A LIFE ON BIKES
The Manhattan skyline in the eastern sunrise runs parallel to Dan Schmalz during his early drive into Central Park. When he gets there, he pulls the race bike with disc brakes off the roof, sits in the tail of his car to put on the stiff-soled cycling cleats that clip into carbon fiber pedals, locks up and leaves his Passat wagon just north of the 5th Avenue Metropolitan Museum of Art, around the corner from a deli that will still be mostly empty later this morning when he’s done. After his bike race, Dan likes to eat a big diner breakfast and read the paper for a half hour before heading home, parked back in his own garage in New Jersey as the clock strikes noon.
This Saturday is a race day. Eight times in the Spring, Summer and Fall, New York city’s prime real estate in Central Park, the 10km asphalt loop permanently closed to cars, is transformed into an hour-long bike race by early morning volunteer road guards with loud whistles in orange hi-viz vests standing everywhere a New York pedestrian or jogger or dog-walker or bird-watcher might wander into the three or four thundering herds of a hundred or more racing cyclists coming down the pike in Central Park at 45mph and wall-to-wall between the curbs.
Dan has raced around this Central Park loop hundreds of times in his two decades of raising a family just across the Hudson from America’s biggest media market. So many Saturdays he’s driven into a 5am traffic-less Manhattan you’d never see otherwise, so many three-hour stacks of quarters for the parking meters until the technology went cashless, so many cold and dark starting lines on Cat Hill, so many Met Museum mass sprints, so many thundering herds of racing cyclists in the heart of New York City.
THE GRAN FONDO
This Saturday Dan hears a joke before the start, a punchline among his teammates and friends, the people over the years and seasons he has come to call his metamodern bowling league, all equally plumaged in skin-tight purple and opalescent green uniforms that identify quickly who is gasping for air once the race is on.
“Gran Fondo – If you time it, they will race,” Dan hears a teammate chortle. The start box is filled with teammates and rivals. Dan laughs, he gets the reference immediately, it’s from ‘Field of Dreams’, the story about a playing field in Iowa with a baseball team that materializes out of the corn. There was a movie with Kevin Costner, and the actress who plays his wife in the film gets into an argument at a Dubuque city council meeting about books in the school library and calls another woman a ‘Nazi Cow’.
In the film at the time it came out, this line got a big laugh. Summer of 1988. Calling somebody a Nazi Cow was funny in 1988. Natalie Merchant, Edie Brickell and Bjork all made their debuts singing in some guy’s band on college radio that year.
But the reference from the film is about the voice Kevin Costner hears in his head, spooking him a bit by whispering ‘If you build it, they will come’, and it’s being whispered by a phantom baseball player from a mythical team in the late 1910s who is telling him to put a baseball field in his corn patch to save the farm from bankruptcy.
The original fiction novel has the Costner character seek out no less than JD Salinger, a famously reclusive and absolutely real cult author from the 1950s, to help him build the field and sniff out a few others to join them as equally mystified accomplices to the mass hallucination.
In the movie, Kevin Costner builds a baseball field, the tourists come and pay him for a spot on the bleachers and watch the phantom players, and he saves his farm from bankruptcy. A wildly popular film at the time, the phrase ‘If you build it, they will come’ is a bona fide catch-phrase of feel-good Americana.
In Manhattan at the start of the bike race, the punchline reference makes Dan laugh, but it’s a laugh that sticks in his ribs funny-like until he gets home after his omelet and he does a bit of internet sleuthing about the two mystery words that came right before: Gran Fondo. What is this ‘Gran Fondo’ ?
DREAM OF FIELDS
There is going to be a new kind of race in New York on Memorial Day weekend, it says on the Internet, and the rumor in the Central Park peloton is the police will close city roads on a Sunday all the way across the George Washington Bridge and up to the reservoir in Harriman State Park, as well as the climbs up Bear Mountain and Palisades.
And the thing is, Dan finds, this Gran Fondo is also going to be a race, with categories and prizes and timed sectors where a cumulative total of a few kms over three separate sections of the course will be recorded by the radio-frequency chip zip-tied to the right front fork of all 23,000 riders on the 5 different loop lengths they each paid $135 to enter.
For a guy with thousands of what sometimes get called ‘hamster laps’ racing around Central Park, a race up to Bear Mountain on wide-open roads, forbidden to motor vehicles for the duration, smells like freedom.
And the math is astounding. Three million dollars in entry fees to pay the cops for real road guards and their much louder whistles and all the fancy timing devices that can handle and calculate the mixed speeds involved in this kind of race. Photographers will work on motorbikes, selling race shots to entrants by bib-number out of lightning-fast commercial databases with numbered photobanks for the memories. Each rider gets a designed jersey to start the day in, and every finisher gets an ‘I Did It’ T-shirt. Vendors fall over each other to hand out samples of snack foods and padded sunglasses at the end of what for some will be an all-day bike ride at leisurely speed. A bike-a-thon with friends and family on familiar roads.
