The year was 1973, and two intrepid reporters from the Des
Moines Register newspaper were in their editor’s office with a concept – “how
about if the two of us ride our bikes across Iowa, reporting on our experiences
along the way?”; “And how about”, said
the other one, “if we invite our readers to join us on the trip?”. The editor told them this was the dumbest
idea he’d ever heard, but for some reason not captured in the written record, he
allowed them to proceed with the initiative.
Much to the reporter’s surprise, 200 of the newspaper’s
customers showed up on the western frontier of Iowa to join them on a Sunday
morning in July of 1973. They dipped
their rear wheels in the Missouri River at the Nebraska State line and started
eastward on a 7-day rolling adventure toward Illinois. In 1973, bikes in America were still largely
toys to be used by children to get around the neighborhood. Helmets
and clipless pedals were still a futuristic concept and bikes were still made
of plumber’s grade piping forged in the mills of Pittsburgh. Lycra and spandex had not yet transitioned
from the pages of Cosmo Magazine to the biking community and cotton and wool
were the fabrics of choice. It’s hard to imagine that any of the
participants that first year were properly trained or equipped for a ride that
would take them over 450 miles of rolling Iowa countryside in the heat of the
summer. Nevertheless, the majority of
the people that signed up that first year made it across the State. How were they able to do it? Because it hadn’t occurred to them that they
couldn’t.
The participants declared the first event a success. The newspaper articles were written, and the
reporters vowed to return again the next year.
News of the ride spread throughout the State via word-of-mouth and the
power of the press, and the second year nearly 2000 people showed up for the
start. The organizers were overwhelmed,
as managing the logistics for a group this large was starting to pose a monumental
challenge. They announced that they
would be capping the event at 3000 for the third and subsequent years. Then something remarkable happened –
individuals approached the organizers and asked if they could join the event as
a team which would take care of all of its own arrangements. They’d ride on the same roads at the same
time, but the event organizers wouldn’t need to coordinate baggage transport,
food, or any of the other logistics.
“Sure” said the organizers, and they raised the maximum event size to
10,000 riders, where the event has stayed since that time. They even gave it a name – RAGBRAI – the
Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa.
Fairly quickly, the Towns in Iowa realized that the event
offered an opportunity to boost civic pride, benefit the local economy, and as
a good excuse to have a pork-based celebration.
The spending power of 10,000 hungry cyclists is not to be
underestimated. Once this connection had
been made the Towns began to lobby to have the route pass through their towns,
and to have your town identified as an overnight stop is not considered a major
coup.
The citizens of Iowa largely embrace the event and many,
many of them participate. Those that
don’t formally sign up for one of the 10,000 spots often jump onto the route
unofficially, swelling daily bike counts to something approaching 20,000. Let’s think about that number for a second –
20,000 bikes. That’s the equivalent of
100 bikes per minute going past a given point on the road for 3 hours and 20
minutes, and that’s about what it feels like.
With a rolling start time of between 6:00 and 9:00 AM and the greatly
varying speeds of the riders, the bikes are typically stretched out on the road
over a distance of 40-50 miles by the middle of each day.
The RAGBRAI route is different every year, but always starts
on the Nebraska border at the Missouri River and finishes on the Illinois
border at the Mississippi. The
organizers try to keep daily mileages between 60 and 75 miles, and the total
distance for the seven day ride between 450 and 550 miles. Iowa is not totally flat, and some days
feature substantial elevation change as you navigate the rolling
topography.
Now in its 43rd year, RAGBRAI has become a
fascinating social phenomenon that defies simple description. It’s common to hear people describe it as a
“Rolling Party”, and it is certainly that, but it is so much more. It’s clear as you ride the route that
finishing this event is a major achievement and badge of honor for many of the
participants, most of whom would not consider themselves “real cyclists”. It is hard to ignore the determination of a
350-pound man on a 50-pound recumbent tricycle
scaling a steep hill at one mile per hour in the hot Iowa sun. Or the 89-year old man sporting a large sign
on the back of his bike that reads “89 and doing fine”. It’s
not unusual to find someone that has done the event 10 or more times, often
beginning at ages of 7 or 8 on the back of a tandem.
