TOUR OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER VALLEY

JUNE 13-14 2009

Some commonly asked questions

If are a first time rider or thinking about riding TOMRV, you may have some questions that are not answered in the ride brochure and application. I will try to field the most commonly asked ones here.

How hard is TOMRV?

It is safe to say that TOMRV challenges every rider every year. Being a two day tour with good milage and challenging terrain, there is opportunity for riders at any level to find challenge. Additionally the tour is early in the summer, and seasonal riders are not at their summer peak.

If you enjoy accomplishing long distances on your bike, then TOMRV is an excellent way to try a longer tour. You will have the advantages of a well tuned route, other riders to ride with and good food and drink supplied on the route. You will want to get some good riding in before the tour. This is not a race, so find your pace and enjoy.

Here is a cyclist's altimeter download from TOMRV in 2002. Note that the route between Bellevue and Preston is changed to a less hilly route, removing about 1,000 feet of climbing. You can see there are hills in Iowa after all. The land near Dubuque is a series of limestone bluffs and valleys, sometimes quite striking. The result is numerous climbs and descents, some over 300 feet.

Registering

You can register for TOMRV at www.GetMeRegistered.com. There will be no online fees for you because TOMRV is paying them. In addition, we are allowing refunds for online registrations up to May 30.

You can also register my mailing in a paper application with a check. If you are a recent rider, then you have probably received a brochure in the mail with an application included. You can also print an application here.

Most riders sign up for the ride fairly early. The main reason for applying early is to get a room at Clarke College, rather than the less convenient Loras College. We provide a free shuttle to and from Loras, a one mile drive to make up for the inconvenience.

If you decide to sign up later, go ahead and send in the application as long as it will arrive by May 30. After this date, don't mail an application. However, you can sign up at packet pickup on Friday evening at Scott. You can either bring in your application or fill out one of ours at packet pickup. (And bring a check - we will not be set up for credit cards!) We even sign up a few riders on Saturday morning! We have never had a rider limit, so we won't turn you away.

Changing your registration

You may decide to change the particulars of your registration. This is usually easy to do. Here are some common change requests, and how to get them done.

• Change your dorm room request - To add a room to your registration, Email or call the registrar with your request. Mail a check for additional funds, to the registrar, including your name and exactly what you are adding or changing.
• Change your start from Bettendorf to Preston, or vice versa - Save this for when you pick up your rider packet. There will be a color coded luggage tag, and you simply swap the tag for the other color at our fix-it table.
• Add a jersey to your registration - You can wait for Friday registration, but your size may be sold out. Another way - Mail a check with the Jersey cost to the registrar, including your name and the size for your Jersey. After May 1st, or if you wear an uncommon size, call or email the registrar to be sure your size is available.
• Additional banquet tickets - You just purchase extra banquet tickets at the door to the banquet.

Suites

For some riders, the real prize is getting a suite at Clarke. Unlike the other dormitory rooms, the suites are air conditioned, and provide several rooms adjoining with a common bath. This makes them desirable for large groups of friends, and on hot years the air conditioning is a real plus. The suites rent quickly, so quickly that we reserve them to mail-in registrations, and ask you to check the website and call the registrar to check availability if you are not signing up right after the registration opens.

Loras and the Shuttle

We field more riders than Clarke College can house, so we also rent the dormitories at neighboring Loras College. We run a shuttle between Clarke and Loras. This year the shuttle will leave Clarke right on the half hour all afternoon. Knowing this, you can time your trip to Loras without standing around at the shuttle stop a lot.

Camping

On the other end of accomodations is tent camping. You can tent camp a part or your entire stay at TOMRV. There is tent camping for no charge on the grounds at Scott Community College and at Preston on Friday before the ride. This is a low impact quiet affair. If you use this, be sure to respect the property and leave your site clean.

There is also camping on the grounds at Clark College, and there is a $13 charge for this. You are entitled to use the dormitory showers as a camper, and a towel is provided.

We have a new camping area, one with restrooms available, but totally away from street noise. There is a soccer field behind the tennis courts, nice flat watered and carefully mowed area. Plus on Sunday morning, you walk past the bike lockup to get to the road. Say good-bye to honking horns.

Many people have camped right off Clarke Drive. That provides easy access to bathrooms in the night. But we have been plagued most years with drivers who ruin campers sleep by honking horns through the night. We want to discourage camping along the road this year. The soccer field has rest room facilities and will not have road noise.

Motels on Friday evening

There is a link to the motels in the area around Scott Community College on the TOMRV home page. Every year people ask which is the closest motel to the ride start. You can see from the map that it is a close call, but the closest motel by perhaps a minute driving time is the Holiday Inn on Middle road, listed on that home page link. You can stay at the Holiday Inn in LeClaire. This on the route at 8.3 miles, so you might arrange to leave your car at the motel over the weekend and have no driving to the start at all.

If you are starting from Preston, you can get a motel in nearby Maquoketa Iowa, or you can stay in Bettendorf and drive up to Preston on Saturday morning.

