From Ahmednagar, Bharat reckons with a hard RAAM 2022 — and is candid about what he would do differently.
Written from Ahmednagar — where a 2021 posting put Bharat in charge of the Army's cycling and rugby teams — Menon's piece is a candid reckoning with the 2022 Race Across America. Bharat retraces the long road to RAAM since 2017: the 2019 collarbone injury, the pandemic, the Virtual RAAM result (first in his age category over 4,086 km) and the Golden Quadrilateral and Leh–Manali Guinness records. The new command, he admits, left less time for his own training.
At the 2022 start in California he began cautiously, trailing early before clawing back by the sixth day; on day ten a fever with chills forced his crew to pull him out. Looking back, he faults a too-conservative start and rough late-race weather, and is blunt about his preparation — “you must push from day one,” he concludes — while weighing whether years of back-to-back challenges had taken their toll.
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