What is the Cannonball Run, and how does it relate to the current coronavirus pandemic?

The Cannonball run is across the United States from New York City to Los Angeles, specifically from the Red Ball Garage on the east side of Manhattan to the Portofino Hotel in Redondo Beach, Los Angeles. Attempting the cannonball requires the motivation to be awake or without much sleep for around 30 hours. In recent years technology has made trying the run much more accessible. GPS, radar detectors, and fast fuel-efficient vehicles have all contributed the ability to break record times more often in the past 20 years than before this age of technology. One of the first records was set in 1915 by Erwin Baker with an unflattering time of around 271 hours. Baker later redeemed himself by placing a much better record of 53 hours and 30 minutes in 1933.  It began to grow much more popular in the 70s, and people have been setting records ever since then. One of the most famous records set was by Ed Bolian, Dave Black, Dan Huang in a 2004 Mercedes CL55 AMG, beating the record by a staggering 2 hours from a time of 31 hours and 4 minutes set in 2006 by Alex Roy and Dave Maher in a 2000 BMW M5 to 28 hours and 50 minutes. 

The 2000 BMW M5 used to set the record.

There is a copious amount of technology used to complete a Cannonball run. 

The whole Coronavirus crisis relates to the cannonball run because one of the factors that go into the times of these records is traffic. With the entire stay-at-home and social distancing measures in place, traffic is a breeze virtually everywhere, so a cannonball record attempt would be optimal but controversial. An unknown group of individuals has actually set a new record of 26 hours and 38 minutes only months after the previous record had been established in November of 2019, forty-five minutes longer than the new one. The 2013 record-setter and owner of the VinWiki app, Ed Bolian, finds this latest attempt to be quite controversial, as the conditions are not typical and an effort like this goes against social distancing measures set in place by the government. Personally, I think that this try at breaking the record should be debated more as to whether it is legitimate or not.