24 Hours of Cycling Madness

So my friend Emily just came tops among female riders in the Faster Mustache 24, completing more laps than any other woman. That’s an insane 24 hours of Atlanta urban cycling. She rode twenty circuits of this route with no sleep, amounting to 240-something miles. Lunacy!

This is what someone looks like after they’ve been riding a bike for 24 hours:

Oddly normal, given the circumstances. Here’s her amazingly glorious bike:

Riders were trackable live on Google Earth, as they carried RFID cards and had to swipe in at a number of locations around town. Here’s a snapshot from this morning:

Now this wasn’t necessarily 24 hours of solid riding. Just a race to complete the most number of laps possible within a 24 hour period. So, if you wanted, you could rest, eat pizza, take a nap, have a beer, etc. But if you’re serious about winning, obviously you want to do as little of that as possible. Hence Emily’s insane 24 hours of riding, with no sleep. Shivering madness, I tell you! But also totally cool and an amazing achievement. Especially four months after back surgery.

The atmosphere at the finishing point today (Johnny’s Pizza) was a glorious mix of exhaustion, drunkenness and bike nerdiness:

And insanity. Did I mention the insanity?

Anyway, congratulations to Emily on a majorly ass-kicking achievement. All due, in her own words, to “pure stubbornness.”