Recap of Day 4 - June 21, 2007

A bicyclist's life on the RRIBT road

By Tu-Uyen Tran, Herald Staff Writer
Published Friday, June 22, 2007

OLD MILL STATE PARK, Minn. — This week, Dave Wrubel unexpectedly gained a wife and three teenage sons when a gas station attendant assumed the group of riders in the Red River International Bike Tour were part of a family.

The riders had met as strangers Monday but had become fast friends over the next few days as they hung out together and rode together in the 342-mile tour across North Dakota, Manitoba and Minnesota. That the Wrubel "family" isn't the only close-knit group in the RRIBT is an illustration of the intense camaraderie that develops in such tours.

In fact, the whole group of 109 riders is something akin to a tribe of nomads, wandering merrily across the plains.

Sometimes they congregate in little families as Wrubel and his friends Deb Hutson (the "wife") and the three high-schoolers (the "sons"), who include Gabe Olson and Kyllo Ronnie of Grand Forks, and Roland Sink of West Virginia. Usually, those of similar endurance rode together, the fast ones with the fast ones and the slower ones with the slower ones.

Sometimes the riders traveled alone, slowing to chat with other members of the tribe as they encounter them on the road or at mealtime.

As a reporter struggled down U.S. Highway 75, two different strangers approached, slowed and started to talk. They said things like: 'Hey, you're that Herald reporter!' 'How are you faring?' 'You slowed down a little there.' 'How long have you lived in Grand Forks?'

One stranger volunteered that her friends are up ahead but she couldn't keep up so stayed behind. Another stranger spoke of how he wanted to begin bicycle touring and was trying the RRIBT to do a shakedown cruise of his new touring bike. And then they were gone, as the reporter had failed to keep up.

Look ahead

Like nomads, the riders would gather at choice watering holes or oases. For a tired RRIBT rider, the small towns along the route are lush oases, where bikers refresh themselves, rest their legs and swap stories with the locals.

Yet the difference between oasis and mirage is oh so fine.

The town of Stephen, Minn., is but eight miles down the road from Donaldson, Minn. Not an especially long ride on the 71-mile Pembina, N.D., to Old Mill State Park, Minn., leg on Wednesday, but it frustrated several riders. The prairie being flat as it is, they could see Stephen sitting on the horizon as soon as they left Donaldson.

But, as one rider said, the darn thing never seemed to get any closer.

What was worse, that's where the town's ladies had gathered to serve homemade doughnuts and ice-cold lemonade under the hot sun.

The tribe looks after its members.

The bicycle mechanics are the smiths who win praise for their skill in fixing and fine-tuning RRIBT participants' machines.

On a recent evening, the young Andrew Knutson, a mechanic at the Ski and Bike Shop in Grand Forks, won accolades from onlookers for not only lowering a reporter's bicycle seat as requested but also, out of sheer enthusiasm, cleaning and oiling the chains and adjusting the brakes, too.

For the riders who can't finish the day's ride, the tribe has thoughtfully provided what's colloquially known as the "sag wagon." That's the car in which dead-tired riders are transported. It's not a name designed to encourage use.

At day's end, the nomads would gather in camp.

Like at the bonfires of old, the elders would pass on lessons to the younger generation.

That's how a reporter interpreted it anyway when Dave Sour told the younger men around him of his trick for beating mirages like the one at Stephen. Focus on a nearby terrain feature and make getting to that feature the goal, he said. When you get there, find another clump of tree or telephone pole and make that the goal.

When the younger men asked him how long he'd been touring, he said "since 1992." The respectful nods prompted him to crack: "Sometimes the gray hair gets a little respect."

At the gathering, the hardcore riders would boast like warriors, and their rivals would deprecate their efforts.

Tony Chu, a Grand Forks resident, joked that his friend Paul Knight was obsessed with riding 100 miles in a day, a feat riders call the "century." How obsessed? Knight was said to have ridden around and around in the parking lot to get the last three miles needed to make a century.

Knight protested that he wasn't really that crazy, to which Chu shot back: "That's why you only talk about it every three minutes."