While for others the Gran Fondo is going to be a fully-drawn-on day of war paint and aggression and speed at the pointy tip of the peloton.
THE RESEARCH
The Gran Fondo is a bike race located safely within a bike-a-thon. While 23,000 pay and start, maybe 3-4,000 are people who consider themselves fast on two wheels. Maybe they run or play tennis. Of those, no more than 400 will be serious racers, in mostly Men’s Age-Group Categories, with a nice-enough plurality of about 80 serious racer women, and another 150 who are new to but enthusiastic about biking, who immediately self-select just by eyeing each other’s wheelsets, whether their bike shoes are custom fitted, and by what type of computer tracking system is hex-bolted to the handlebars.
Nobody really races against anybody else head to head in a Gran Fondo. The computer records it automatically, calculates the time and even emails or texts the results to the registrant’s account. It’s not exactly the same thing as team racing like in the Tour de France, but it means not all 23,000 riders have to start at the same time, and folks who want to ride in after breakfast to the start in Manhattan from the outer boroughs will have time in daylight to do so, on roads empty of cars for their protection.
In age and gender categories, for different types of bikes accounting for all the wheeled transport vehicles out there, awards are determined and prizes administered. Food and drink vendors at the start-finish cater to a raucous crowd of drained and hungry cyclists. Rock bands on stage entertain eaters in the shade.
Along the course there are banana stands, great people-chutes of ticket-punching efficiency that accept thousands of arriving and wristband-proffering riders and guide them through an assembly line of pocket stuffing buffet tables, offering bagels and spreads, cut fruit, snack bar samples and the curious ketchup-packet sized glucose gels with varied doses of caffeine and guarana you just squirt into your mouth like cake frosting. Water and sport drinks flow freely and bottles are either refilled or replaced.
Dan does all this research at home in New Jersey after his curiosity gets piqued by a funny reference that morning in Central Park. Teammate won the sprint in the B race, that was nice. It struck him that one part of his life was now intersecting with another, and the reflection got him thinking about Dubuque, about growing up a Dubuquer in the 1970s, before the movie ‘Field of Dreams’ ever came out, and about the great myth that Iowa is flat. About the unfairness inherent in the even greater myth that having great backyard mountains is the only path to being a decent cyclist or snowboarder.
FLAT MIDWEST SOCIETY
The midwest of the popular imagination is flat, and for as far as the mind’s eye can see there are row upon row of eye-high crops that glimmer and glisten in the virtual blue sky sun. This popularly agreed-upon imaginary midwest landscape is usually punctuated by cows, or Mt. Rushmore, and there are straight lines in every direction. There is shade on a wide porch and a table with some empty chairs and cool water beading up in a ring under a pitcher, waiting to be poured as soon as you walk in the door.
Part of this flat-midwest myth is true in some parts, and there is no shortage of endless horizon in more than a few stretches along the glorious interstate network of criss-crosses that pattern like the black lines in a Mondrian painting through Kansas and eastern Colorado – those two states and some of Oklahoma could be called the flat part of the midwest.
But not Iowa. Because Dubuque for pete’s sake ain’t flat.
There are historic bluffs on the westside riverbank that make up the city of Dubuque, and early city mavericks built their most prosperous families’ giant Queen Anne houses astride these inclines, peering out at the busy Mississippi port and steamboats heading up and down river. Up Fourth Street the elevator cars of the world’s steepest train were built to ferry goods and people on lanes too steep to walk.
At the far western edge of modern Dubuque there is a ski mountain with 475 feet of vertical drop over 21 different runs through stands of Cedar and a snowmaking machinery that gives high school kids a place to shred after school and be home in time for dinner. The streets that run up from Dubuque’s historical downtown pitch in at inclines from 13 to 17 percent, and seem to stretch on into endless urban heights.
THE WHISPERED VOICE
In the Dubuque summer as a boy Dan Schmalz would gaze up nearby Roosevelt Street and see a mile uphill to Eagle Point Park. Do-able on a bike, but more often a distance to be survived. And with an elevation gain of 240ft in that Roosevelt mile, it was a timed challenge for Dan to get to the top faster each morning when he left for community center tennis lessons at the park. The problem was his brother Mike had been tinkering with his bike to make it look like an exact replica of a racing motorcycle. It looked great but rode like a parade float in a car wash.
