Nearly 400 bike riders put themselves to the test in The Day Across Minnesota endurance race, a sometimes-brutal single-day journey with only one reward, getting to the finish line before the clock strikes midnight. MPR News rode along during Saturday’s race. Here’s what we saw.

Anthony Williams stepped off his bicycle late Saturday morning and let out a soft groan as he sank into a red folding camp chair on the side of a gravel road. A fine layer of brown dust covered him, from his pink helmet all the way down to his patched, black leggings.

Someone handed him a paper plate with two tortillas filled with peanut butter and honey. He slowly took several bites then paused, too exhausted to notice the honey dripping onto his lap.

“I’m having a really hard time staying awake,” he said.

The 25-year-old St. Paul man had just bicycled 124 miles in roughly nine hours — but he was only halfway to the finish of The Day Across Minnesota, a 242-mile ultra-endurance cycling race known as “The DAMn.”

The goal is pretty straightforward: Push off at midnight from Gary, S.D., a hamlet on Minnesota’s western border, and pedal to Hager City, Wis., just across the Mississippi River from Red Wing, Minn., before midnight strikes again.

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