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An endurance event is born: Planning the route for the first Trans Iowa

In my most recent installment on The Biking Hub, I described how the idea for the Trans Iowa endurance event was hatched. This week, I’m giving you a behind the scenes look at how the route was laid out and planned.

Since the total time that passed between the basic idea for the event and the opening of registration was about two weeks, I did not have much time me to devise a route! And my job became even harder when I had to figure out what to do a whole state full of gravel and dirt back roads…

The end, the start, and somewhere in between

I did have a bit of help in narrowing the choices down a bit. My partner, Jeff Kerkove, told me that he really didn’t care what I did for the route as long as it went through his home town of Algona, Iowa. That chopped off about two thirds of the state right there! And after further research, one of our contacts offered to help with the finish line and awards ceremonies if we would end the event in his town of Decorah. That is not quite at the eastern border of the state, but the offer was too good to pass up, so we accepted it. The only thing left to do was to find a town to start in.

Since we have a recreational cross state ride every July in Iowa called RAGBRAI, we decided to choose a city in the northern third of the state along the western border that had previous experience with that cycling event. The only city that fit the bill was Hawarden. Jeff contacted them, and they heartily accepted. That was pretty easy! Now all I had to do was connect the dots.

Connecting the dots: considerations for the Trans Iowa route

As it turned out, this was the hardest part of my job.

I needed to route the course so that it was on as much gravel as possible and to have it pass through towns with, at the least, a convenience store so that riders could re-supply themselves. According to our plan, these towns had to fall at intervals of no more than 50 miles.

Finding my way: the search for a decent map

After I’d finished that, I had to find a reliable source for maps that were fewer than 10 years old. Any map older than that couldn’t be trusted since the gravel back roads of Iowa are slowly disappearing. In recent years, several throughways have been built at locations all across Iowa, causing interruptions on many gravel roads. In other places, gravel roads were paved or disappeared altogether. Added to that was the fact that most sane adults have no interest at all in a map of gravel roads.

I had to be careful with my choices and, with the onset of winter and only five months to the start of the event, I had a bit of pressure mounting.

I checked into the on-line resources, like county government maps and Department of Transportation maps. Unfortunately, most of these fell outside of my dating criteria. I found myself scanning the map section at Barnes and Noble one day when I finally came across a DeLorme Atlas of Iowa. It was supposedly up to date, so I bought it. Armed with this, I went home and buried my nose in the thing for hours. I thought I had it made but, later, I would discover that wasn’t the case at all.

In the next installment, I will discuss the pitfalls and problems arose in planning the route. We had a long way to go and a short time to get there…….

This entry was posted on Monday, April 17th, 2006 at 9:55 pm 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.