Their goal is simple: To make it across 2,900 miles of hell. If they survive, they vow ‘never again.’ But each year, they keep coming back for more. Why? : They’re Beyond the Point of No Return

On a dark desert road in the hours before sunrise, amateur bicyclist Steve Born slouches toward Congress, Ariz. Sheathed in a white racing suit and aiming east, he has crossed nearly 300 miles of California and Arizona in less than 20 hours.

Born’s stomach is queasy from liquid meals. His route map shows 2,600 miles yet to ride.

But he is content. The Thousand Oaks cyclist is near the front of the pack in the Race Across America, one of the most demanding and least celebrated ordeals in American sport. Last year’s winner, Bob Fourney of Denver, is only a few minutes ahead down Highway 60; the 1989 winner, Paul Solon of Tiburon, Calif., is somewhere behind.

Born signals his support van and pulls off the road for a quick massage of his knotted thighs.

Then, whoosh .

Out of the darkness rushes another rider, neck braced, face grim, pace steady. His arms are bruised, bloodied and bandaged, his left side rubbed raw from a high-speed crash more than 200 miles back. But he is hammering those pedals. Bathed in a ghostly white light, Paul Solon whizzes past. His support van trails an echo of Motown music.

“God,” says Born. “What makes him go?”

The Race Across America, which concluded two weeks ago, is a bicycling competition in the sense that the Atlantic is a body of water: large, menacing and populated by rare beasts struggling for survival.

But it is as obscure as an epic event can be, operating on volunteer labor and meager prizes, seldom seen by more than 100 people at a time as it winds across the country, this year, its tenth, from Irvine to Savannah, Ga.

They struggle through temperatures from the 30s to the 100s, push themselves over 10,857-foot Wolf Creek Pass in Colorado, strain through 784 miles of Texas, and sweat in the pea soup humidities of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.

During the race, their lives are marked by mood swings and road kill. For sustenance, most slug down hourly chocolate-flavored liquid meals. For rest, riders make do with two or three hours of sleep per day. For entertainment, many hallucinate.

“I saw riders that weren’t there,” recalls Darrell Bowles of Tempe, Ariz., who finished fifth in 1990. “I thought they were trying to kill me.”

The riders are a cult, a band of 30-ish men and women with clean-shaven legs, sinewy calves and day jobs to support their habits. Born is a 32-year-old sound-effects editor; Fourney, a 33-year-old part-time cartographer; Solon, a 37-year-old attorney. They spend hours in solitary training, scrape up a $500 annual entry fee, then gather for the transcontinental ritual sacrifice itself.

“It’s kind of a sickness,” says Rob Kish, a 36-year-old Florida surveyor competing for the sixth time.

“They have me on video swearing I’ll never do it again,” confesses 36-year-old rider David Kees of Auburn, Calif., on the eve of this year’s event.

In the race ahead, 14 men would complete the 2,930-mile course in less than 11 days. A husband-wife tandem team would finish in just under 12, and three women would finish in 12 to 14 days.

Fifteen others would drop out along the way, suffering various maladies. Los Angeles physical therapist Randy Ice, who has conducted detailed studies of racers over the last five years, says he has “never detected any kind of permanent damage.” But he has seen plenty of curable heat exhaustion, saddle sores and muscle strains, some of which can linger for months.

For the riders, the whole point is to transcend the pain. For those on the roadside, however, the whole enterprise looks more like hell on two wheels.

Those wheels started spinning at 9 a.m. on the last Saturday in July.

Nine riders were from California, two from Switzerland, one each from Germany, Austria and Australia. Each of the 34 entrants had completed a previous Race Across America, excelled in a 500-mile U.S. qualifying race or performed well in a European long-distance competition.

From the Irvine Holiday Inn they rode to Anaheim Hills. In Banning, traffic thinned. And on the way to Indio, the 100-degree heat claimed its first victims.

At least two riders, one official reported, were “puking right off their bikes.” One dropped out the next day, one kept going.

About 100 miles out, Paul Solon crashed on a tight left turn. He had been riding a tail wind at 40 miles per hour.

