That was a profligate snooze for a RAAM rider; among the veterans, anything longer than 90 minutes is considered sleeping in. But Breedlove understood what it takes to pedal some 3,000 miles across the United States in eight or nine days: He'd done it five times before. In an endurance contest as punishing as RAAM, the race often goes not to the young and studly but the weathered and crafty. At 53, Breedlove was the oldest competitor in the solo division, running 12th in a starting field of 25, but he didn't see any reason he couldn't finish in the top five. If history was a guide, half the riders would be felled by saddle sores, strained muscles, and exhaustion long before the finish line in Atlantic City.

Breedlove sailed down from La Veta in the early-morning light, huffed up Cucharas Pass, and then aimed his bike toward Stonewall, a rustic settlement tucked among cottonwoods below the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Thirty miles ahead was the time station at Trinidad, and beyond that lay the eastern Colorado grasslands and Kansas. Breedlove was a flatland rider at heart; his home turf stretched between Kewanee, Illinois, where he was born, and Des Moines, Iowa, where he and his wife, Gretchen, had raised four children while he built a thriving practice in orthopedic surgery.

Shortly after 10 a.m., Breedlove took a break. His three-man chase crew was waiting for him at a turnoff from Highway 12. At night, in accordance with RAAM rules, the crew's red Volkswagen van stayed right behind him, but during the day Breedlove and his crew often leapfrogged each other when the road lacked shoulders or a pullout, the van driver letting him get a few miles ahead before catching up and passing him. Flanked by ditches on both sides and no more than 25 feet across, Highway 12 was just such a road.

"We'd see the rookie riders, and their teams would be following them all the time, regardless of what road they were on," says 65-year-old Reuben Aukee, who crewed for Breedlove during six transcontinental rides. "Bob wouldn't let us do that. He believed it was easier for cars to avoid him than to avoid a slow-moving van."

By the time Breedlove passed through Stonewall, he'd been iding for close to five hours. He got off his pumpkin-orange Trek Pilot for three minutes, washed down a PowerBar, and saddled up for Trinidad. The crew gave him a 15-minute head start. They were about to leave when a battered white Chevy pickup came barreling in from the east, the driver honking and screeching to a halt. An agitated, heavyset young man in a football jersey jumped out of the passenger side and started yelling.

"We just hit one of your bikers," he said. "He's dead! He veered right in front of us. Right in front of us!"

The driver, a thin teenager, sat motionless behind the wheel, saying nothing. The truck's windshield and headlight were smashed on his side. Crew member Jerel Merical, 55, asked if the pair had called an ambulance. They hadn't. Cell coverage in the area was terrible, as Merical discovered when he tried to use his own phone. Merical told the young men to go get help. The passenger got back in the truck and the driver peeled off to the west. The crew raced east.

The accident site was less than two miles ahead, a stretch of gently upsloping straightaway just before an S-curve. There was a white church in the distance, and the scene had a lonely, postcard-from-the-heartland quality—or would have, if not for the body in the road. Breedlove was lying facedown in the eastbound lane, his head a few feet from the centerline. He'd bled profusely from his nose and mouth. His cracked helmet and one shoe were scattered on the other side of the highway. His left leg was broken and badly swollen, but most of the damage to his body—skull fractures and cuts, broken ribs, and a shattered jaw—couldn't be seen in his present position. Merical, a medical technician who worked in the same hospital as Breedlove, checked his vitals.

There was no pulse, no sign of respiration. Bob was gone.