RAGBRAI Review: A Week Without Cars
This week, I am writing to all you lovely people from Carbondale, Colorado! I am staying with a good friend of mine here for the next week or so while I settle back into a more normal routine and catch up on sleep after a marathon of a week. Last week, I crossed the state of Iowa with 30,000 other people during the 50th annual RAGBRAI (Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa). For seven straight days, I pedaled with some old friends, some new friends, and a whole bunch of total strangers 500 miles from the Missouri River in Sioux City, Iowa to the Mississippi River in Davenport, Iowa.
Based on what I had read and heard, I thought I would be spending more time drinking beer, listening to live music, dancing, and enjoying the company of thousands of others than I would be riding my bike. My understanding of RAGBRAI was that it would be a weeklong festival with some biking sprinkled in. Well, it turns out that riding 500 miles in seven days with temperatures consistently over 90º is exhausting in itself. The majority of riders were up before 5am to combat the heat, meaning late bedtimes and drinking would quickly erode the fun and energy of riding all day everyday.
I quickly settled into the reality of what my week would look like and learned that the fun didn’t have to come from the live music or beer gardens as I had imagined. The premise of RAGBRAI on its own is ridiculous and so much fun simply to be around. Riding a bike among thousands of strangers on wide open roads in America’s heartland is one of the most fun things I’ve ever done.
RAGBRAI is incredibly well organized. It felt dialed throughout the entire experience. To feel that way about a literal city that moves every piece (tents, event stages, portable toilets, water and food service stations, a full vendor expo, and support vehicles for 30,000 people) every single day in time for the first riders’ arrival in the early afternoon is astounding. While there wasn’t much direct oversight or large-scale messaging to guide us where we needed to go, it was totally unnecessary and would have been impractical because of the scale. With the participant population of a mid-sized town traveling from point A to B with all the same basic needs, it was effortless to determine where to go and how to get what we needed. I didn’t once need to use my route map or phone to help with directions.
Riding with 30,000+ people was unbelievable. Imagine a river. On this river floats a consistent, even spread of plastic balls, like the ones you’d find in a ball pit. The river is 80 miles long. You are one of those floating balls and from the moment you jump into the start of the river to the moment you reach the end, there is a never-ending stream of balls just like you. If you get out of the river to take a break (even a two-hour break), the stream never pauses, thins, or ends. It just keeps going. That’s what riding in RAGBRAI feels like.
Cyclists from every walk of life participate in RAGBRAI - from small children being pulled in a trailer behind their parent to a 97 year-old man riding with his grandson. There are unicycles, penny-farthings, recumbents, tandems, triple tandems, double stacked bikes, and, of course, regular bikes! Very few people ride competitively in RAGBRAI, and those who do tend to be out of sight as they rise the earliest and arrive ahead of the pack. I loved the lack of competitive atmosphere as we could all share in the joy of traveling a shared route on bicycles without any goal or prize at stake.
One of my favorite parts of this experience was getting to put my rearview mirror away for the week. Whenever I ride where cars may be present, I have a mirror mounted to my helmet to see traffic approaching from behind. I can’t ride without it if there are cars around - it feels like driving blind when I don’t have it. I wasn’t passed once by a car going the same direction and only had a handful of instances where sparse oncoming cars were present. Each intersection was staffed with either a volunteer or local police officer to stop traffic and keep us riders safe (and they all played music to keep our energy up). For the first time in my life, the main danger while riding was gone. All I had to think about was other cyclists. It was divine.
As an added bonus, the volume of people that flood these tiny towns cripples the cellular networks to a point where you can hardly send a text message if you’re lucky. While this presented a challenge when trying to rendezvous with separated buddies, it meant little opportunity for the distractions of the phone that pull us away from the present. I wasn’t spending time looking at or thinking about what other people were doing. I was in the moment with good people in a beautiful setting.
RAGBRAI not only brings people together over a beautiful shared experience, it creates a huddle around quaint American communities that shoos away the noise of the world. We could all use more moments like these, and I highly recommend this unique experience to anyone who is capable of pedaling a bicycle.
As RAGBRAI progressed, my thoughts returned to how wild it was that this many people show up to spend a full week, likely during vacation days, riding a bicycle with total strangers in the heat of summer. The amount of individual logistics to get to the ride start location and return back either to the start location or home via an airport is a huge operation in itself. Having completed the experience, I can say without hesitation that it was well worth the time and money to make it happen. RAGBRAI has a good thing going and is a well-oiled machine that will hopefully continue for decades to come.
Want to learn more about RAGBRAI or my experience? Reach out with questions and hopefully I’ll see you at a future ride across Iowa. Thank you for reading and enjoy your August!
-Ben Grannis
#EyesUp
