PEDALING CORN
Never underestimate the power of good fortune.
Alternatively, don’t get all cocky about how great you are when credit really is down to good weather.
My RAGBRAI was 447 miles long and included pedaling up 18,211 feet of hills during a weeklong ride across America’s 29th state. From Glenwood on the banks of the Missouri river in the west to Burlington on the shores of the Mississippi in the east I also saw (approximately) 3,972,831 stalks of corn. All of that corn was, as it happens, as high as an elephant’s eye.
It was my first experience with the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa.
It will be my last.
That is not because I had a bad time. To the contrary, I had a terrific experience with a dozen friends and thousands of other people I did not know pedaling bicycles and peddling pork and pies. Trepidation marked my preparation (1,700 miles of training rides from March to July) as I fretted about the heat and the hills. As it happened, the hills proved conquerable, but only because of the temperate weather. Four mornings began with the thermometer registering in the low 60s. Until late in the week, it never broke 90. From Saturday to Saturday it rained not a drop – a storm threatened one afternoon after I was already in camp, but the black clouds and rolling thunder passed by us without producing rain. I did not have a flat – a string of good fortune that extends to more than 3,000 miles of long-ride adventures without tire failure, or any other mechanical problem. I did not crash, nor did I have any physical breakdown other than the obligatory chapped ass from Day 5 onward.
Why would I test my luck? Just last year, RAGBRAI featured days of heat index over 100 degrees and severe weather, including a tornado. No thank you. I managed to complete every inch of this iconic ride with low temps, low humidity, and no issues with bike or body. I declare victory and leave the field of battle with a triumph. No way am I going to sully that perfect record by tempting fate with another attempt.
More than that, the experience with my Glendale High School chums was exemplary. Jean-Marc Wong, Robert Ellis, Mike Frerking, Chris White, Charlie Mace, Jean-Paul Wong, Steve Edwards, David Bright, and Bill Poole were a full-time pleasure to ride, eat, drink, and snore with. Some of those men I had not seen in 41 years. All of them proved to be excellent company and happy campers. (Same goes for the three non-Glendale men who were in our tent circle.)
I am ridiculously proud of completing the ride and doing so with such aplomb. I was not sure I had it in me. While my preparation could not include the kind of elevation gain I figured I needed, the South Georgia heat I trained in certainly helped by making my rides much more difficult. The fact remains, however, that at the very least I would have had a much less pleasant time if the Iowa weather had been 10 degrees hotter; in fact, under those conditions, it is likely I would not have completed the route.
I will take the W.
Beyond my own performance on the bike and the great time with friends, I count it a wonderful experience in Iowa and with this particular traveling circus. It’s not the type of thing I’d usually go for, but having done it I am glad to be able to say I did so. I suspect I occupy the demographic median of RAGBRAI as a 59-year-old white male. While the norm would reflect a resident much more Midwestern than my own home address in Thomasville, there were plenty of riders from distant points in the country and the world. I would say my very middling physical condition also fell close to the mean, but I may be overestimating my own standing. What I lack in fitness I make up for in idiocy and stubbornness.
The festival aspect was mostly a curiosity, one I approached with a Margaret Mead eye for insight into the larger meaning of GMO corn on the social structures of United Methodist spaghetti suppers. The geology and topography got my Lewis & Clark treatment – the pair would have passed by our western beginning point precisely 220 years before. History does not record what kind of tires Meriwether preferred to run on his gravel bike. Musical ethnographers agree the Wednesday cover band’s renditions of George Clinton funkadelic was a crime against nature and genre.
I saw miracles and wonders, freakshows and heroes, and a veritable inland ocean of corn, corn, corn.
There were cyclists on beautiful bikes and ugly rides, expensive crap and vintage beauties between peoples’ legs. There were tandems, recumbents, BMX bikes, tri machines, and pedal-assist conveyances. At least five men roller-bladed across the Hawkeye State. One feller pedaled backwards. A goodly number carried all their gear on their bicycles. Remarkable riders propelled their bicycles with their arms turning the cranks.
Our crowd came from Florida, Oklahoma, Georgia, Kansas, Colorado, and Missouri. We met folks from California, Wisconsin, Puerto Rico, New York, Iowa, Texas, and the Netherlands.
About one in twenty cyclists rode with amplified music, generously sharing with the world their dubious taste. These ran the gamut from A to B, with heavy representation of Journey, CCR, the Beastie Boys, and the program director’s playlist at Springfield’s KWTO Rock 99 circa 1979. This was the topic of extended conversation in camp, with the combined wisdom of our crew finally deciding these two-wheeled stream jockeys were insensitive megalomaniacs intent on fulfilling their calling to inspire the pedaling masses.
The whole operation was a miracle of logistics and planning – not my own; that was a plodding exercise in overpacking – by the RAGBRAI organizers and, especially, the Pork Belly Ventures people who I signed on with to provide charter services. It was a wonder of organization and accumulated knowledge and native ingenuity. Pork Belly hauled my gear, provided places to camp, offered hot showers, port-a-lets, three evening meals, coffee in the mornings, and charging stations for electronics.
Oh, and free beer all week long. (Big Grove brewery staff said they went through about 12 kegs a day keeping the pink plastic mugs of registered Pork Belly riders filled with lager, hazy IPAs, and golden ale.)
There were about 18,000 riders in this year’s edition of RAGBRAI – like Super Bowls, it puts on airs by using Roman numerals; this one was LI – and the challenges presented getting that many people across Iowa would rival D-Day if the Allied forces were 50-something men wearing garish Lycra and toting portable speakers blaring Billy Idol. There was food aplenty, water at hand everywhere I turned, and corn. (Did I mention there was a lot of corn?)
At every significant intersection along the route, for the entire breadth of the state, an Iowa state trooper stood vigil and directed traffic. A caravan of food trucks, bike mechanics, kit vendors, and musical acts were featured in more than 40 towns along the route and in overnight towns. My responsibilities were limited to setting up and breaking down my tent each day and hauling my two duffels to the truck. Beyond that, all I had to focus on was pedaling.
Great people, fabulous food, rolling countryside, perfect weather, free beer. If we’d been told when we were in high school that four decades hence we would all ride our bicycles across Iowa when we were in our 50s, all of us would have signed up on the spot. It is a measure of how great we all turned out that we signed up just as readily this year.
(Home page photo credit to Charlie Mace for his pic of Dwight Rahmeyer in front of a wall of corn.)