is possible.”

And he will be helped next summer, he said, by the education he received in the deserts of Arizona.

“I’m going to have to increase my training to include sleep-deprivation training,” Born said. “Hopefully, I’ll learn not to talk to cactus.”

But he should also remember that when you’re tired, the cornfields of Kansas can look remarkably like a million tall, thin people wearing yellow raincoats.