RAGBRAI: a cyclist's paradise

Sunbaked plains, rolling hills and friendly towns lure bike riders to Iowa once a year for a 500-mile ride. The reward? An ineffable feeling that this is where you are meant to be.

By Jim Verhulst, Times Perspective editor
Published August 26, 2007

RAGBRAI Diary

Find a rider's diary and a list of what to take and what to leave home at travel.tampabay.com.

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IOWA - Like most people, you've probably dreamed of riding your bicycle across Iowa but were never sure how. Don't laugh, at least not yet.

Over the past 35 years, tens of thousands of otherwise sane, well-adjusted people have indeed spent the last week of July biking 500 miles across the Hawkeye State. Instead of jetting to Paris or driving to the Grand Canyon for vacation, they migrate here. They ride 70 miles or so during the day, camp at night in tents on fairgrounds or ball fields, venture from small town to small town across the heartland, eating church food and making do with gritty hygiene conditions.

And they've got the roads nearly all to themselves.

"They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom," said James Earl Jones' character in Field of Dreams, which was set, of course, in Iowa. The sentiment is the same for bikers who come for RAGBRAI (pronounced RAG-bry, biker talk for the Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, an event sponsored by the Des Moines Register). The Register lets about 10,000 riders into the event each year and even more want to participate. For the past two years, I've been among the riders.

Each year, the ride's route varies, and the towns along the way make it their day of days. A village of 200 will see more than 10,000 bicyclists spin through.

For drinking water, townspeople drill holes in PVC pipe and run a fire hose or garden hose to it, creating small geysers just right for filling water bottles. For restrooms, there is a traveling caravan of portable toilets.

For food, churches and civic and volunteer groups beyond number cook every kind of pasta and casserole and pork dish - though the main vegetables seem to be iceberg lettuce, green beans and fresh corn on the cob.

Always there is pie, every kind you can imagine: apple, peach, pecan, rhubarb, pumpkin, cherry. Eat it and immediately ride those calories off. The food's not cheap - corn can run $2 an ear, as can a banana - and it's certainly not haute cuisine, but it's filling and good, honest fare.

A Spartan existence

The ride is a week of veritable high-tech homelessness. Each morning, we rose at dawn, packed our tents, broke camp and threw our bags on a truck, which met us at the next town's campsite. The Internet is available if you find the Iowa Telecom trailer in each town that provides free high-speed access. But TV and radio are blessedly missing from riders' lives for the week. People have modern camping equipment that takes some of the edge off of roving from grassy patch to patch each night, but running water, hot showers and bathrooms are still the sought-after essentials each day.

At night, riders gather in their camps to talk before turning in shortly after dark. (There is a party-hearty element of RAGBRAI as there is usually a band and beer garden in each overnight town, but it's certainly not omnipresent. I've avoided it both years I've ridden.)

In addition to the thousands who tent, there are many who have a team bus, a converted school bus painted in garish colors with a platform welded on top for sitting and for storing bikes. My favorite team was "Team Dairy Air." Lots of folks stuck strange things on their helmets (safety cones, for one; plastic bones, for another) or on their bikes.

The ride itself is amazing. You move from town to town at a speed that has a human scale so you can take in all of the surprisingly beautiful, unflat Iowa scenery. You will sometimes move in an amoebalike organization of hundreds of bikes rolling down the road close together. Other times, if you choose, you can join a pace line and zip along at high speeds, sounding like a swarm of bees as you whir and buzz in unison. Or on a downhill in the final moments of the ride, you can hit 45 mph screaming toward the Mississippi River as we did.

For some, the ride is the easy part. Pitching a tent, locating water and finding a bathroom and a way to get out of the midday sun and heat are often at least as challenging.

Forget privacy. The thin nylon tent doesn't deaden the sound of the loud snorer three tents away (I know) nor the sound of a puppy's whimper, which turned out to be an uninhibited couple (I know this, too). The tents are staked next to each other in the thousands. You will be brushing your teeth beside your tent, shaving (if you bother) by looking in a truck's mirror and doing your laundry in a bucket in front of your admirers. All part of the charm of RAGBRAI.

Never in his lifetime

Some ride hard, using the week as training. Others take it easy from town to town and sit and stay a spell. Many do both.

My riding partner and I cycled hard into Stout, a town of 210. Then I helped Howard Hanson, a 77-year-old retired John Deere worker, carry chairs from his home so we could sit and chat with him and his wife, Ramona, in the shade by the roadside. Their 10-year-old granddaughter, Alana, was riding one leg of RAGBRAI. The Hansons had never seen such a sight as the thousands of cyclists coursing through Stout. "Never, never," said Mr. Hanson.

The people of Iowa are themselves the big draw. Towns love to have RAGBRAI come through, and it shows. People gather on porches to cheer on riders.

And they show uncommon kindnesses. Ask people what they like about RAGBRAI, and you'll hear some of the same pablum - "it's a ride, not a race," "it's summer camp for adults," "it's a rolling circus." But the ones who are most thoughtful say it's the magic of the people. The people of Iowa and the riders bring out the best in each other. That entire week, I heard not a single angry word. When does that ever happen?

