RAGBRAI Wrap Up

RAGBRAI XXXIX has come to a close, and we are happy to be back in our home in Ames with no serious injuries and a lot of good memories. Among other things, we are especially happy about the following aspects of being home:

• Air conditioning
• Showers with reliable temperature adjustment
• Knowing that the location of the bathroom has not changed from the previous day when nature calls in the middle of the night

Our RAGBRAI experience this year was improved over last year (our first RAGBRAI), mainly due to upgrades we made to our hybrid bicycles that allowed us to ride 60-70 miles a day, for multiple days on end, faster and more comfortably than last year. Clipless pedals (which despite the name, actually involve clipping your shoes directly to the pedals) improved our pedaling efficiency and especially helped us get up the many rolling hills that Iowa has in abundance. New grips for our handlebars included small "fins" to act as platforms for our hands, which helped spread out the pressure on our palms and reduce the bend at our wrists, along with bar ends that provided an alternate hand position, helped us avoid the numbing tingly sensations that stuck around for months after last year's ride.

The Bike World charter was great again. The group of people who use their charter service come into Des Moines and Ames from all over the country, and they're generally an easy-going group of people who enjoy cycling through the Iowa rural areas and small towns, meeting people, and hanging out under the shade tent after a day's ride. There are any number of ways to do RAGBRAI (mainly varying by the amount of alcohol one consumes), but this group's method fits our style pretty well.

We'll likely do RAGBRAI again sometime in the future. Having done it two years in a row on hybrid bikes, the main change we'd like to make is switching to a tandem road bike. While we got it done with our current bikes, and improved the experience with upgrades, it was still difficult not to be jealous when we were pushing to hit 10 MPH going up a hill and getting passed by someone of similar physical stature going by on a road bike at 15. A tandem road bike could probably hit something upwards of 18. While RAGBRAI is most definitely not a race, moving faster would be nice in that we would have more time to spend in the various towns, especially the overnight towns, exploring the parks, restaurants, shopping, and other unique things each community had to offer. Getting through the hot afternoons faster would be great as well!

Most of all, it'd be nice to have more time to focus on the best part about RAGBRAI: meeting new people from all over the United States (and even other parts of the world). Most of our memories from this year's ride involve interactions we had with others, however brief, like the conversation we had with two women sitting across from us at a pancake breakfast in Ladora who were wearing plastic moldings of rear ends outside their bike shorts, who turned out to be on the same team as one of Amy's former coworkers. Or the debate while standing in line at the fresh limeade stand on a county highway outside Grinnell about how many hills were left, based on a sign indicating "only three hills to go!" that we had all ridden past earlier, and whether the rising ground we could see ahead of us was actually a hill, or just an "incline." Or the short conversation with the retired woman from Team Loon at the Casey's General Store in Boone who rides with the Team Loon tradition of a loon bird head sticking out the top of her helmet, but with a cowboy hat adorning it to show that she is from Texas, not Team Loon's home base of Minnesota. We had heard about her from the women with the rear end enhancements at the pancake breakfast, and as she told us herself, she's infamous. There was also the random encounter at another Casey's General Store (maybe we could get a sponsorship from Casey's!) with a gentleman and his son who sat across from us in a booth while we all took an air conditioned break that turned out to be from my hometown, and involved in the school music foundation there which held its first fundraiser event this past spring. I played trombone in the alumni jazz band at the event, and he was helped out in the trumpet section.

I came across a quote at some point early this past week, probably in the Des Moines Register, that sums it all up pretty well. It went something like this:

RAGBRAI isn't really about biking; it's about meeting people who happen to ride bikes.