Cranking through the miles

Team Love, Sweat & Gears poise for a photo after crossing the finish line of the Race Across America. The team (from left to right, Scott Gordon, Todd Gentzler, Ben Mangus, and Terri Marso) finished the race in just over 6 days
By: 
Ryan Mitchel Collins

Not many people can say they raced 3,145 miles in a relay style bicycle race spanning the length of our great nation. Even fewer can say they won such a race.

Team Love, Sweat & Gears can now boast such an accomplishment, having just crossed the finish line in first place in the Race Across America.

On June 23, after six days, 3 hours, and 30 minutes of relay racing in a team of four, team Love, Sweat & Gears crossed the finish line in Annapolis, Maryland. They won the mixed division male and female under 50 group and the overall four rider division, the first time that feat has been accomplished by a mixed group in the history of the race.

Ben Mangus and Terri Marso of Douglas were part of the four person team that raced their way into the history books.

The race was unique in the fact each team or competitor must have an organization or charity they ride for, Ben Mangus said.

Theirs was the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, who was the beneficiary of the team.

“The crew especially were the key of the whole thing,” Mangus said. “We were just four people riding bikes. They were the racers as well. I had great fast teammates that I was surrounded by. I also had really great problem solving crew members that just got it done. It was phenomenal.”

Chuck Mangus, Ben’s father, is the head coach for the fourride team. He became the coach only a few months before the race took place but was thrilled to see the team through to victory.

“Our team is like a bicycle wheel,” Chuck Mangus said. “Every member is of equal importance. The racers get the glory, just like a quarterback gets the glory on a football team. Every team member is like a
spoke on a wheel, they’ve got to do their job.”

Each racer would go for about 30 minutes at a time at some points of the race. They were accompanied the entirety of the race by two relay vans that would move the racers to different relay points, according to the coach.

“It’s kind of like a circulation of personnel 24 hours a day,” he said. “When we got to some of the big climbs like Wolf Creek Pass (Southern Colorado) and some of the climbs in the Appalachians, we would actually put all four racers out on the road at once.”

On Wolf Creek Pass, Chuck was extremely impressed with how well his team performed.

“It was a work of art going up that pass. We passed several of our competition while going up there,” Chuck said.

To Marso, Wolf Creek pass was her favorite area of the competition.

“It was so hot in California,” Marso said. “It was a 122 degrees on the first day, and in Arizona it was 118 degrees. Just riding in that was brutal.

I enjoyed going across the mountains. In Wolf Creek Pass I got to do that decent. We kind of all climbed up together, did little short pulls and then got to do the decent.”

Ben Mangus and Marso are considering racing in other events, but as Ben put it, “this was the big one.”

Their coach thinks preparation was a big part of the victory.

“Each team member put in 20,000 miles on a bike in preparation for the race,” Chuck Mangus said.

All of that preparation spanning the previous two years ended up paying off for the team in the long run, earning them a place in the record books.

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