The bike flipped two or three times. Solon’s feet stayed on the pedals, and doctors later found the following: A torn shoulder muscle. Whiplash. Cuts on his buttocks, hips, elbows, arms, back and shoulder. A sprained left ankle. A loose bone chip in his left ankle joint. A sprained right knee.

“I knew that it was going to be a problem right away,” Solon would say later. “I knew it as I went down, at that speed.”

By the first night, the leaders are 250 miles out and Steve Born is among them.

He has counted on this. Born took six months off to train for this race and spent about $8,000 on equipment and logistics. And if his bulging thighs, gleaming bikes and intent expression aren’t enough to convince rivals of his seriousness, the cassette collection on the floor of his support vehicle might be.

Born has made 27 tapes, “everything from classical to Frank Zappa,” each 100 minutes long, each numbered and labeled “Shaddup and Ride Your Bike.” Ever the editor, he has recorded with certain times and places in mind.

Born weighs 180 and looks like a Viking bodybuilder. He was raised in Wisconsin, Van Nuys and Thousand Oaks, and ran track in high school. But after school he exercised less, and 10 years ago he was a 200-pound smoker.

“I woke up one morning and looked at myself,” he explains.

He quit smoking cold turkey and soon after set out on a solo ride from Oregon to Los Angeles. In 1986, he heard about the Race Across America and wondered what it would be like. In 1987, he did well in a qualifying race, and in 1988, he tried his first RAAM.

For that race, Born didn’t think to rig up a sound system on his support vehicle. He also didn’t expect to make repeated wrong turns, to be abandoned by his massage therapist halfway into the race and to spend upward of an hour lying on the middle of a Midwestern highway, road-addled and spellbound by the sight of fireflies.

Remarkably, he finished ninth, averaging nearly 12 m.p.h. over a 3,073-mile San Francisco-to-Washington course.

During the race, he vowed never to try it again. Within days, he was laying plans for just that. In 1989, he crewed on another rider’s team. In 1990, he was busy with personal and professional obligations. For 1991, he has strategized elaborately: intravenous vitamin and mineral supplements; daily blood tests; a crew of eight, including his parents, three brothers, a triathlete cousin, a mechanic and a doctor. And no sleep for the first 42 hours.

The Arizona border had come after 13 hours. The apparition of Paul Solon, bloodied and bowed but still pedaling, came after about 16.

But Born presses on, exhorted by his brothers.

“No fireflies this time,” says brother Mark, 24, riding shotgun.

“You are bad ,” adds twin brother Dave, at the wheel.

Seventeen hours. Eighteen hours.

“We need Sam!” shouts Born, approaching Aguila, Ariz., under a full moon.

And as the cyclist speeds through the darkness, the shrieks, taunts and insults of Sam Kinison echoes among the jack rabbits and cacti. Born shakes his fist at the night and pedals on.

As the second day of racing dawns, he is still on his bike, looking up. Ahead and above lies Yarnell Grade, a seven-mile climb 40 miles short of Prescott, Ariz.

Born switches to his lightest bike and, remembering the cassette collection, calls for “New Beginnings,” a long, little-known instrumental by Giles Reeves and John Goin.

While synthesizers noodle and the drumbeat gradually builds, Born climbs. About halfway up the hill and wobbling, the crew notices, is Paul Solon, demon of the night. Born keeps climbing and passes Solon as the sun throws the day’s first full light on the mountainside.

Just down the road in Prescott, Born’s crew learns he has passed several others by staying on his bike all night. Twenty-four hours and 397 miles into the race, Born is the leader--a terrible mistake.

At race headquarters in Orange County, volunteers were amazed. At 200, 300, 400 miles, Paul Solon had kept on rolling.

He was down for about a half-hour after the crash, crew members said later, while they scrubbed him with Neosporin and swathed him in gauze, plastic wraps and Second Skin. Then he rose and resumed.

At one point in Arizona, crippled by pain, he had his team call headquarters to pull him out of the competition. Then he slept eight hours, woke feeling better, and negotiated re-entry.

Five-hundred miles. Six-hundred miles.

