Where to next?: Bike club members plan rides for the new year
Reflecting on 2024, I’m not alone in totaling mileage and fantasizing about next season’s riding goals. A quick survey of regional bike clubs finds like-minded cyclists doing the same, some with varying degrees of club coordination, others on their own.
For 15 years, a shifting crew of regulars have frequently helped me greet the dawn, logging 20-30 miles at paces faster than I’d maintain riding solo. While individual mileage totals were personal, we commonly bandied ideas over post-ride coffees about gearing up for longer distances and discovering routes beyond our usuals.
Pre-pandemic, we’d gather yearly at a local eatery for post-winter holiday planning breakfasts, armed with big ideas, cellphones, and paper calendars for more organized planning. A belated holiday buzz, bottomless coffee mugs and that familiar camaraderie generated by endless miles on each other’s wheels facilitated our winter dreaming. Invariably, a couple weeks off our bikes with a new year beckoning led us to inevitable overplanning.
Stoked for the next riding season, we’d push back from the table, our heads filled with the biking equivalent of holiday sugarplums, ranging from one-day rides — St. Patrick’s Day in Wauconda, Chicago’s Bike the Drive — to longer ventures like Iowa’s weeklong RAGBRAI (Des Moines Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa).
Like me, bike club members across the Chicago area are anticipating their own 2025 riding goals, looking to pad their mileage with multiday adventures in novel, challenging settings. Clubs offer a built-in advantage: a large pool of riders often possessed with cycling ambitions to match one’s own.
Time to plan
In a recent club newsletter, Arlington Heights Bicycle Club President Pete Schmelzer observed, “As the best days of 2024’s riding season fade away, small talk among cyclists transitions from ‘Where have you been riding lately?’ to ‘Where are you going to ride next year?’”
While some clubs simply raise awareness of multiday or destination trips, others do more. Ella Shields, secretary of the Wheeling Wheelmen, noted that her well-established club falls into the former category, with no one person coordinating trips. “It's friend to friend and word-of-mouth.”
Evanston Bicycle Club takes a casual approach to coordinating multiday rides, according to President Doug Hoffman. “When a club member registers for a ride, such as the Grand Illinois Bike Tour or Horsey Hundred, they’ll send an email announcing travel plans and invite club members to participate.”
“As long as there are at least two EBC members, a ride can be an EBC Club Ride,” Hoffman said. “The organizer becomes the ride leader and can log the distance as ‘Club Miles.’”
Elmhurst Bicycle Club President Jason Jarrett emailed that the club doesn’t have an individual for coordinating multiday events. “More likely one interested member, also a ride leader, will take the lead organizing it.”
A member has led RAGBRAI club participation the last couple years, for example, holding in-person planning sessions, initiating email and text groups and posting information.
Like the Elmhurst club, Schmelzer’s Arlington Heights club is farther along on the helpfulness scale. “AHBC has not formally designated anyone responsible for coordinating specific destination rides. Usually, what happens is one person sends out an email blast to the members, saying ‘I'm going to XYZ ride … is anyone else going, and what are your plans for driving, hotels, etc.?’”
Bottom up process
“At a monthly member meeting, we’ve had people give a two- to three-minute promo for a favorite destination ride,” Schmelzer said. “Our ‘process’ is rather informal and bottom up rather than top down.”
Club vice president Paula Matzek echoed that a “standard” destination ride, Indiana’s Amishland and Lakes, has been publicized this way for eight to 10 years. “Someone spearheads the effort, promoting it at meetings, contacting the lodging, sometimes organizing a group meal.”
Having ridden it herself several times, she’s met other Chicagoland clubs on that weekend outing in northern Indiana, like the Wheeling Wheelmen.
At the Fox Valley Bicycle and Ski Club, a member researches an invitational event or tour, networks with members to solicit interest, and sends the board information for posting on the club calendar. That individual becomes the club contact, a liaison to locate accommodations, book a block of rooms and handle reservations for group dinners. As the date approaches, a text group enables participants to contact each other.
Already posted on FVBSC’s calendar are RAGBRAI (last full week in July) and Pedal Across Wisconsin Northwoods trip (July 20-26), starting and ending in Rhinelander.
Grand Illinois Bike Tour 2025
One frequent club response to destination ride planning is the annual Grand Illinois Bike Tour hosted by Ride Illinois. In its 22nd year, GIBT embraces different Illinois regions, scrambling routes each year and adding to its popularity.
This year GIBT rolls June 8-13, starting and ending in Rochelle, and overnighting in Ottawa, DeKalb and Rockford hotels; shorter three-day ride options are also offered. Luggage transport and mechanical support free up riders to enjoy biking and fellowship. With registration only open since Nov. 1, the ride’s popularity is not overstated.
One three-day ride option is already sold out, according to Ed Barsotti, senior consultant for Ride Illinois. “We’re almost 70% full at the moment,” he reported in mid-December.
“In recent years, we’d ‘fill up’ by sometime in January,” Barsotti said. “But some waiting list registrants and others have been able to get in later due to cancellations.”
Proceeds benefit Ride Illinois, the statewide, nonprofit bicycle advocacy organization whose mission is to make Illinois better through biking.
• Join the ride. Contact Ralph Banasiak at alongfortheridemail@gmail.com.