Hail dodgers tour Heartland

I am a big loser. For years I owned no bathroom scale because I didn’t want to know what I weighed. Besides, I reckoned, muscle weighs more than flab, and I had a lot of muscle on top of the flab.

OK, so I was in Denial. That’s probably one of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it towns in Iowa friend Bill and I bicycled through in July during the 37th annual RAGBRAI. That’s a bicycle ride from Iowa’s west coast, the Missouri River, to Iowa’s east coast, the Mississippi River, many parts of which are not flammable.

The ride was a gas. It included 20,000 of our new close personal friends. Imagine everyone in Union County minus babies, toddlers and the infirm, no matter what body shape, tootling down the road on bicycles.

RAGBRAI is a cruise ship on bicycles, a moveable feast of charitable fundraisers. I told the Wonder Woman — aka, my girlfriend — that I would gain weight on the 500-mile ride over one week because of the volume of pie and ice cream being served by church, 4-H, school, civic and Scout groups along the route. She didn’t believe me. As usual, she was right. Despite eating a watermelon, meatloaf, pie, ice cream and enough pancakes to feed a Third-World country, I ended the ride at 198 pounds.

That’s down three pounds from my start weight. It was also the first time I’ve weighed less than 200 pounds since a 3,500-mile bike ride through Banff and Jasper, Canada, in the early 1980s — when I had a metabolism.

That’s also down 40 pounds from my peak weight of 238 in 2005. It’s eight pounds less than the weight I hauled along a marathon route two decades ago.

RAGBRAI is a marathon for bicycles. It’s also Woodstock on Wheels. Many riders wear traditional bicycling gear topped with bananas, boneheads, loons and other crazy costumes. Rock, classical, polka and other music blares from boom boxes towed in trailers and from the ubiquitous under-the-bike-seat stereos.

Everyone except for a few Darwin Award nominees wore a bike helmet. Since my 30-year-old tent seemed to be a lightning magnet — camping was more exciting in the old days — I donned my helmet at 5 one morning when a thunder, lightning and hail storm played reville to wake up camp.

Later that morning, we bicycled past marble-sized hail piles along the roadside, somehow slow to melt in 90-degree heat, and shreaded corn fields.

A narrow miss.

As could be expected, we were welcomed home to Northeast Oregon by a series of 100-degree days, or close enough to 100 to take the pep out of grasshoppers. But it felt great to be back in the dry West and away from the humidity of Iowa, where summer dampness is a way of life. And the Wonder Woman still loved me, once I had been desweatified.

This was the hilliest RAGBRAI yet, with nearly 22,000 vertical feet of climb — hillier than some Cycle Oregons.

RAGBRAI — The (Des Moines) Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa — attracted riders from all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Fifty-nine riders came from 17 foreign countries, from Austrailia to the United Arab Emirates.

The 20,000 riders come in all shapes, from athletic to round mounds of pound.

Eighty-one percent ride a road bike, although two unicyclists finished the course, as did a roller-blader and a runner.

Part of the fun was searching for meals. Each night throngs descended on Iowa small towns, like La Grande except more sweaty. Many churches serve meat-intensive suppers.

Sometimes, though, the throngs were just too big. One evening about 8 Bill and I came across a story about as newsworthy as a mail carrier biting a dog. We stopped by a Pizza Hut — and it had run out of pizza.

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