Anyone can do it

Riding RAGBRAI fills finishers with the rush of accomplishment when they dip their front tires in the Mississippi River at week's end. But there is also a sense of community, of being part of something larger than yourself, one of 10,000 riders, including Lance Armstrong, who have Iowa's roads to themselves for a week.

"It's a getting out and letting any other pressure go," explained Joe Van Houtte, a 64-year-old retired math teacher from Illinois who finished his 19th RAGBRAI last month after missing the 2006 edition because he was riding across America instead. "I'm just free."

Lance Armstrong, who rode all but one day of RAGBRAI, caught its spirit as he pedaled past one man who looked to be slung too low over his bike.

"As I got a little bit closer to him, I realized he didn't have forearms. And he had gloves on the end of his elbows. And he was out, all alone, riding down the road early in the morning," Armstrong told a crowd in a speech at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. "And I thought, 'Wow. That is RAGBRAI.' . . . That inspires me."

I saw a young man with tattoos and a prosthesis where his left leg should have been take a fall when he skidded on gravel and couldn't unclip from his pedals. He got up, dusted himself off, clicked in and rode off. I saw a farmer in blue jeans riding the route on an old beater bike. I saw an old man riding an adult trike like we have here in Florida. He had fashioned a holster out of a huge, stubby tube of PVC pipe. In that holster he carried his metal crutches.

Salve for the soul

RAGBRAI shows the possibilities of the cycle and of the culture. Too often we think of the bike in extreme terms. Either it's transportation for the poor or young or it's serious recreation, never actual transportation, for the well-heeled athlete. In Florida, bicyclists are often simply in the way. Iowa shows a middle way. Bikers of all shapes and sizes bestride bikes of all sorts make their way across an entire state. It is, to borrow that 1980s phrase, a paradigm shift. If you can ride a bike across a state, there isn't much you can't do on or off a bike. Five hundred miles seem impossibly far? Start by riding around the block or to the store. Build from there. Ride a mile, then 2, then 10. You'll be surprised at the fast progress.

As we cycled down the roads that were all but closed to car traffic, I asked rider after rider when and why they did their first RAGBRAI, how many they've done and why they keep coming back. The answers were often unfocused and banal. And near week's end, I realized it was my fault. I was asking rational questions. I should have been asking spiritual ones. For there is no sensible reason to do RAGBRAI, but there is every spiritual one.

It truly is good for the soul.

One day, we passed through Amish country and were greeted by little girls in long dresses and bonnets and boys in suspenders and straw hats, their draft horses out in the fields, pulling hay wagons as Amish farmers pitched shocks of oats onto the racks. On the penultimate day of this year's RAGBRAI, we stayed overnight in Dyersville, home of the Field of Dreams. Bikers got up an impromptu game on the field even as they wore Lycra and duck-walked around on their stiff cycling cleats. It was quite a sight.

Remember when Shoeless Joe in Field of Dreams asks "Is this heaven?" And the reply: "No, it's Iowa." I'll add to that: This is RAGBRAI.

Jim Verhulst can be reached at jverhulst@sptimes.com.

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BIKING ACROSS IOWA

RAGBRAI, the Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, always occurs the last full week of July. It is limited to 8,500 weeklong riders and 1,500 daily riders. The fee is $125 for the week. Neither food nor lodging is included. The route changes each year, but always runs from the western border to the Mississippi River on the east; typical distance is usually just under 500 miles. You can apply for the lottery beginning Nov. 15. The Web site www.RAGBRAI.org has a host of information from the history of RAGBRAI to tips and tricks, message boards, general information and photos.

- In 35 years, RAGBRAI has had 286,000 participants.

- 65 percent of the riders are 40 or older.

- The oldest rider this year was 87.

- The youngest was 6 years, 4 months.

- Over its history, RAGBRAI had visited nearly two-thirds of Iowa's towns.

- Riders come from every state and 21 nations.

Sources: www.ragbrai.org, Des Moines Register

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Three degrees of Lance

Seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong rode two days of RAGBRAI last year, all but one day this year and promises to come back next year. How close did I get to him?

I see him dip his wheel in the river at the starting point of the ride . . . in a photo in the newspaper.

I talk with 11-year-old Kevin Baumann, who met him at a kids-only event. Kevin rode RAGBRAI as a "stoker" on the back seat of a tandem piloted by his father, Scott.

I speak with Desiree Reid, who finds herself riding with the LiveStrong fundraisers. She pedals ahead so a friend can take a photo of her leading the group. Suddenly, everybody yells "Lance," and he comes up fast with a few other riders. "Oh, my God," she said. It was the "joy of a lifetime." Good for her, but at best merely a vicarious thrill for me.

I pass a woman wearing a cropped jersey. On her bare back is written "Marry me, Lance." A taffeta wedding ribbon streams from her helmet. She claims she gave Lance a ring. I'm not convinced.

Finally, at the University of Northern Iowa Dome in Cedar Falls, I stand on the floor as Lance Armstrong takes the stage, maybe 50 feet away. He's not on a bike, but there he is introducing his LiveStrong team, people who collectively had raised $300,000 for his cancer foundation. This will do.

[Last modified August 24, 2007, 11:42:38]