The banquet

When you ask a TOMRV rider about the ride, you will probably hear about the banquet. This is a truely wonderful dinner after a hard day on the road. There are dozens of delicious foods to choose from and all that you will want to eat. The banquet starts at 4 p.m. and runs until 8:30 p.m. So you can plan when to drop in. Your wristband admits you to the banquet. If you have non-riding friends, they can buy banquet tickets at the door.

This year, the banquet will include vegan fare as well as traditional. The serving dishes will be marked for you.

What clothing to bring

Spring in the Midwest is a variable time, sometimes warm, sometimes hot, and sometimes cold. Although warm to hot is most common, in 2006 we had temps in the 40s with strong headwind and rain on Saturday morning. It was foolhardy to ride without good protection for cold and rain.

When preparing for the tour, you want to bring clothing for a range of conditions. When you actually start the ride, you can select those you will need.

Eat on the ride

A tour the length of TOMRV has a fundamental difference from all rides of lesser distance: your body does carry enough readily available energy to complete the ride, and eating along the route is necessary to avoid bonking. This means eating both at each stop, and sometimes on the road between stops.

Your body gets power from three sources in roughly this order

1. Fat metabolism, at a rate up to 200-300 calories per hour
2. Carbolydrates and proteins being digested from what you are eating
3. Glycogen stored in you body. There is typically 1,500 to 2,000 calories of glycogen erergy in a rested person's body

See the chart below to get an idea how much energy you will use on TOMRV. You can see that you will use energy much faster than 200 calories an hour (energy source #1 - fat), so your body will use energy source 2 (food you digest on the ride) as well. This preserves energy source 3 (glycogen).

The problem comes if you fail to eat enough along the route, and use up all of your glycogen. This is fondly known as bonking, which feels a lot like dying. A 100 mile ride is easily long enough for this to happen. So eat plenty along the route. We are giving away food at every stop, all of it just the kind that you need. So eat and live.

Calories Burned During Exercise

Reference: http://www.nutristrategy.com/activitylist.htm

Drink on the ride

Along with eating enough, you must drink enough. When the temperature goes up, your body can lose one to two quarts an hour while riding. While being two quarts down is not dangerous, it materially reduces your ride speed. Dehydration also makes you susceptible to leg cramps.

You will want to drink well at stops, especially as the temperature gets high. You will also want to carry water with you to drink between the stops.

What if I am unable to finish?

TOMRV riders are a tough lot, and few are willing to quit even when the going is tough. If you have adequate clothing, food and water, you will finish unless a health or bike catastrophe occurs.

But every year a few riders have to bag it, generally due to real health concerns. We run a sweep at the back of the ride and pick up bicycles and riders who cannot complete the day. This is not a lot of riders, and it is a slow way to get to Dubuque.

Route safety

We all know that cycle touring is a hazardous sport. An advantage of TOMRV is that the route is carefully selected and checked for safety each year. We are committed to a safe tour. We check each year for road construction, drive the route each year, and post warning signs where we find a forseeable hazard.

That said, we cannot guarantee that you will not encounter hazards on the road. You must be alert and cautious when vehicles are around, and must ride within the road conditions. You are responsible for your safety on the tour.

I want to mention particular hazards in an organized tour that are not generally present when you ride alone or with a couple friends. They are both in descents. The first is overtaking a slower rider and not being able to get around. You may be a crit rider, but the person in front of you is not. Now a car comes up around the curve ahead. A-a-a-g-g-g!

The second is riding too fast on a descent on a secondary road. These roads are former wagon paths with crown grading and chip seal. They have not been engineered. Commonly the lowest turn is the sharpest one. Resist the urge to descend fast on these curving roads. Keep your speed in control until you can see the runout at the bottom of the descent.

Riding responsibly

This is my plea to you the rider to ride responsibly. There is a tendency for riders to engage in riding practices on a large group ride where cyclists impede traffic on the more heavily traveled roads. This results in angry motorists who may then engage in rude or aggressive driving, stop and confront riders, or call the county sheriff.

There is bound to be some inconvenience to the daily users of the roads, but some rider practices abuse the right to the road and make a real problem.

• Riding multiple abreast - riders enjoy talking while riding, leading them to ride abreast. State laws ban this practice when it impedes traffic. When riding abreast, keep aware of traffic behind and in front, and go single file whenever necessary to maintain vehicular flow.

• Echelon riding - a practice where in a side-wind riders pace to the left of the bicycle in front. This brings each bike in the line further into the lane. Keep pace lines short in this situation.

• Double pace lines - where cyclists ride two abreast in a pace line. Since there is no way to move into single file, is is not a viable riding style for TOMRV.

• Long pace lines where slower cyclists are continuously being passed. Although no individual rider is impeding traffic for long, the line as a whole does. Break overly long lines into shorter ones.

These riding practices come from a belief in the cyclists that because of the tour, they have extra privledges on the road. This is most emphatically not the case. We share the roads with all users as a common. State laws allow cyclists to share the roads with the requirement that they ride toward the right and don't unduly impede traffic. The sheriffs in each county regulate this use. If they decide we cannot operate a safe tour, then can stop the tour for good. I really hate getting calls from the sheriffs or the highway patrols.