Team Bikeway.com member Sam Train recently completed the RAGBRAI (The Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa) - it sounds like it was an awesome experience! Maybe next year we will have a whole contingent of the yellow and black participating!
To say that the RAGBRAI was not an easy ride is definitely an understatement. 480 miles in 7 days is the longest distance I've ever ridden in such a short period of time. It was 7 days of riding and drinking large quantities of beer. A brief description of the ride is 7 days of riding your bike from the western border of Iowa to the eastern border of Iowa. The route goes through 3-4 small towns during the ride, with a stop over town for each night. There is camping at designated areas each night in a town's high school or parks, camping in people's yards, sleeping in people's houses, or hotels. I decided to camp most of the way, with my Dad driving support vehicle. It was nice having the room to have what I wanted to camp comfortably. Other than that, you had to turn in your camping gear to a truck for transportation each morning, with a 50 lb limit for the bag. The overnight towns had all sorts of activities, including concerts at night. If you are a registered rider, everywhere you go you get a discount on food and other items. There are 10,000 people registered to ride. At any given day, 12,000-15,000 people ride the route, as the roads are public roads and anyone can ride on them.
I started things out by driving from New York to Iowa, which turned out to be a 21 hour drive. Trying to do things as cheaply as possible, I drove it straight through. I met up with my Dad, and continued on to Glenwood, the starting town on Saturday. We set up our tent in the football field of the local high school. There must have been at least 200 tents there...with a typical midwest thunderstorm quickly approaching. I did get to see something I've never seen before fly by the high school...one of the air forces stealth bombers (Offut Air Force Base was nearby). Was quite a sight! I didn't do much partying that night as I was still tired from the drive out there. I just relaxed in front of my tent drinking beer and talking with other people and my Dad. The day started early Sunday (woke up at 5:30 AM). Most people were heading out at that time. I dipped my wheels in some Missouri River water (it was considered to dangerous with the flooding to allow people to dip their wheels in the actual river). It was a fun ride...59 miles for that day. I talked with a few people along the way and learned an important leasson: You MUST stop and eat at least 1-2 times or you'll run out of energy. I ended up dogging it into the next overnight town of Atlantic. It wasn't too hot that day...high was around 97 I believe. I knew the importance though of drinking lots of water...must have gone through 10 water bottles of water and gatorade. The next day from Atlantic to Carroll was 65 miles...another warm day of course with the high in the high 90's. I ate more and had a much more pleasant ride. Most of the ride consists of riding on roads that go by rolling hills, corn fields, and soybean fields. I rode a bit faster than most because it's hard for me not to! I talked with a few people along the way and enjoyed the scenery. One mistake many people make is that Iowa is as flat as a pancake. Not true. They aren't the "mountains" that we are used to here in the Hudson Valley, but rather rolling hills. It isn't a struggle to get up the hills, but after 50-65 miles of these rolling hills, one gets tired, especially me having to haul up 265 lbs (me+bike)...up and down, up and down. Thankfully my triathlon training did me well though. The longest ride was on Tuesday, where the route was 70 miles, but there was the option of doing the "Karras Loop" to make it a century. I decided to do the century for the fun of it and discovered it's a really bad idea to change your saddle from the one your used to riding on...I put on a more cushy saddle, and suffered some serious saddle soreness. Tuesday was an especially HOT day...you could feel the heat "flowing" off the corn and soybean fields and onto the road. Felt like you were riding through an oven! After the prior 2 days of finishing typically around 12:30 before it got really hot, finishing at 4 pm was tough. At 3 PM, the temp on the road was 108 deg. Heat index was 115 deg. I was seriously hurting after I arrived, and needed several more bottles of water, followed by several beers. The ride was a bit painful, but I was quite proud of myself for finishing the century. A LOT of people ended up giving up and riding the SAG wagon in. The rest of the week was a bit cooler...on Wednesday, the ride was only 56 miles long...piece of cake after riding a century! Continued to meet nice people and chat. Wednesday was a bad heat day though...another 115 deg heat index. We decided to stay in a hotel that night to get a good nights sleep in the A/C. The last day of Saturday, I was a bit sad to come to the end of RAGBRAI. I arrived in Davenport, and slowly rode to the finish to dip my tires in the Mississippi River. I arrived at the city's waterfront park, and dipped my wheels in. It had been a long, fun week.
Most people rode safely and rode at their own pace. One thing I did find with my faster riding is I'd pick up "wheel suckers", especially on windy legs of the course. I'd eventually get 5 or 6 people behind me, forming a "paceline". This would usually scare me a bit because I had no idea what experience people had riding a foot off my rear wheel. I saw one guy behind me in his aerobars...I said to myself "REALLY? Is this idiot actually doing that???" Most of the time I'd then kick it into high gear and lose those people. Sometimes I didn't...so I made sure to be very vocal about what I was doing. It still scared me though knowing if I had to brake in an emergency, I could be part of a nasty crash. If I felt nervous about it, I'd slow way down and would lose the wheel suckers.
Most days, I was up at 5:30-6 AM so I could get an early start before the heat set in. I didn't do too much partying because I knew it would destroy me the next day (I can't stay up and drink late the night before and then have a day or riding like I could 10 years ago). But it was fun to go in and stay till early evening in town and go to the concerts for a bit and just relax. I would definitely go ride RAGBRAI again. Hopefully next time I go, I can get some other team members to come along for the fun. One thing teams did I noticed was rent a truck and transport the camping gear from town to town. One person would drive each day (someone different) and find the primo camping spots and get everyone's gear unloaded. If anyone is interested in the future, please let me know. Registration cost is $150, then plan on spending around $350-$400 on food for the week. Then transportation costs to/from Iowa. Is it worth it to spend the money? Absolutely.
If anyone has questions about the ride and interested in riding a future RAGBRAI, please feel free to drop me an email at samueltrain@yahoo.com. RAGBRAI's website is www.ragbrai.com. They have up a lot of good info on it.
The end! If I can get some people next year, I'll talk with you guys to get the ok to start Team Bikeway.com for the RAGBRAI. Hopefully I'll get some people interested!
Sam
No comments:
Post a Comment