While RAGBRAI LI will kick off on July 20, I had the privilege to ride RAGBRAI on its 50th anniversary last summer, battling its epic and notorious heat, hills, and headwinds.
But there was one thing that I never tired of: from horizon to horizon, thousands of bicyclists blanketing the road. It was a beautiful sight, one that I will surely see only a few times in my life.
Bike author Grant Petersen is a former professional cyclist and current owner of Rivendell Bicycle Works. He’s also the author of Just Ride — a comprehensive treatise self-described as “a radically practical guide to riding your bike,” written in Martin Luther 95-theses style.
This time, Petersen falls six short — he’s written Just Ride in 89 readable separate tips, tricks, and debunks that fall under eight different sections: Riding, Suiting Up, Safety, Health and Fitness (Don’t Confuse the Two), Accessories, Upkeep, Technicalities, and his self-dubbed “Velosophy.”
But upon whose church is Just Ride to be nailed? That of the congregation whose baptismal garments are made of spandex and whose communion wine is electrolyte goo: Petersen’s manifesto is targeted at bike racers.
“My main goal with this book is to point out what I see as bike racing’s bad influence on bicycles, equipment, and attitudes, and then undo it,” Petersen writes, in his first sentence. His view is that all of the innovations necessary for making your bike go as fast as possible have trickled down to the common rider.
“For the most part, noncompetitive, recreational riders wear the same clothes, pedal in the same shoes, ride the same bikes as racers do. Most rides are training rides, and we’re always trying to improve our times,” Petersen correctly observes. The vast majority of us have no use for spandex jerseys, carbon fiber frames, clip-on pedal shoes, and heart-rate monitors, yet we’re told that we need them.
How to abandon this mindset?
- Give up posturing and quit the pecking order.
- Enjoy bikes again, the way you did as a kid, before you got so serious.
- Become an “Unracer.”
Petersen often imagines his audience in his book as his former self: an Unracer at heart but (literally) draped in racing gear. I am much the opposite; I’ve always internally been a racer, thinking that, if I don’t ride as much as I can as often as I can, then the bike gods from above will surely smite me.
Yet, on the outside I more so take after my father, who has certainly consulted this book numerous times and is a textbook Unracer: he rides in dorky highlighter-green shoes and tattered t-shirts. He rides with drop-down handlebars turned sideways on a steel bike that weighs more than some lawnmowers. Why? Because it’s comfortable and he doesn’t give a crap. He passes the Unracer quiz, which can helpfully be found in the final pages of Just Ride.
For the rest of us who are not so easily swayed, Petersen offers a few tips.
First off, throw that RAGBRAI training spreadsheet out the window—Petersen advises tabulating your rides in minutes, not miles. On second thought actually, don’t even bother going on RAGBRAI. “Why beat yourself up twice a week for six weeks, just so you can suffer slightly less—or maybe more—on the big day?” he writes.
Instead of RAGBRAI or an equally punishing ride, Petersen offers the Unracer antidote in the “S24O.” Standing for “Sub-24-Hour Overnights,” the S24O is a simple one to three hour ride out to a campsite on a Friday or Saturday afternoon and a (preferably downhill) return the next morning.
Gabe Lareau, Moline Cycling Blogger
Its short length, focus on recreation, and complete ease with any fitness level “minimizes any problems in planning, packing, weather, bike imperfections, or anything else that might wreck a long tour.” It’s riding for riding’s sake, sans the emotional, and physical, baggage.
Petersen’s helpful tips don’t just relate to his “Velosophy” either. He is strongest when offering practical tips. For example he advises: unless you’re a racer, you have no business buying carbon fiber frames; if you need a spur-of-the-moment bike stand, hang your steed from a tree; if you don’t care about looking like a moron, wear a poncho during your next ride in the rain. Even though the spandex syndicate may be racing past, you’ll still be drier.
Not everything in Just Ride should be taken as gospel, though. As Petersen notes early on, not everyone is going to agree with everything he has to say in the book. I happen to be one, mostly on the issue of helmets. Not fifty pages in, Petersen claims “helmets aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”
I understand the need to have a controversial point of view in order to sell more books, but I take issue with it when it could come at the cost of lives. Petersen’s argument is that, of course you should wear a helmet, but it may lure you into a false sense of security and encourage you to take greater risks.
What Petersen fails to acknowledge is that he’s operating under a base assumption that helmet-wearing and risk-taking have a direct relationship; it’s possible to be risk-averse and wear a helmet. It’d make sense that if you are wearing one, you’re likely to take fewer risks.
You should see the cracked helmet my mother has kept hanging in her closet, a reminder of the skull-saving headgear after she accidently plowed into my brother on the Ben Butterworth path, cartwheeling off her handlebars and over my brother to land hard enough for her first trip in an ambulance. The EMT showed her the helmet and said, “Lady, this saved your life.”
Also, I’d encourage him to take a visit to the University of Illinois—or any college campus or the Quad Cities — where I’ve seen firsthand riders who take enormous risks on their bikes are the ones never wearing helmets.
As a rebuttal, Petersen writes, “In the Netherlands only one in thirty riders wear helmets, the streets are full of cyclists, and the bike accident and head injury rate is far lower than it is the United States.” A fantastic argument for streets better designed to accommodate bicycles. Not so much for busting the helmet “myth.”
Nevertheless, most of Petersen’s “Velosophy” is all well and good. It doesn’t have to apply to just bicycling either.
As the rest of the summer lays before you like an open road beckoning adventure, remember as with life, it’s about the journey.
The amateur speedsters on RAGBRAI didn’t get any prize money by getting to Davenport faster. In fact they looked more exhausted than I was at the end. It seems the “Unracer” t-shirt I wore on that last leg worked just fine.
