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described a sensed-presence experience that “filled me with an exultation beyond all earthly feeling. As it passed, and I walked back to the ship, I felt wholly convinced that no agnostic, no sceptic, no atheist, no humanist, no doubter, would ever take from me the certainty of the existence of God.”20 Indeed, as the psychologist James Allan Cheyne, an expert on the study of preternatural experiences, observed: “There is often a dual consciousness associated with the presence in which a hard-nosed realist is simultaneously aware that the presence is not real in the normal sense of the term, yet utterly compelling; so compelling, and persistent, that food may be offered to the presence in a casual and automatic manner.”21 That’s the power of agenticity.

I’ve had many such experiences myself in association with the three-thousand-mile nonstop transcontinental bicycle Race Across America (RAAM), which in 1993 was ranked by Outside magazine as “the world’s toughest sporting event” (based on such criteria as distance, course difficulty, pain and suffering, environmental conditions, dropout rate, recovery time, and other factors).22 RAAM starts on the West Coast and ends on the East Coast, with competitors sleeping only when necessary and stopping as little as possible. The top cyclists complete the three-thousand-mile distance in eight and a half to nine days, averaging 325 to 350 miles a day and sleeping only about ninety minutes a night. Weather conditions vary from 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the California deserts to the low 30s and freezing over the Colorado Rockies. The pain from saddle sores and pressure points and the agony of fatigue are almost unbearable. There is no time to recover. The dropout rate of about two-thirds is a staggering testimony to the difficulty of this ultramarathon event, and in nearly three decades of racing fewer than two hundred people have earned the coveted RAAM ring. The Race Across America is a rolling experiment in physical exhaustion and psychological deterioration, which when coupled with sleep deprivation has produced some wild and wacky stories from the highways and byways of America. I know because I cofounded the race with three other men in 1982 and competed in it five times.

All RAAM riders have stories to tell about bizarre experiences they have had under these extraordinary conditions. I would often perceive clusters of mailboxes on the side of the road in the Midwest as cheering fans come out to root us on. Blotches in the pavement from minor road repairs looked like animals and mythical creatures. In the 1982 race Olympic cyclist John Howard told the ABC television camera crew: “The other day I saw about fifty yards of Egyptian hieroglyphics spread along the highway—craziest thing I’ve ever seen, but it was there!” In that same race John Marino recalled, “In the fog of Pennsylvania I was riding along and I visualized myself riding sideways in a fog tunnel. I put my hand down, stopped, got off the bike and sat down, then got back on the bike.” In the 1986 race, Gary Verrill recounted his out-of-body-like experience: “After day three my consciousness was in a dream state. I was alert enough to carry on a conversation, but at the same time was viewing myself from another plane. The sensation was exactly like dreaming—the only difference was in the disappointment of not being able to wake up or control the dream.”23

When I was the race director in the 1990s, I would routinely come across blurry-eyed cyclists in the middle of the night blathering on about guardian angels, mysterious figures, and assorted cabals and conspiracies against them. One night in Kansas (where Dorothy had her vision quest to Oz) I came across a RAAM rider standing next to some railroad tracks. When I asked him what he was doing he explained that he was waiting to take the train to see God. More recently, five-time winner Jure Robic witnessed asphalt cracks morph into coded messages, and hallucinated bears, wolves, and even aliens. A member of the Slovenian army, Robic once dismounted his bike to engage in