SHORTLY BEFORE BOB BREEDLOVE'S last race, he and Gretchen went to a dinner party in Des Moines. "It's Breedlove, the biking legend," someone greeted him.

"I think you have to be dead to be a legend," Bob replied.

Two weeks later, he was. Breedlove's death made headlines in Des Moines and quickly became the talk of the ultracycling world. The initial shock gave way to a flood of memories about an intensely disciplined athlete and gifted physician, one who seemed to have treated every bum knee in central Iowa.

Breedlove had discovered long-distance cycling relatively late in life. He'd been a star wrestler in high school, but then came college and medical school and marriage to Gretchen, whom he'd known from childhood in Kewanee. And then, in short order, three daughters, Molly, Ann, and Erika, and a son, Bill.

In the early eighties, still eager to stay in shape and compete, Breedlove ran

The Breedloves boiled over when they learned how the case was settled. Joseph Rael lost his driving privileges and paid a small fine. Bob's name wasn't even mentioned in the three-minute hearing, and the DA didn't bother to tell the judge the case involved a fatality.

marathons, but he threw himself into cycling when he decided it was easier on the joints. In 1988, when he told Gretchen he wanted to tackle RAAM—which had started in 1982 with only four competitors—she was skeptical, but his eventual emergence as one of the race's most durable riders didn't surprise her.

"I can't think of anything Bob put his mind to that he didn't do—and do well," she says. "He loved to set goals."

Breedlove finished seventh in his first RAAM. He came back in 1989 to pursue a new objective, one that thrust him into the sport's elite. He rode from St. Louis to Irvine, California, the starting line of that year's RAAM, pushed on to the race's conclusion in New York City, finishing third—and then turned around and biked back to St. Louis. He did it in 22 days, 13 hours, and 36 minutes, shattering Lon Haldeman's double-transcontinental record by a day and a half. In Breedlove's next three RAAMs, he finished first in the tandem division two times and second in the 1994 solo division, a scant 93 minutes behind his perpetual rival, Rob Kish.

Breedlove never dominated the race like Kish, who won three solo titles in the nineties. But he was usually close behind and exhibited an exceptional toughness—always upbeat, always finishing. In 1999, on a tandem, he did a cross-county ride with his son, then 14. In 2002, in the wake of 9/11, he completed a transcontinental ride to raise money for the families of emergency-response workers killed in the line of duty, setting a cross-country speed record for a cyclist over age 50. Each time, he was backed by a seasoned crew, led by Magie and Bill Breedlove, who ran a sporting-goods store in Kewanee and had always been his brother's biggest fan.

During all this—hundreds of thousands of miles on a bike—Breedlove never suffered a serious accident. Stuart Stevens, an Outside contributor who rode with Breedlove for years and helped pay for the family's investigation, says his friend was an "annoyingly safe rider." The orange outfits were only the most obvious signs of his safety mania, as Stevens saw firsthand in 2003, when the two rode the 750-mile Paris–Brest–Paris on a tandem.

"Bob wouldn't draft anybody, because he thought the person in front of him wasn't as good a rider as he was," Stevens recalls. "He's the kind of guy who would brake all the way downhill. It drove me crazy."

Brian Duffy, editorial cartoonist for The Des Moines Register and a longtime riding buddy of Breedlove's, says he never saw his friend cross the centerline. "Never, ever, ever," he insists. "He always rode within four or five inches of the edge of the road. Never even in the center of his lane."

Following behind Breedlove in a van for tens of thousands of miles, Magie never saw him cross the line, either. But he did see him fall over twice as he pedaled toward New York City during the double transcontinental, clearly fighting sleep. "That's the worst I've ever seen him," Magie says. "At the top of a hill, we put him in a lawn chair and put ice bags on his head."

The fact that Breedlove managed to collapse in his own lane on those falls is hardly reassuring. And all his precautions didn't allay Gretchen's fears about what could happen to him. She joined the road crew once, for one of Bob's first RAAMs. It didn't go well; after a couple of days, she called her sister to come get her. "I was a nervous wreck," she says. "These semis are whooshing by him, and I'm thinking, Oh, my God. That's the love of my life."

RAAM's reputation for pushing limits encouraged such fears. An experiment in how much agonizing mileage a body can take, RAAM requires its solo riders to cover a third more distance than the Tour de France in half the time. In 25 years of RAAM, a mere 176 solo riders have actually completed the race. There have been a few serious smash-ups—dating back to a 1985 nighttime encounter with a hit-and-run driver in New Mexico, which left a Canadian named Wayne Phillips paralyzed—but Breedlove's death was only the second in RAAM's history. In 2003, in another New Mexico mishap, 30-year-old Brett Malin was killed at night on U.S. 60; while letting another member of four-man Team Vail–Go Fast take over his position, he made a U-turn near the crest of a hill, just as an 18-wheeler came over the top.

Living on a bike for eight to 12 days can do obscene things to the body, but the most common problem may be sleep deprivation. After a few days, some riders hallucinate. Jure Robic, the gonzo Slovenian who won back-to-back RAAMs in 2004 and 2005, has reported being shadowed by bears, aliens, and bearded horsemen. Muffy Ritz, who finished second in the women's division three times, has said she saw imaginary flea markets along the roadside for miles.

When something goes wrong during RAAM, it's widely assumed that lack of sleep had something to do with it. More than a year after the accident, VeloNews blamed Breedlove's death on the familiar malady: "It is surmised that he had fallen asleep on his bicycle." But sleep deprivation usually manifests late in the race. Bill Breedlove doesn't think it was a factor in Bob's death, given the sumptuous nap he took the night before and how fresh he appeared just minutes before the collision. Still, there's little doubt that anyone who enters RAAM is taking a chance just by signing up.

After every RAAM, Bob would declare he was done, but he always wound up racing again. Gretchen was usually the last to find out, through a stray e-mail or chance remark. She wasn't thrilled to discover he was training for RAAM in 2005. But Bob could always come up with a reason to ride; Rob Kish was going to be there, he told her, and he had to defend his over-50 record against Kish and other graying veterans.

To his children, he preached the importance of grabbing life by the horns. In recent years his Christmas presents had tended toward the conceptual, such as challenging his family to read the Bible or keep a journal. One year he gave everyone an empty bag. The point was to take a break from material concerns and focus on who and what they loved.

His gift to himself was one last RAAM. As always, he carried a walkie-talkie during the 2005 race so he could speak to his crew along the way. Over the first four days he used it frequently, and he was in a reflective mood.

"He was remembering all the great rides he had and all the great people he'd met through biking," Aukee says. "I told Jerel, 'He never talked like this before.' I think he just knew this was his last hurrah. His career was coming to an end."