“It was really fun to watch,” said Charlie Lawrenson, his brother-in-law and crew chief. “Those legs were just cranking like pistons.”

By the third day, Bob Fourney was leading the way into his home territory, the Colorado mountains. Born, who covered 600 miles in 41 hours before he slept, was ragged from fatigue, four hours out in fourth place and fading.

Solon was more than 15 hours behind the leader, but he had just covered 380 miles in 19 hours. Race officials joined him and drove along to see if this was really possible.

As his system strained to ride and heal at the same time, however, Solon suffered a recurrence of a circulatory problem. The result: lower body swelling, on top of all the cuts, scrapes and strains.

Still, he rode on.

Solon passed the California Bar in 1982, and worked for several years for a Bay Area firm. Later, he became an assistant U.S. attorney in San Francisco, specializing in civil litigation.

He has always been active in sports, but didn’t start riding bicycles seriously until 1984, when he took up triathlons. In 1987, after an unsatisfying attempt to establish himself as a professional triathlete in Europe, he returned to the United States and narrowed his focus to professional cycling.

A speedy time in a transcontinental race, he thought, would make his name: “I was going to try to use the Race Across America to serve my purposes and never do it again.”

Instead, pneumonia forced him from the 1987 race and lingered for another six months. He had neither training time nor financial backing in 1988. In 1989 he did, and he rode well from the start.

But about 1,600 miles into that race, Solon’s neck was so strained that he could no longer hold his head up. His crew rigged a harness from a luggage strap and a bungee cord, and Solon wore it the rest of the way as he set a speed record. He averaged 14.5 m.p.h. over 2,911 miles, from Costa Mesa to New York City.

Preparing to defend that title last year, Solon was hit by a cattle truck, breaking his left hand in 13 places and almost severing his right arm.

All that history made him a determined rider in 1991. But about 15 miles outside of Cortez, Colo., Solon and his crew had to face facts: His circulatory problem was worsening, and his speed was down to about 5 m.p.h. His left ankle was locking up.

“I could have lived with all that other bullshit,” he said. “But after a while, it all got to be a little bit too much.”

He checked into a Holiday Inn and pulled out for good.

From Colorado, the route headed south through New Mexico to Texas, the race’s longest, hardest state.

Bob Fourney arrived in Dalhart, Tex., 1,279 miles out, 89 hours after the start.

Rob Kish, a 36-year-old surveyor from Port Orange, Fla., ran 4 1/2 hours back in second, just as he had for most of the 1990 race.

The heat evolved from dry to wet, and the landscape seemed to vibrate with buzzing insects. Alongside the road, cyclists passed armadillos, skunks, squirrels, birds, a deer and a horse, all dead or dying.

In Corsicana, Swiss rider Felix Battig quit. Joint problems.

In Vega, Steve Born wept. Sapped by his fast start, he had fallen from the top 10 and was more than 10 hours behind the leaders. He had a strange pain on the inside of his knees and was ready to quit.

For this, he had no prepared music. Finally, recalled Born, “I said, ‘I’ve never quit anything in my life. And I just can’t.’ ” He reminded himself of his plan to give his finisher’s medal to his father, and got back on the bike. Even when disharmony among his crew led to the departure of his doctor and his cousin a few hundred miles later, Born kept going.

In Post, Mary Burns of Florida quit. Acute knee sprain.

In Athens, John Lee Ellis quit. Logistics, his team reported to race officials, without further explanation.

In Stephenville, Wyatt Wood quit. Falling behind schedule.

From the same stop in Stephenville, Roger Mankus’ crew called headquarters. Mankus had been one of those vomiting near Riverside. Now, 1,650 miles and seven days later, he was quitting. Reason: “Lack of scenery.”

Crickets and humidity. Jackson, Miss., and Montgomery, Ala.

Bob Fourney, leading again after a duel with Kish around the Texas-Louisiana border, reached the Montgomery time station at 12:49 a.m. on the race’s second Sunday. He led Kish by about two hours; most riders were still in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Fourney, a quiet man with a short haircut and boyish grin, noddedto the gaggle of fans and cruised past the time station. Then, when he was sure no one was looking, he veered off the road.

