RAGBRAI 2023

So, I did this thing called RAGBRAI L (https://ragbrai.com/) with Gary Reinking last week, where "L" connotes the 50th anniversary of the famed bike ride across the length of Iowa, west to east. This year's incarnation included about 527 miles over seven days of riding, several of those days in considerable heat (mid-90s with sufficient humidity to reach a "feels like" index of 108F). We were joined by 30,000+ other registered riders and a large number of "bandits," those who refuse to register for various reasons yet ride some or all of the route alongside those of us who (meekly) follow the rules.

I remain at a loss to describe how I feel about this experience, given it alternated between the single dumbest thing I've ever undertaken, voluntarily, on those longer, hotter days while trundling through endless vistas of monotonous corn and soy beans, to something like sublime in the early morning, when the sun rose over those same corn fields shrouded in fog and I was moving along a two-lane highway with thousands of other cyclists, all seemingly happy and excited for the day ahead, never mind the many deprivations the ride all but requires.

A typical RAGBRAI day involved waking between 4:30-5:00am, given you're surrounded by thousands of other campers who choose to rise at that time, breaking camp, packing and hitting the road as quickly as possible. The RAGBRAI-savvy were riding by 5:00am, when the state troopers closed the route to vehicular traffic and the earlier start allowed them to beat more of the afternoon heat. Gary and I were slower in the morning and couldn't seem to get on the road until 6:30-7:00am most days.

People frequently ate breakfast round mile 10 or 20, followed by myriad other stops throughout the day for RAGBRAI's vaunted culinary and other roadside attractions (beer, vodka lemonade, pork chops, ice cream, petting zoos, water features and every flavor of nice person and eccentric may be chief among them). We then arrived in the overnight town sometime between 4:00-6:00pm depending upon the day's mileage and number of stops, when we'd set up camp again and wait in long lines to use the restrooms ("kybos" in RAGBRAI parlance), shower and acquire food, which took until 9pm some nights. But the tents didn't cool down sufficiently for sleep until 10:30-11:00pm (for me, at least), so I never got what I would term a good night's sleep—perhaps 4-5 hours if I was lucky.

Compounding the sleep issue was the fact that everything we brought with us was moist after the first night—there's so much humidity and dew that nothing we had in the way of clothing or camping gear was even remotely dry during the week, no matter the material. One might assume that donning wet cycling clothing in a moist tent at 5:00am became almost routine by week's end yet, no, I will never learn to enjoy this particular facet of RAGBRAI.

The one advantage Gary and I did have over most other campers was Joe Carpenter, seen on the left in the photos attached to this post. We met Joe on the flight from Denver to Omaha and we set up our shipped bikes together in Sioux City the day before the ride began. Joe was a former racer for a team in Portland and I don't know that he broke a sweat on any given day during the week. He was typically one of the first people to arrive in an overnight town and would secure a campsite with the best (or some modicum of) shade, as well as two spots on either side of his tent for Gary and I, and this small luxury was worth more than I can tell you on at least 2-3 evenings.

One of the photos below shows Joe, Gary and I dipping our rear wheels in the Missouri River before the start of the ride in Sioux City, IA (the day before, actually, so we're still in our street clothing), a tradition which also calls for one to dip the front wheel of one's bike in the Mississippi River after the ride is over (we opted against this given the wait was more than an hour). The second photo shows Joe, Gary and I in front of the RAGBRAI sign, also in Sioux City the day before the ride started, while the third photo is of me after having just crossed Iowa's famed High Trestle Trail Bridge, an amazing rail trail which is a major attraction in its own right (the trail was not on the official route but was a worthy six-mile detour).

So, should you do RAGBRAI? Will I ever do RAGBRAI again?! No idea, honestly, though with each passing day my memories of the event grow more positive and I now know how I could make the ride both easier and more enjoyable were I to return. Were I to return ...