Eighteen months ago, when Jack Chen started training for the Race Across America, he hadn’t been on a bike since 2012. The longest ride he had ever completed, in fact, was the cycling leg of an Ironman. But a series of 24-hour simulations on a trainer in his garage convinced him to take on the gruelling, 3,000-mile, ultra-endurance event.

“I always felt like at the end of 24 hours, This is doable. I can do this,” Chen said. “It feels awful, but I can get up. I can do this again.”

For Chen and his team, called Sea to See, the challenge of riding in this year’s RAAM goes well beyond completing what organizers call “the world’s toughest bicycle race.” Chen is blind. So are three of his teammates. Over the course of RAAM’s nine days, he and his fellow riders will compete on tandem bikes, each with a sighted pilot in the front position and a blind stoker in the rear.

For teammate Dan Berlin, the mission is simple. “We are trying to challenge the perceived limits that we have of ourselves and that a lot of people have of themselves,” he said.

When limits are pushed to the extreme, there’s no telling what might happen. To pull off this kind of colossal feat, the team has a crew of 20 working behind the scenes to bring the ambition to reality.

Jack Chen, rear, and his pilot Chris Howard mount their tandem bike. Team Sea to See

“There is so much unpredictability in this race. Anything can happen,” Chen said. (Caroline Gaynor, the only team member to previously compete in RAAM, had a support car catch fire during the race in 2012.) “Being willing to take on that unpredictability and rise to the challenge is what will make or break the race.”

Preparation is key for any long-distance rider, but Sea to See has myriad considerations that other cyclists might take for granted. “As an athlete who is blind, the easiest thing for me is going to be riding the bike,” Berlin said. “From the time I’m off the saddle, I have to worry about where I’m stepping, staying off the road and out of traffic. Am I in the right RV? What am I eating? All of these things become a challenge because we are constantly in an unfamiliar space.”

“We don’t see what’s coming up ahead. We react. We just feel the bike change.”

Felix Wong, the team’s crew chief and himself an accomplished rider who has completed the Trans Am Bike Race and Tour Divide, understands cross-country cycling better than most. The varied terrain, changing climate, and barriers both physical and psychological are only a few of the challenges that lie ahead. For Wong, the stakes couldn’t be higher. “We have to finish the race, or our entire plan is a bust,” he said. “We believe we can do that. We have very capable athletes.”

To get the team and crew comfortable with the process, Wong organized overnight race simulations. The preparation was critical for Chen to “understand how quickly you need to get off the bike, get changed, eat something, and then try to go to sleep,” he said. “And how hard it is try to go to sleep when your heart rate is so high.”

The simulations were also important for getting the stokers and pilots comfortable with sharing a tandem bike. “We don’t see what’s coming up ahead,” Berlin said. “We react. We aren’t preparing for a climb 100 meters ahead, we just feel the bike change.”

Sea to See team member Tina Ament, rear, with her pilot Pamela Ferguson on a training ride. Team Sea to See

The trust Chen and Berlin have in their pilots is immeasurable. “There is almost nothing more exhilarating and scary for me than being on the back of a tandem, flying down a hill, where I realize that I have almost zero control to keep us on the road,” Berlin said. “I don’t have brakes. I don’t have gears. It’s putting full faith and trust into the person on the front of the bike.”

Berlin has been putting in 200-300 miles of pace and tempo training per week, but RAAM isn’t an ordinary race. “We need to be able to train for short-distance, time-trial riding, but one after another, with limited sleep, over seven days,” he said.

Chen and Berlin are both experienced endurance athletes, with multiple marathons, triathlons, Ironman events, and impressive climbs up Mt. Kilimanjaro and the Inca Trail under their belts. But with only nine months to train for RAAM, the task seemed daunting to those around them.

“Coaches and other folks told us that we shouldn’t do this race,” Chen said. “They said, ‘Wait another year. You’ve got to put in 20,000 miles.’ And I said to myself, ‘We are going to do it anyway.’ That’s the kind of adversity I love.”

Dan Berlin, rear, and his pilot Charles Scott training for RAAM. Team Sea to See

Chen, an attorney for Google with a degree from Harvard, and Berlin, a co-founder of the vanilla extract company Rodelle, have both found career success off the bike. Yet their stories aren’t especially common throughout the blind community.

“College-educated blind people in America have a 70 percent unemployment rate,” Chen said. “That number hasn’t changed in decades. We have to tackle that.” Sea to Sea rider Tina Ament, an Assistant U.S. Attorney and Yale graduate, wrote on the team’s Facebook page about facing questions over her ability to complete simple tasks during job interviews throughout her career.

“They said, ‘Wait another year.’ And I said to myself, ‘We are going to do it anyway.’ ”

This passion and concern led the team to hire a documentary film crew to follow their journey competing in RAAM. They hope that by recording the hardest physical challenge any of them have ever taken on, it will serve as an answer to the question they and other people who are blind hear all too often: “How are you going to do that?”

“When people aren’t really in contact with successful people who are blind, it’s kind of hard for them to envision what they are actually capable of,” Wong said.

By pedaling from Oceanside, California, all the way to the finish line in Annapolis, Maryland, this month, Team Sea to See hopes to change that narrative. “For me, it wasn’t enough to put out how I live life as a blind person,” Chen said. “It was about putting out there crazy, extraordinary success both on and off the bike.”

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