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An endurance event is born: Trans Iowa

There are new endurance races popping up all over the country these days. The typical 24 hour events have been joined by ultra-marathon, point to point excursions, and other types of suffering as well.

Some of you may have asked yourselves, ‘What causes someone to start one of these events?’ While I can not answer for every event out there, I can tell you about one of them. You see, I help promote one of these little gems. The event is named Trans Iowa and I am going to share with you the story of how it got started. My hope is that perhaps some of you will be inspired to try putting on your own event or, at the very least, you can see from a event organizer’s perspective about what it looks like on the “other side of the fence”.

Is your head on straight?

I suppose an event of any type gets started with a challenge. You know, like: “Think you can clean that hill?” That sort of thing. The next thing you know, everybody in the town is showing up to see if you and your buddies can bomb that hill. Times start getting checked. Rosters are kept. Looks like you have an event on your hands!

The idea for Trans Iowa started in a way that was not much different than that. My partner, Jeff Kerkove, and I work together in a bicycle shop so we often talk about endurance events and related subjects. We thought about the days when riders used to travel across the state of Iowa on road bikes in one day. Since neither of us are what you would call avid roadies, Jeff came up with the idea of doing the trek on mountain bikes over the state’s gravel back roads.

Our plan was to subject Trans Iowa participants to more than 300 miles of unsupported riding on gravel back roads, self navigated, and it all had to be done in fewer than 30 hours.

I decided that I would help Jeff organize such an attempt. I think I must have lost my mind that day!

A “Perfect Storm”

In the days that followed the start of our project, many amazing things happened that still defy explanation. I suppose a lot of the early success had to do with the fact that Jeff is a well known endurance racer and had several connections to industry people through his various sponsorships. That, and the very nature of the idea was appealing both to supporters and potential event participants.

So, combined with good support from our partners, the growing demand for a challenging event helped make Trans Iowa somewhat of a hit right out of the box. It was the right idea at the right time, I guess.

Next week…

My part in the event was rather invisible at first — it was my job was to plan the route and help with the running of the event.

In my next few installments on The Biking Hub, I will discuss the developments leading up to the first running of Trans Iowa. Ironically, I am reliving a lot of this as I write since the next running of Trans Iowa is coming up on April 28th through the 30th. I’ll include a special report of the event afterwards.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 at 12:05 am and is filed under Features, Bike culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.