116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Corridor cyclists hit roads and trails for fun and fitness
On the cusp of RAGBRAI this week, cyclists share benefits and tips
After Matt Nagle of Cedar Rapids suffered a stroke in January 2019, he graduated from a wheelchair to a walker to a cane — and then a bicycle.
Lingering weakness on his left side makes running “awkward,” he said, but he bikes “with no problems.” He’s been riding a minimum of four to five days a week, leading up this week when he’s riding in the 50th anniversary of the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. He has participated in about 10 of these treks across the state.
This year’s route begins today in Sioux City and ends Saturday in Davenport. Overnight stops include Tama-Toledo on Thursday and Coralville on Friday, where the rock band Bush will headline the main stage at 8:30 p.m. in S.T. Morrison Park.
Nagle, 61, rode a bike during his childhood in Davenport, all the way through law school in Iowa City. After that, he bought a car and drove to work, but picked up biking again with his young family. Nowadays, he uses a stationary bike in his house during the winter, then when the weather warms, gets back out on the trails and joins on Hawkeye Bicycle Association rides. Riding with a group aids his training and rehab.
“It just encourages me to sign up for the ride and go on the ride; to meet new people; and to hang out with club members and talk with them when I'm biking,” he said.
“The basic attraction is just to do a fun activity with other people and share that activity with them. And of course, there's the terrific distraction of having a conversation with other people that takes your mind off of any discomfort you might be experiencing while you’re biking. The miles just sort of flow by you.”
Hawkeye group
The Hawkeye Bicycle Association, one of several biking clubs in the Corridor, has about 230 paying members, according to Jim Bernstein of Cedar Rapids, its vice president. He’s 72, and a recent survey noted that the majority of the members are 50 and up.
“It skews a little bit older than the existing cycling community in Cedar Rapids,” he said, adding that most of the 30 or so new members in the past year are “young adults in their 20s and 30s, with young families, which is nice.”
Among the organization’s many group rides, Bernstein said the Wednesday night rides are even more popular than weekend rides attracting just 12 or 15 riders. Wednesday rides are large enough to split into three groups, based on the pace people want to ride.
And in the weeks leading up to RAGBRAI, he said a lot of Hawkeye members join up with longer rides — like the mid-June, 71-mile Bacoon Ride in Central Iowa’s Raccoon River Valley — to prepare for the weeklong trek. Hawkeye club rides also tackle more hills as RAGBRAI draws near, to get primed for what Bernstein said “is one of the hilliest ever in the history of the ride.”
The Hawkeye club will have about 70 riders on the team bus for RAGBRAI. Instead of camping outdoors, they stay in host churches.
“The age factor comes into account here to some extent,” he said. “Most of our members aren't out partying very hard. … We're a pretty responsible group.”
He’s been riding RAGBRAI for 25 years, and is astonished by the hospitality.
“It always impresses me and amazes me how much Iowans open up their home to perfect strangers,” he said, noting that last year in Sergeant Bluff, when about six of the Hawkeye riders asked a resident at their host church for a dinner suggestion, he took them to a nice restaurant, ate with them, then tried to pay for their meals. They declined, but afterward, he drove them to a couple of “touristy landmarks” riders wanted to see.
Being part of a group pays big dividends.
“I just think having like-minded people to ride with is a good thing,” Bernstein said. “And just speaking for myself, I've developed a lot of nice friendships that I might not have otherwise, outside of bicycling.”
The nonprofit Hawkeye group, formed in 1971, is holding a bike safety event in August, Bernstein said, and has contributed funds to the local trail association to help with building and maintaining the trails in town.
Gearing up
Bicycles come in all styles and sizes, with hybrids being the most popular these days, said Kyle Moscrip, 33, owner of Hall Bicycle Company in downtown Cedar Rapids.
He’s the fourth generation of his family to own the business, after his great-grandfather, Walter Moscrip, began working there in 1914 and in January 1929, bought it from Edward Hall, who founded the business in 1898. That was just 34 years after French carriage makers Pierre Michaux and Pierre Lallemen decided to add pedals to an earlier British precursor, the Dandy Horse, in 1864.
Today’s popular hybrids are a cross between mountain bikes and performance road bikes — “a little more casual” than either of those, Moscrip said. Unlike road bikes with drop-down handlebars, hybrids have straight-across handlebars, and anywhere from 18 to 21 speeds and up.
They come in a lot of categories, Moscrip said, “but they’re really great for trails, neighborhoods, streets, fitness (and) recreation type of riding.”
Most RAGBRAI riders will be pedaling an endurance-type road bike with drop handlebars, he said. But it doesn’t stop there. The training page on the event’s website says: “You will see everything out on RAGBRAI: racing bikes, hybrids, trikes, cruisers, mountain bikes, tandems, e-bikes, maybe even a unicycle.”
Pedal-assisted e-bikes are picking up speed, Moscrip said, with the most popular price points being $1,900 to $3,500, but they can run as much as $10,000 to $12,000.
“We sell a lot of e-bikes,” he noted. “That's definitely our highest growing category, for sure.”