Tennis was fun, and all the neighbor kids were there, swinging rackets and thwacking fuzzy balls, and the Schmalz brothers had the gumption to continue. To spur themselves onward, Dan and Mike would race each other up Roosevelt and time it on their wristwatches. Head-to-head races sometimes occurred, but an honor system for self-timing meant the brothers could race it alone and just note the finish and brag later at dinner. Six minutes was the upper limit, while getting inside 10 was considered the brotherly standard.
It was these first timed excursions up Roosevelt St. that put Dan Schmalz and his brothers in the mindset of a bike racer. First he upgraded his equipment and swapped out the motorcycle replica for a more apt pedal-powered machine. Then he joined a race club and began track cycling on the midwest circuit of outdoor velodromes, sprinting and cornering on fixed-gear frames in pursuit of more speed.
In his youth, the legends of cycling from Europe’s professional ranks became mythical sports heroes for Dan, and his love for bike racing solidified itself as a lifelong pursuit, a healthy hobby and a professional passion he has carried with him ever since.
‘If you time it, they will race’. Dan heard this voice in New York at a bike race and it stayed with him into the hot New Jersey night. It woke up with him and spoke whenever he thought of Dubuque’s historic bluffs. The voice of a lifelong bike racer spoke to Dan Schmalz from the mists of Eagle Point Park.
“If you time it, they will race”.
GREG LEMOND AND AMERICAN GRAVEL
“You need the three Ps if you want to put on a bike event for people – Police, Port-a-potties and People,” Dan says. “Police to stop the traffic, port-a-potties to stop public urination, and people to volunteer for all of the things it takes in between. Any one of those Ps is missing, you can’t do it.”
The Dubuque Gran Fondo first happened in 2014, after Dan and Mike had spent the previous calendar year researching and organizing how best to stage a bike event in Iowa that specifically showed off the region’s steep hills and dirt roads.
“Not dirt, gravel,” Dan said. “We wanted to bring folks to Dubuque to show how challenging the riding can be.”
Their first logistical stops in planning included the Dubuque City and County police departments, who had years of roadguard experience from a bevy of fun-runs, 10ks and other public events but hadn’t honestly done a Gran Fondo just yet, and to their credit seemed generally curious about the idea, as well as showing a demonstrated willingness to get on board the road closures for timed sectors.
“Police are key, but they do a lot of jobs all the time, so we made sure our contacts and pre-event plans were designed in advance and delivered with the whole event in mind. We did early route staging and planning together, and we also worked with the Heritage Trail park office for the chance to let folks discover Iowa gravel,” Dan says.
Iowans, Wisconsinites, Chicagoans and Minneapolitans have ‘discovered Iowa’ on bikes for nearly six decades, with mass events like RAGBRAI in the last week of July every year since 1973 attracting so many thousands that a lottery system was set in place to help limit the crowds. And also a lot of sensible knowledge about how to manage 8,000 people riding aon bikes for a week and not having them all peeing in people’s front yards all day. To accommodate more and more regional cyclists, the Iowa State Tourism Board even helped to fund the creation of an event calendar specifically for bike riders in search of supported weekend tours and day-long catered events every weekend from April to November and all across the state.
“RAGBRAI is the biggest supported bike tour in the world, but it’s a recreational ride, and for a lot of people it’s just a fun ride every day to the next night’s party. We saw DGF as a different kind of cycling opportunity, a ride with competitive sectors, a downtown Dubuque start and some gravel to make everyone see how hilly Dubuque really is,” Dan says.
Dan and Mike put in the early work to create the DGF with a helpful ear at the Dubuque Department of Tourism, in a joint venture funded with a tiny grant. The brothers used the seed money to flex their marketing chops and put flesh on the bones of a borrowed Gran Fondo concept for a summer weekend bike event around the only hilly place in the Midwest.
Local cyclists knew what lay in store at the beginning of 72 miles in mid-August, 2014. Out-of-towners had only been told of the warning, that one doesn’t simply go for a leisurely bike ride in Dubuque, that a crushed limestone road for miles would crunch under them on the shaded Heritage Trail sector, out into honest-to-god corn fields for a loop that took in the steep city streets off the bluffs to start, and then a speedy downhill at the very end of the day to finish and dig in to the food and drink from the nearby Irish Hooley festival.
In fact the DGF was catered along the route, with food stops for participants staffed to accommodate even mechanical needs at miles 22 and 42 of the 72 mile full circuit that looped generally counterclockwise from its start at the 3-O-Clock position of the River Museum, and out to the 9-O-Clock spot where the last, and larger food stop took place.
That last DGF food stop took place at the Field of Dreams house and ballpark, no less. A place to water the bottles and replenish the pockets with more fruit and energy bars. To sit in the shade trees out past right field, lean the bikes up against those wooden bleachers and get to hear from the Old Timer on staff in his authentic 1918 Chicago White Sox baseball uniform as he stood and greeted the arriving DGF riders.
