The GTDRI Stories: Just What Is This Anyway?

 

"The GTDRI Stories" is a series telling the history, untold tales, and showing the sights from the run of Guitar Ted Death Ride Invitationals. This series will run on Sundays. Thanks for reading!

The concept of a 'death ride', a ride where you go until you basically bonk, or cannot continue, or are exhausted at the end of, was probably not on most folks radar at the time I was doing such nonsense in the early 2000's. But I was really into the idea of long, hard gravel rides. 

Would anyone else be into it? I kind of figured that a few might be, but I was resigned to the fact that this "new" gravel thing was only for weirdos like myself, because, c'mon! We're talkin' gravel roads here. NO ONE was doing this back then that I knew of other than Jeff Kerkove, and a few of his friends, who would pound out miles and miles of gravel road riding to train for his solo 24 hour racing. I believe he did this for two reasons, mainly.

From a June '06 recon ride in Tama County

One was that there was little traffic to deal with. Secondly, gravel roads weren't typically leveled through hillier territory. They tended to follow the contours of the land more closely. This provided more opportunities for hard efforts in terms of climbing. And maybe Jeff's early gravel rides as a youth to get to fishing spots played into that, I don't know, but I do know he did a LOT of gravel riding back in those times. 

So, Jeff and a couple of guys in the area would do gravel group rides from time to time, but the majority of cyclists I knew weren't into it at all. I knew of the Pirate Cycling League guys by this time, and they did have a thriving gravel scene already by 2006, but that was so far away from where I was putting this on. Who would show up?

My idea for using maps for the first GTDRI came from the DK200.

I had a new acquaintance who was a blog reader here. He was also a part of the first Dirty Kanza 200 in 2006. His name is David Pals. David worked for the State of Iowa doing survey work. He mentioned that if I liked the idea of using maps, like the DK200 did for their inaugural event, that he had a similar resource that I could use. The State of Iowa was retiring their old paper maps in favor of digitized maps and there were a lot of old materials with maps of the different Iowa counties that were going to be disposed of. David got me almost the entire set for the State of Iowa. These were in the form of old paper road maps, if you remember such things. 

I simply copied these and highlighted the route on three separate sheets, put them in sandwich bags, and there you go! Route navigation the old school way! Cues were , of course, a better, more compact way to go, but this was easy, and it wasn't a race. Which brings me to this: "Just what the heck was this event anyway?"

I guess in hindsight the goofy name I came up with for this ride was not a great idea. I never ceased to be amazed at how often people took it seriously, or were confused by my saying that they could just show up and ride. Some were expecting an actual written invitation personalized for them. Some were off-put by the "death" thing, and were thinking this was a suffer-fest. Well......it was, kind of, but it was a group ride with a no drop rule, so it wasn't going to be like you would be left to fend off the wolves yourself, but it was still hard to convey this. 

And despite my insistence that this was not a race, many thought it was- at least early on- and I had to keep explaining to those who weren't understanding that this was not another version of Trans Iowa. It was just a ride, but after thinking about this, I think people were just really excited about the new gravel scene, and wanted to see more races on the calendar.  

But this whole confusion surrounding the name, the "Guitar Ted Death Ride Invitational", was limiting in the end. I think it took about ten versions of this ride to finally get it through to folks that it was just an excuse to ride ourselves silly all day on fun gravel routes. But that's okay. We had a lot of fun and some folks actually did 'get it' right away. This series will tell those tales. 

Next: The First GTDRI