The batteries will last the length of the day’s RAGBRAI ride, and can be recharged in four hours or less, plugging into a regular wall outlet. Moscrip said some people may choose to take two batteries to cut down on the number of recharges.
Regular road bikes with drop handlebars will run from $1,100 or $1,200 up to $10,000 or $12,000, with “all kinds of options in between,” Moscrip said, depending on the technology with the drivetrains, frame and materials. Casual riders can find a good bike for $600 to $1,200. Bikes that tykes might find under a Christmas tree will run from $120 to $300.
A wide range of accessories are available, too, with the most important being a helmet. Other items include bike shorts and shirts, gloves, attachable water bottles and bags for carrying items, a light rain jacket and repair items like an extra inner tube.
Health benefits
Dr. Gregory Schmidt, 66, of Iowa City, rides a bike to work every day, relying mostly on a commuter bike to handle Iowa’s various weather whims. He lives 3 or 4 miles from work, depending on the route he takes.
An intensive care specialist at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics and a UI professor of intensive care medicine, he has a vested interested in the physical, mental and emotional benefits of cycling.
After riding bikes with his friends in his youth, he put cycling aside when lower back disc issues popped up around age 30, making it “challenging” to lean over a bicycle.
“I simply was unable to ride a bike for many, many years,” he said. “ … I was limited in a lot of the things that I could do, just because my back would not support a lot of physical activity. But then about 25 years ago, I got my back repaired, like an artificial disc, and it changed my life, because now I don't have troubles anymore.”
During his recovery, he rediscovered his old road bike, gathering dust in his garage in Chicago. The tires were flat and the handlebar tape was falling off.
“But something about seeing it and having my back repaired made me pump up the tires.” He took it for a short spin, and over time, “2 miles became 3 miles became 5 miles, and within less than a year, I rode my first century ride.”
Riding to work every day is part of his regimen, which makes it easier to stick with. Each week, he rides about 100 miles or more in the summer and about 75 in the winter.
“To me, this is something that I want to sustain — and I have sustained,” he said. “Human nature being what it is, we have to use tricks in order to sustain the habits that we want to sustain. And for me, one of the ways to sustain it is just do it reliably, without having to think about it.”
On Thursday nights, he hops on his road bike to ride with a group of friends. Among his seven bikes, he also has a mountain bike that about 11 years ago he road from Telluride, Colo., to Moab, Utah. In a few weeks, he and his son will ride through Italy’s Dolomite Mountains, part of the Northern Italian Alps.
He also has a fat tire- and cyclocross bikes for off-road riding. But until recently, he hadn’t put much stock in e-bikes. A medical study over many months, with volunteers given pedal-assisted e-bikes or regular bikes, showed that the e-bikers actually gained more fitness because they rode longer and farther.
“What I've noticed, especially over the last year, when I'm out riding, I see more and more people on e-bikes,” Schmidt said. “And the kind of people that I see on e-bikes are the kind of people I never would have seen out riding two years ago. So I actually believe e-bikes are facilitating a reentry into the world of exercise and the world of cycling to a lot of people who kind of wanted to do it, but they didn't think they could.”
From the medical standpoint, when muscles contract during exercise, they release myokines, hormonelike substances that circulate throughout the body. Schmidt said they have measurable positive effects on the brain, immune system, the gut, heart and organ systems “in ways that are only being discovered within the last 10 to 15 years.”
“They have measurable effects on things like cognition, and memory, and mood and pain thresholds,” he said, noting they’re released through any type of regular exercise. And unlike some activities, like running or soccer, “cycling is something that you can continue in all of your life.”
“And in doing these things, regular exercise has been compared with typical antidepressant medications, and has this same order of magnitude of effect as typical antidepressants,” he said. “It reduces chronic and acute pain, it improves memory, it has been shown to slow the brain deterioration that's typical of Alzheimer's disease, or severe chronic diseases like severe diabetes.”
For those wanting to take up biking or return to biking, he offered up some tricks that have worked for friends and colleagues, as well as himself:
Use a fitness tracker. “When you get feedback about your body, at least I have become more attuned to taking care of myself and noticing the impacts of exercise or non-exercise on my body.”
Lower the barriers. He barely used the bicycle trainer in his basement, until he took it upstairs, put it in an office-type room with a window, and set up a screen so he could watch something while riding. “All of a sudden, that changed everything for me. I started using my trainer,” he said.
Make it a habit. “Human nature being what it is, if you want a new habit, you have to tie it to an existing habit,” he said, like doing squats or situps before taking a morning shower. “You’ll be more likely to remember it and sustain it.”
Rewards matter. Like the “fireworks” burst you might get from a fitness tracker when you reach 10,000 steps, “that little dopamine jolt of a silly little thing is powerful.”
Find social networks. “Iowa City is a wonderful place to live,” he said, because on any given day, he can find people to ride with. “The social circles are sustaining,” he added, because social bonding is the positive thing to emerge from the social pressure of riding regularly with a group not skipping an outing.
“I know that I'm going to see some of my dearest friends tonight. We're going to ride about 27 miles, and then we're going to sit down and we're going to share beer. And that,” he said, “is a reward.”
Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com
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