Local pro Evan Hartig, a university student in Wisconsin racing the interscholastic league that spans Midwest colleges and has MTB and even cyclocross race scheduled through Autumn and Winter, was the first DGF lowest-cumulative time winner, hustling through food stops to pick up more quick carbohydrates on his very fast tour of Dubuque’s gravel and hills.
Retired American Tour de France champion Greg Lemond came down from Minnesota with his wife as VIP guests of honor to ride the DGF from the start. As an added moment of cycling entertainment, on Friday evening Dan hosted a welcome dinner for hundreds of participants and their family members at the River Museum, screening a recent HBO documentary about LeMond, his legendary French teammate Bernard Hinault and their head-to-head duel for the yellow jersey in 1986. With LeMond up on stage talking about the very events depicted in the film, the whole evening took on a sheen of surreal and everlasting quietude, when a man with a story to tell, alone with a microphone on stage, sat and quietly thrilled an audience at dusk on a warm summer’s eve in Dubuque.
SERIOUS SAUSAGES
Dan says the computer timing system allowed for a novel process in determining competitive riders in the separate categories, and helped him select age-group winners easily.
“The overall winners – first woman, first man – both won a brand new bike from the American bike manufacturer Van Dessel. The New Jersey company even custom-fitted the whole setup and delivered a fully equipped two wheeler to their homes.”
“Each age-category winner got something a little more special, though, because we realized that a prize at the Dubuque Gran Fondo should be something unique, special and really big. A serious prize for serious cyclists.”
Armed with coolers of crushed ice, Dan loaded up serious 8-lb summer sausages from long-time Iowa salumists at the Dubuque Packing Company, nearly a dozen pieces, and called each happy winner to the stage.
“Winning a new bike is a big deal, and Edwin Burke at Van Dessel runs a company built on custom fitting with good quality parts for hard riding on gravel, but an 8-lb sausage for some people is like winning the Price is Right showcase. They’re incredibly happy and the smiles are broad and genuine. Nobody expects a sausage trophy.”
BANANA SHORTAGES
Five different countries have flown their national flag over Dubuque in its history, from France’s blue and yellow territorial banner in 1673, and again under Napoleon’s republic in 1803, to Spain in the last four decades of the 1700s, the Union Jack of Great Britain in 1780 and finally the stars and stripes of America from the time of the Louisiana Purchase.
But there has only ever been one symbol for Dubuque, and that’s the Fleur-de-Lis, a decorative Iris flower stylized to represent the martial outposts of France in its monarchical period. And this Fleur-de-Lis was first brought to the region by none other than Julien Dubuque, the French trapper and miner who became the first European settler to live permanently on the shores of the Mississippi near the steep bluffs of the river.
What brought Dubuque to the region was the abundance of lead ore in the ground. He used his knowledge to build highly technical smelters for the era that allowed the raw ore to be heated and then to drip into tiny molds and cooled for use later as ammunition shot in rifles and muskets.
The DGF symbol, Dan says, could only ever be the Fleur-de-Lis, and so each jersey, each t-shirt, all the road markers that were stapled to fence posts and telephone poles and all the victory sausages came printed with a great and easily identifiable logo on the front.
“Two years after the first DGF, the gravel cycling event market in America exploded. Thousands of riders across the country started riding fast trail bikes with larger tires in organized groups everywhere you looked. In Kansas the Flint Hills around Emporia put on a series of races during Memorial Day weekend that proved so popular a whole new industry was created: The Gravel Grinder,” Dan says.
“Our initial dream was to show off all the nature stuff in a place that doesn’t have a lot of nature stuff. Dubuque is not the French Alps, but there are steep climbs everywhere you look. Dubuque is not the cobblestone farm roads of Belgium, but there are unorthodox terrain challenges for bikes up and down the bluffs. And Dubuque is a city of trendsetters,” Dan says.
“In the end I got to play Kevin Costner for a weekend and build a dream loop for cyclists, in the hopes they would come. And they did, even America’s greatest pro cyclist Greg LeMond came, and he led the peloton for the rollout up 3rd Street. It doesn’t get any better.”
In fact, Dan’s only quibble was a logistical oversight that sent him out to plunder Dubuque’s all-night grocery stores at 4am when he realized that the size of the crowds was going to outnumber his snack supply.
“We went bananas on the bananas, and loaded up at 4am with every single one in the store,” Dan says. “As a proof of concept we were early on the gravel craziness, and came out of the experience as trendsetters. Hundreds of riders and thousands of family members all spent a weekend in Dubuque on our secret hills, and we even won a Dubuque 365 Impact Award from the local independent newspaper for ‘Best New Event’”.