Psychologists say that four and a half hours of sleep a night is sufficient for survival. Unfortunately, during Race Across America, most riders don’t have the luxury of sleeping four and a half hours a night. A full week’s sleep deprivation usually leads to vivid hallucinations. During the Great American Bike Race in 1982, Michael Shermer hallucinated that trees were monsters leaning over the road to attack him and visualized blotches on

the road as lions and snakes. Leaving Athens, Ohio, Shermer finally succumbed to sleep – but he was still on his bike. At nearly 30 miles an hour he rode into a guardrail, which was the only thing that kept him from careening down a steep hill. Other riders claim to have seen tarantulas, spiders and scorpions, preachers riding alongside them, aliens lurking under bridges, even a sixty-foot-tall giant holding a pizza.