One of the most important pages

For those of you looking to follow the progress of the race, probably the single most important page is here : http://stats.raceacrossamerica.org/2008/reports/overview.html

This will give you overall standings, as well as where racers are placed overall and relative to each other based on their arrivals at each time station. From there, you can click on links to the racers and the individual times station to see who arrived where and when.

RAAM is all about numbers and it looks the race organizers are going to make it easy for us to follow the race by the numbers.

The most critical number is average speed.

- Average speed between each time station shows both how well a racer is riding as well as whether or not he/she took a sleep break. (If a rider is averaging, say, 17 mph between times station and all of the sudden it drops to 10 mph, chances are they went to sleep.)

- Average cumulative speed is all-encompassing - meaning it takes into account all stops, including sleep. The winner will average around 14.4 mph overall.