The Story Of Guitar Ted: The Beginnings Of The Guitar Ted Death Ride Invitational

A Guitar Ted Productions series.

Welcome to the third series on G-Ted Productions! This series jumps off from the time where the "Race Against Death Tour" ended and will take you up to the beginnings of Trans Iowa in late 2004. This is an eight year period where my life was transformed. You could say it was metamorphosed from the old to something quite new.

This won't have a lot of bicycle stuff in it at times, but it is all essential to the story of "Guitar Ted". This isn't about where the name came from. That's all here.  No, this is about the person. 

As with previous historical series on the blog, images will be a rarity. Cell phones, social media, and digital images were not available to take advantage of in those last days of analog living. 

In today's post the origins of the Guitar Ted Death Ride Invitational are explained........


The Beginnings Of The Guitar Ted Death Ride Invitational: So, in the years that I was a car mechanic, as I have said, I really had no time to ride a bike. I had almost no extra energy to do it either. Being a car mechanic in a busy shop is exhausting physically. To then go on any sort of a bike ride was almost beyond my capabilities at the time. I tinkered on bikes in my new shop in the basement, and sometimes I would pick up the odd repair for extra cash, but mostly, it was just car work. But that said, there were occasional bicycle outings.


 There were the occasional mountain bike rides, for example. I had a pretty sweet Bontrager Race with the special offset Rock Shox Judy fork on it. Since soft trail conditions in the area were miserable from May through September due to overgrowth of weeds, we mainly rode off pavement around here in Spring and Fall. 1997/98 saw me putting in a trail that traversed the two "forks" of the Green Belt Trail along Ridgeway Avenue and then that extended Eastward to the lake out there at one time. Only the section between the forks of the Green Belt Trail survives to this day. Because my friend Mark helped a little bit with this it became known by the avid cyclists in the area as "Marky-Mark".


But off road riding was rare. I couldn't find decent weekends very often in Spring and Fall. I do remember once getting out with Ryan in George Wyth. No one had ridden out there in weeks due to the weedy overgrowth, and while Ryan and I were speeding along Alice Wyth Lake, I hit an unseen log, went end over end, and snapped my Answer Hyperlite bar off at the grip on one side. That was it for that ride! This also was the last time I ever rode bikes with Ryan. So anyway, mountain bikes were a rare treat, and riding at all was a rare treat.

However, I would pick one nice day, generally a Saturday I had off in Summer, plot a route on county blacktops, and ride my road bike all day long. I would start in the morning, and generally get about 6-8 hours in, and come home bonked, dead tired, and beat. Basically, I would ride myself to death just to make sure I got a “good one” in and that had to satisfy me for the remainder of the year until the following year’s “death ride” would occur.

These rides were sometimes lessons. In fact, to be honest, you’d have thought I lost all knowledge of what I had learned back in ’94 and ’95 when I did my two big self-supported tours. I would almost never have enough water, I would bring no food, and maps? Ha! I flew by the seat of my pants, often ending up in towns and on roads I never had planned on visiting or being on. I recall being near to falling off the bike when I finally reached Jesup, Iowa and got some Coke and a bag of Cheetos. (True convenience store “nutrition” there!) Another ride ended up on a black top that petered out into a gravel road, and me on an old Aegis carbon road bike with 23mm tires! Yes, I flatted.

By this point those little “flip phones” were becoming a “thing”, but I had no intentions of ever owning one. So, here I was, a fool on what generally was a hot, humid Summer day, riding a road bike all alone in the Iowa countryside. It is a wonder I didn’t get killed, or die from stupidity. I wasn't unaware of the irony, and I took to calling these Mid-Summer rides "Death Rides", as if I were taunting Death in some weird way.

Once I had gotten married, Mrs. Guitar Ted wasn’t too fond of these goofy, solo outings in the countryside. A countryside which she was totally unfamiliar with, by the way, being from Texas. But I insisted on continuing these rides until we had our daughter in December of 2000. That was when I had to be home and take care of my new baby. Then I had something else come up which kind of came out of left field. A chance at an old profession. Just for a week.

Next: Road Mechanic