He Has His Foot on the Pedal of the Race Across America : Bicycling: Marino started the event, rode in it the first three years and has organized and directed it the past seven.

The meeting the day before the start of the Race Across America is always a raucous affair. John Marino makes sure of it. For three hours he instructs, lectures, cheerleads and laughs with the long-distance cyclists, their families and friends, gathered in a ballroom at an Irvine hotel.

The ride is always torture. There is no easy way to pedal cross-country, no matter how much sleep you get along the way, and the riders don’t get much. At 2 a.m. on a frigid mountain road in Colorado, Marino’s race van appears out of nowhere. For 10 minutes, he leans out a window, encouraging a tired, chilled rider. Then he’s gone to check on someone else, up ahead or far behind.

Road conditions are sometimes unpredictable. The bridge that was open when the route was scouted months ago could be impassable once the lead rider reaches it. On a humid evening in a backwater Louisiana town, Marino meets with other race officials to determine the best alternate route.

News of the race often is hard to come by. Hours before the finish, Marino is summoned to a pay phone near the finish line at Rousakis Plaza in Savannah, Ga. Paul Solon, a past winner from Tiburon, Calif., wants to know the latest.

From start to finish, Marino’s finger is on the pulse of the Race Across America, the 10th edition of which rolled out of Irvine this morning on a 2,930-mile, 10-state trek to Savannah.

After all, it’s his race. He dreamed it up, persuaded “ABC’s Wide World of Sports” to televise the inaugural race--called the Great American Bike Race--rode in the first three and organized and directed the past seven.

Major sponsorship dried up when ABC pulled out after five award-winning, but expensive, years, but the race continues to grow.

RAAM is now the longest-running bicycle race in the United States and Marino believes it will roll on as long as there are cyclists bent on crossing the nation.

“When we lost ABC five years ago,” Marino said, “all of sudden we felt like a nonentity. The only place left to go was down. I wondered, ‘Will anybody want to ride it?’ I figured it wouldn’t fly. But they continue to want to ride. We always get 35-40 riders. This year it’s 37. We’ve already invented the wheel. It’s just a question of getting new people involved.”

Every year there are more new faces, now riding on a new southern route, two signs that Marino’s race continues to evolve. In the 1991 RAAM field, all four women entrants and 10 of the 29 men are “rookies,” as Marino refers to first-time riders.

Dropping the traditional Orange County-to-the Northeast course for something new, RAAM went Dixie for the first time in 1990. New York City is a tough nut to crack, anyway. The 1989 race ended on the George Washington Bridge with trucks whizzing past and only a handful of well-wishers.

It was the best Marino could arrange.

Last year in Savannah’s historic riverfront district, a crowd of about 300, including Mayor John Rousakis, three local TV stations broadcasting live and a reporter from the Savannah Morning News, welcomed winner Bob Fourney of Denver a few minutes past midnight local time.

It was RAAM’s best-attended finish by far, and perhaps the smoothest-run race.

“I’m content with the southern route,” Marino said. “Savannah’s not tiny. It’s not huge. They love the identity of being the RAAM finish. There’s a lot of potential there.”

This year Marino said a local TV station is planning more race updates and local radio deejays will camp out at the finish line throughout the race.

With the welcoming committee set, Marino has spent much of the past weeks signing up volunteers to work the 50 time stations along the route and contacting local law enforcement agencies.

After every race, he makes a list of things that should have been done, but weren’t for whatever reason. Money, or lack thereof, keeps Marino realistic, however.

“We’re not in a position to have a huge budget,” he said. “We have to skimp. It’s a bare-bones type of thing.”

Over the years, Marino has learned to rely on the help of others, which has left him more time to spend at his Irvine home with wife, Joni, and children, Lindsey, 7, and John, 3.

“I contract out,” he said. “I’m subcontracting as many things as I can now. The biggest thing I do is deal with police authorities. In New Mexico, for example, the law is whatever the officer decides it’s going to be on the road. They decide on the spot. It’s cowboy law. That’s a problem.

“To do what we do, we don’t need a permit, as long as we abide by the vehicle code. The riders are being stopped less as policemen are becoming more familiar with RAAM. There’s still a lot that don’t know us, though.”

Of the more than 300 volunteers who help Marino stage each RAAM, three stand out.

For the next two weeks, Randy Evans’ Placentia home will serve as RAAM headquarters. Roger D’Erico scouts the route, searching for last-minute problems. Kurt Wochholtz supervises the construction of the start and finish lines.

“Those are all costly (expenses),” Marino said. “We have those things done by somebody for free. They look on RAAM as if it were there own. We’re fortunate to have them. Just a phone call and I get the whole thing going.”

It wasn’t always that way, but after 10 years it’s getting easier for Marino. With new riders entering each year, a different route and dependable aid from friends, RAAM has carried on without the help of network TV and a major corporate sponsor.

And that suits Marino fine. He is satisfied with the course RAAM has taken.

“We’ve structured it to be self-sufficient, so we can continue without sponsorship,” he said. “I don’t care if we don’t have any sponsors, I can still put the event on.”