Ten members of the Thread City Cyclers ventured to Iowa
during the third week of July 2015 to see what all the buzz was about. Organizing a group to get from New England to
Iowa at the right time with the right gear is not a trivial matter. The start and finish of the ride are on
opposite sides of the 450-mile wide State, and in addition to figuring out how
to get your team to Iowa, you need to find a way to get your bike, body, and
gear to the start on the western side of the State and home from the finish on
the eastern side of the State. We accomplished
this formidable task with the aid of three loaded vehicles that shuttled us
1100 miles from Connecticut to the finishing town in Davenport. From there we put our bikes on a semi-trailer
and our bodies and bags on a bus caravan for a seven hour ride to Sioux
City. Along for the ride from TCC were
John & Beth Hankins, Sylvia Ounpuu, Jim Adams, Hart Blanton, Tammy
Walesczcyk, Ione Jackman, Kerry Landeck, Dave Waldburger, and Dave Burgess.
New to the concept of Ragbrai were Jim and Sylvia, who found
out about the event only a couple of months before it rolled. John and Beth, who had attended the 2009
edition, told them to expect a high level of mirth and whacky individualism. Jim, an Engineer at Pratt & Whitney, took
this as a license to develop a unique image for our team. Inspired by Willimantic’s frog bridge, he
engineered rather large and impossible to ignore adornments for our helmets
that consisted of a large rubber frog sitting atop a wooden spool of thread. To make sure no one missed us, these were
highlighted by a series of multi-colored pipe cleaners which were wrapped
around the thread spool then extended through the frog’s cranium, exploding
colorfully upward half a foot into the Iowa sky. Our adornments were fastened to our helmets with a couple of zip ties, and off we went
into the Iowa countryside, faced with the challenge of explaining the poorly
documented basis for Willimantic’s frog fetish.
Controversy swirled among our group on the actual story behind the
frogs, and each of us was left to concoct our own version. In addition to the frogs allowing us to find
each other in a crowd, they provided a theme for the trip and a conversation
starter with everyone courageous enough to talk with us. We became a magnet for newspaper and
television reporters, and gained some notoriety with locals along the way. As John ate his pancakes one morning, a
silver-haired local woman approached him and said “I saw you on TV last night,
what’s this about the frogs?”.
Food. Remarkably, and
unlike any other bike event I’m familiar with, the Ragbrai organizers provide
the riders with exactly nothing in the way of food or drink along the
route. Also remarkably, there is no
shortage of food or liquid sustenance. Along
the 500-mile route, it is rare to go more than a mile without some kind of
family roadside enterprise selling a variety of drinks and all manner of food
product. And when you roll into the
towns along the way, which happens about once every ten miles or so, there is a
veritable open air market of delectable Midwestern treats being offered. Bratwurst and pulled pork abound, and there
are many creative offerings of corn and sizzling Iowa goodness on a stick. There are so many bikes and so many vendors as
you pass down Main Street in each town that the riders must dismount and walk
several blocks before continuing on.
This, of course, is just fine with the vendors. Food on the course is such a certainty, that
we left the campground each morning on empty stomachs, with confidence that
we’d be finding breakfast within the first 20 miles, which we always did. Pancakes some mornings, breakfast burritos
other mornings. At one 7:30 AM breakfast
stop, a family with a camper and a griddle was serving delicious breakfast
sandwiches and offering FREE BEER. If
you think that at 7:30 AM with 60 miles still to ride, people would pass on the
opportunity to drink beer, you would be wrong.
In line in front of us were two girls that may or may not have been of
legal age, merrily sipping away on their Leinenkugel’s.
