Paul Solon

The man pulled up in a broken-down station wagon outside the Maverik Country Store in Flagstaff, Ariz. Noticing a group of people in a gravel lot next door, he wandered over to see what was happening. He seemed stunned when told that 45 bicycle riders were racing cross-country from Irvine to Savannah, Ga. And that any minute now they'd be passing through town. "Are they drunk?" the man asked. "All the way across the United States of America? On bicycles?"

The meeting the day before the start of the Race Across America is always a raucous affair. John Marino makes sure of it. For three hours he instructs, lectures, cheerleads and laughs with the long-distance cyclists, their families and friends, gathered in a ballroom at an Irvine hotel. The ride is always torture. There is no easy way to pedal cross-country, no matter how much sleep you get along the way, and the riders don't get much. At 2 a.m.

One is a 37-year-old Newport Beach commodities broker who wants to travel across the Pacific Ocean . . . on a bicycle. The other is a 23-year-old snow boarder-turned-sales manager for a mountain bike company. Although Perry Stone and Jeff Estes are competing as a team, they have different agendas. Thursday, they will leave Irvine on the first leg of the 16th Race Across America transcontinental bicycle competition. They will be the only ones in the race to compete on mountain bikes.