Scott moves past Rockies, closes on Kansas

Scott's now about 40% through the race. With the Rockies safely behind him, he can breathe a little easer now. More importantly, he's racing well. "The crew has been doing 12 hour shifts, but I think I'm going to change it to 15 to give people a little more time," said Bryce Walsh in our phone call today. "Scott's running really well, and when he's doing 20MPH like he has been lately, it takes quite a bit of time for the off-shift follow vehicles to catch up to him."

Click the map for realtime GPS updates on Scott's location

Scott's still safely in 6th place. His closest follower, Martin Jakob, is about 1/2 hour behind him. This is a closer gap than the 1-hour lead Scott had yesterday, but Bryce's explanation for it was shocking. "Last night in Talus, Scott took a little bit of a break. When we were ready to go, they wouldn't let us back on the course. It turned out that one of the riders [Mark Pattinson] was attacked."

"A couple guys came out while he was changing clothes and beat him up. He was banged up, his helmet got cracked. It sounds like it was pretty bad."

Mark's still in the race at third place, if you can believe that. Amazingly, I can't find any mention of this story on the RAAM blog or even on Mark's blog. It's good to know that he's OK and still racing strong.

"By the time they finally let us go, some of the riders behind us had caught up," said Bryce. "But when Scott finally got out of there, he jumped right ahead of everybody back into 6th place."

What RAAM will do with this time discrepancy is unknown. They may ignore it, or they may discount the wait time from Scott's total race time post-race.

Franz Preihs, currently in 5th place, has about a 5-hour lead on Scott. That means Scott's catching him -- yesterday the gap was 6 hours.

Stay tuned, more to come...