It was time for sleep, and some strategic secrecy. With Kish so close behind and only 396 miles to go, Fourney’s crew made sure their man was hidden from spies.

Fourney trains year-round, and gets substantial support from his father, Gene, an aerospace engineer who lives in La Jolla.

On the night before this year’s race, Bob Fourney sat quietly in a corner of the hotel lobby, fielding questions while a Suspension Eyewear representative tailored racing glasses to his head.

“This is the only reason I do this,” deadpanned Fourney. “I get a new pair of glasses every year.”

He tried his first Race Across America in 1986. Like most first-time riders, he started too fast and dropped out. The next year he finished fourth. In 1988, saddle sores knocked him out and in 1989 he joined in a four-man relay team. In 1990, Fourney rode solo, carried a lead into the deep South, and clung to it across three states to the finish.

Then came some serious cross-training: several months in Alaska, riding and training with dog teams.

It was still dark on the race’s eighth morning when Fourney emerged from his 90-minute nap. He rode another few hours and then, as dawn colored the sky, paused to switch bikes in front of Big B Drugs in Tuskegee, Ala.

“We’ve got a three-hour lead?” Fourney asked, sitting while two of his crew’s four chiropractors pounded life into his legs. “So why don’t we just take a sleeper.”

The chiropractors laughed.

It’s early Monday morning, Aug. 5, and Savannah is hot as usual. On the waterfront beneath Bay Street, 75 groggy people stand around the finish line. Some have been drinking all night; others have arranged wake-up calls so they won’t miss this moment.

At 5:30 a.m., after a flurry of walkie-talkie messages, Bob Fourney appears at the end of the block.

He is the winner. While his crew cheers and race officials scurry to be sure that all is in order, Fourney wobbles toward the finish, then stops 15 feet short of the line.

He starts to get off his bike, looking like a man marooned in a tiresome dream. As race director John Marino watches, Fourney’s crew rushes up to lead him across the finish line.

Local television cameras close in, but Fourney can only mumble a complaint about the quality of this nation’s roads and volunteer, “I wanna go to sleep real bad.”

His time: Eight days, 16 hours, 44 minutes--the last 24 hours without sleep.

“He couldn’t have lasted another hour,” says his brother, Gene Fourney Jr.

Rob Kish is second, three hours back. Gerry Tatrai, a first-time rider from Australia, is third, 10 1/2 hours off the lead. Californian Dave Kees is fourth.

Paul Solon is home in Tiburon, taking muscle relaxants and propping up his leg to ease circulation.

After sleeping all day, Fourney announces he won’t enter next year’s race; he’ll be too busy training for his first Iditarod.

The next day, Steve Born wheels across the finish line.

He is the 11th finisher, more than 24 hours behind Fourney, but a half-day better than his previous time. He has heat rash, bug bites and a growing conviction that the South is not for him.

He’s been off his bike for scarcely five minutes when someone asks about next year.

“I really believe I have what it takes to win this thing,” Born says. “I learned so much this year. I just have to come back.”

Riding for Miles and Miles

In the Race Across America, riders struggle through temperatures from the 30s to the 100s, push themselves to an elevation of more than 10,000 feet, strain through 784 miles of Texas, and sweat in the pea-soup humidities of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.

The starting point: At 9 a.m. July 27, 34 riders leave the parking lot of the Irvine Holiday Inn and commence the race.

100-mile mark: Paul Solon, the 1989 winner, falls from his bicycle. 791 miles out (in Cortez, Colo.), he quits the race.

911-mile mark: The riders reach their highest point (10,857 feet), Wolf Creek Pass in Colorado.

1,751-mile mark: In Stephenville, Tex., rider Roger Mankus drops out, citing a “lack of scenery.”

2,221-mile mark: The riders cross the Mississippi River by ferry, at Vicksburg, Miss., and Hunter Heights, La.

2,930-mile mark: At 5:30 a.m. Aug. 4, Bob Fourney crosses the finish tape in Savannah, Ga. His time: 8 days, 16 hours, 44 minutes, The last 24 hours without sleep. 19 riders will finish the race.