Steamboat Reporter Completes 409.6-Mile RAGBRAI Ride in Iowa

Steamboat Springs —What does it take to ride 409.6 miles across Iowa when your longest local ride was 30 miles?

Not much, apparently. Just a cheap road bike, a lot of boredom, and the kind of suffering that turns a casual observer into a participant.

Sarah Feinsinger wrote in the Steamboat Pilot & Today that she completed her first bicycle tour at the end of July. She’s the Outdoors and Sports reporter here. She covers the cycling scene that dominates this town’s weekends. But long-distance cycling was never her sport. Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, she pedaled no more than 15 miles in a day. Cycling was just a mode of transportation. Or a Sunday family activity.

She bought a cheap road bike in February. She bought clearance gear. She rode the paved roads around Steamboat on weekends. If she had time.

It wasn’t enough. Local cyclists probably laughed. The pavement here is minimal. She got bored. She got unmotivated. She logged around 400 training miles. Her longest ride was just 30 miles. That’s it.

Then she went to Iowa.

The Hawkeye State is her dad’s boyhood home. It’s where the family gathered every holiday. She remembers sitting on her grandfather’s lap, playing cribbage. The six-hour trek from Chicago to Des Moines was a constant. Through the pandemic, college graduation, her parents’ divorce, mental health struggles, and her grandparents’ passing, Iowa remained steady.

She decided to ride RAGBRAI. The Des Moines Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. It’s a rolling party of 40,000 riders. They go from the Missouri River to the Mississippi River. It takes a week. They drink beer. They eat pork chops. They push through 95-degree days with 90% humidity. The corn sweat is real.

Her uncle leads a team of adolescents and young teens there every year. He handles the heavy lifting. He ensures riders are awakened, fed, and ready to go at dawn. Coaches and mentors do the work so the riders can focus on biking. They talked about it over the holidays. They compared the cycling scenes of Steamboat and Iowa. It struck her that she should do it.

The event started in 1973 as a newspaper article. Years later, she found herself serving as a burgeoning reporter at a newspaper. The irony is thick.

She didn’t just ride. She learned about pain. She absorbed the suffering. And she understood family. The ride wasn’t just about the miles. It was about the connection to the place that held her together when everything else fell apart.

The short version: She went from riding 15 miles to riding 409.6. She went from watching the sport to living it. The cornfields didn’t care about her fitness level. They just sweated. And she rode.

The question isn’t whether she finished. The question is why she stopped at 30 miles for so long. The answer is in the boredom. And the cheap bike.

Feinsinger wrote that the experience taught her more than endurance. It revealed lessons about the people who support you. The uncle who wakes the team up. The mentors who guide them. The family that waits at the end of the journey.

Iowa isn’t just a backdrop. It’s the reason she went. And the reason she came back changed.

Read that again.