BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KERO) — A 68-year-old Bakersfield road racing cyclist is on the road this week, competing in his 20th Race Across America.
Joe Petersen is riding with Team Skipper in the RAAM, a grueling race that runs from Oceanside, California, to Atlantic City, New Jersey. The team left Oceanside on June 20.
Petersen first competed in the RAAM in 1994 and ran the race five consecutive years, winning four of those overall and setting a transcontinental record in 1996.
"That one's been eclipsed, not by much, like by 3/100 of a mile per hour. Yeah, seriously," Petersen said.
The team originally planned to compete in the 70-plus division, but a last-minute injury forced a change. The team's 73-year-old rider was training when a dog chased him off the road, sending him into a ditch. He broke ribs and was unable to compete.
With the roster change, Team Skipper added Matthew LeftHand, a 34-year-old cyclist with a Guinness World Record, and Barbara Sullivan, a 70-year-old Hawaiian Ironman triathlete who Petersen said is still competing at the top of her age group. The fourth member is Tim Skipper, the team's namesake and main sponsor, who has completed more RAAMs than Petersen — 24 or 25 by Petersen's count.
With LeftHand on the roster, the team's average age dropped to 60.2, moving them out of the 70-plus division and into the 60-plus division.
"Instead of being a 70-plus team, our average age is 60.2, so we barely squeak in there because he's 34 and the rest of us are a bunch of old geezers," Petersen said.
The team is projecting a finish time of 7 days.
Petersen said he chose to race this year rather than wait until he turns 70 because the division is determined by average team age — and the current roster already averaged 70 years old before the injury to the team's oldest rider.
"I decided to do it this year because I don't know, 2 years from now I might have a steel plate someplace else that doesn't let me finish or complete something like this," Petersen said.
That's not a hypothetical concern. Petersen's body carries the evidence of decades of racing: bone cadaver material, steel plates, titanium pins, 2 broken screws in his left ankle, a steel plate holding his collarbone together, and a fractured C7 vertebra from 6 years ago that left some muscles paralyzed and his grip compromised for about a year.
"If I were Humpty Dumpty, I'd say they've put me together probably one too many times," Petersen said.
Despite it all, he has no plans to stop.
"I probably will retire after I turn 80 and do 80-plus RAAM," Petersen said.
Petersen is also heading into this race on new equipment. Before leaving Bakersfield, he walked through the bikes loaded on the back of his truck — a Trek concept bike he called his primary ride, and a backup that will double as his climbing bike.
"This is the dream machine. If I could have fantasized this 20 years ago, I would have had something to do with bringing this to fruition because this is amazing," Petersen said.
The Trek is fully electronic, with no cables or external shifters. Shifting is handled by Bluetooth-connected buttons — one for up, one for down, and a third for the front derailleur — all powered by a battery rated for around 1,000 hours.
The backup bike is geared differently for climbing and equipped with disc brakes for high-speed descents through the Rockies.
"When I'm doing 50, 60 miles an hour down the Rockies, I need disc brakes. I've done it old style, and I've lost brakes before, and it gets kind of sketchy and scary," Petersen said. "As much as I love cycling, I don't want to die on the bike, so Kerry made this as efficiently and anti-crashable as possible."
The technology is a far cry from the bikes Petersen started on decades ago, and he said it caught his attention closer to home as well. About 6 months ago, he walked into Electric Cycle Spin on White Lane and was stopped in his tracks by the computerized spin bikes inside.
"I walked in, my mouth just dropped. All the bikes are hooked up with computers. It rates your watts, your speeds, your distances, and gives you all the input. At the end of the class, it prints up a leaderboard," Petersen said.
He has since gone 45 for 45 on that leaderboard.
When asked what keeps bringing him back to the RAAM, his answer was simple.
"The challenge," Petersen said.
He elaborated on what that means across 20 races.
"Every year is so different, though. I mean, I've done it on two-man teams and set transcontinental records and 4-man teams and six-man teams. I've done it on tandems. I've done it on fixed gear bikes. So I mean every year it's a completely different challenge and different personalities and character and fellowship and the camaraderie, and sometimes it's good, and sometimes it's not, but that's sports," Petersen said.
Petersen also rides with a personal philosophy he applies to competition.
"I always like to shoot to finish in the top one," Petersen said. "Because it's like, you know, if you're not gonna give it your all, if you're not gonna try and really go out there and do it, then it's just a fun ride. It's really not a competition, and it's not a race, and it's called Race Across America, not Sleeper play across America."
He said that drive has to come from within, and he worries it is becoming less common.
"Everybody gets a participation trophy. There's no incentive to excel. There just really isn't. It has to come from inside, and a lot of people just don't have any fight in them," Petersen said.
He attributed that in part to modern culture.
"I think that we've been, I don't know that it's technology modernization, social media, what we see on TV and what we're fed and what's normalized to us, makes us, I think, makes a lot of people go, Well, that's just the way that it is, or that's the best I can do, and it's really not unless you're actually trying to do the best you can do," Petersen said.
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy
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