Beer. It was
everywhere, and it seems to be an integral part of midwestern culture. A substantial percentage of the riders were taking advantage
of the alcoholic offerings along the way, and the practice is not discouraged
by the event organizers (although they suggest that drinking in moderation
might be a good idea). We saw 10-year
old cub scouts out on the street with signs, yelling “stop up ahead for ice
cold beer”. The crème-de-la-crème of
the beer stops was the craft beer tent that was erected about 10 miles before
the finish town each day. Ten Iowa
breweries pooled their resources, and offered $3 glasses of over 30 varieties
of local brew. There were always
hundreds of bikes pulled over at this final stop, and Hart’s was always one of
them. Several of us joined Hart on one
of the days to partake. The beer was
pretty good. The nap I then needed to
take after consuming beer on a hot Iowa summer day after 60 miles was even
better. I’ve decided that we should make
beer and naps mandatory on all TCC rides over 50 miles going forward.
Entertainment.
Although people of all ages do Ragbrai, the event organizers have
decided that their target audience is the tail end of the baby boomer
generation. This group, they have
decided, would really like to listen to the big hair bands of the 70s and 80s. The line-up of talent was fairly impressive,
with a main act every night – Huey Lewis & the News the first night,
followed by some version of Styx, Cheap Trick, and finally Hairball, a
chameleonesque phenomenon that morphed themselves into every 80s hair band that
was not able to physically make it to the event. Like most concerts, these often started at
9:00 PM and went to the wee hours, timing that was not well synched to our
schedules, which involved going to bed at 9:00 and waking up at 5:00 in time to
demobilize our tent sites and get on the road before the worst heat of the
day. Nevertheless, in many towns the
bands were set up within earshot of the campsites, so we drifted off to sleep
to the sounds of Ozzy Osborne cover songs and the like. Mandatory Ragbrai equipment - - - earplugs.
The People: If you
have not experienced the warmth and spirit of small-town Midwestern people, you
need to leave your puritanical roots behind and get yourself anywhere west of
Ohio. The participants of Ragbrai and
the people you meet in the Towns are some of the absolute nicest and outgoing
people on the planet. There were
cheering crowds in every town we passed through, and you couldn’t find a rider
in the event that wasn’t interested in striking up a conversation along the
way. The cordiality extended even to the
Iowa State Troopers, who manned all of the busy intersections. To our amazement, each of the troopers was
loudly playing inspirational music through their car’s powerful PA systems, and
most cheered us on as we passed by.
The Riding: You’ll
note that I didn’t get to the riding part of the event until after the food,
the beer, the people, and the entertainment.
That’s because the riding component of Ragbrai is perhaps not its most
important feature. If you had the whole
country to choose from, it’s unlikely that you’d invest one of your precious
weeks of vacation traversing the cornfields of Iowa. That said, we found the riding to be
enjoyable and beautiful and, amazingly, we did not tire of corn and soybeans. Iowa is not totally flat, and the landscape
rolls up and down modest sized hills over much of the State. One of our 70 mile days featured over 4000
feet of climbing. There was never a time
we were riding where there was not a sea of bikes on the road stretching to the
horizon, normally from gutter to gutter.
Even so, if you wanted to roll quickly, you could ride on the left side
of the road and slower traffic in front of you would generally heed your “on
the left” request to move over. Beth,
Hart, and I decided to “drop the hammer” on the one day that featured a Century
ride option, and managed to get ourselves in with an average of 20 mph. Other days we were content to ride at a
conversational pace and talk to people about the deep meaning of the frogs on
our helmets, a conversation that never seemed to end. If I had to guess the average speed of the
peleton I’d say it would be about 10 mph, with many riders going significantly
slower than that, almost universally with smiles on their faces.
When Beth and I did Ragbrai in 2009 we vowed to return, and
we were lucky enough in 2015 to be joined by a group of TCC riders that had the
proper combination of fitness, zaniness, and patience to truly appreciate the
experience. We’ll likely return again in five or six
years to see if the old guy is still at it, perhaps with a sign that says “95
and stayin’ alive” on his back. When we
do return, we’ll hope to bring another generation of TCC’ers interested in
seeing what all the Midwestern hub-bub is about. The plastic frogs and pipe cleaners will be
ready to join them. Frog On!
