A Missed Opportunity

Gifts which arrived with registration for Trans Iowa v11

Today there is a big registration party going on at District Cycles for the Mid-South event upcoming in March of 2026. District Cycles owner, Bobby Wintle, is the mastermind behind the event, and along with his wife, Crystal, they have leveraged every opportunity to promote their business alongside this event. 

Makes sense when you stop to consider it all. Why would one want to keep things separated - the event and the business - or why would one not want to hitch their wagon, as a business, to an event which draws in warm bodies to your establishment? 

These were my questions back twelve, fifteen years ago, as I was running Trans Iowa. In fact, Jeff Kerkove and I started Trans Iowa out of the bicycle shop we worked at. All along, for fourteen years, one might have thought Europa Cycle & Ski would have wanted to take advantage of what Trans Iowa was capable of bringing to the business.

Post card registrations for Trans Iowa v11

 But oddly enough, the owner did not take advantage of anything we could have benefited the business with. I recall one Trans Iowa registration where we had a dozen people waiting to get in the door to register. That's twelve plus people you wouldn't have had inside your business at any other time, but was there any effort to make anything out of this opportunity? 

Nope. 

And this was, and still is, baffling to my mind. I look at how Bobby Wintle handles this kind of thing and I can only shake my head at all the years of lost opportunities related to Trans Iowa and the bike shop I worked at then. I think about the buzz registration at the shop caused amongst the employees. Heck, even the mailman was excited every year about Trans Iowa. You'd think this would be a clue that possibly there was a nugget of opportunity waiting there.  An opportunity to bring in local cyclists to be a part of something cool and unique, and create goodwill amongst the locals for the shop. Maybe even sell some things. 

Yeah, it doesn't matter anymore. But whenever I see something like Mid-South's registration party, and remember Trans Iowa registration typically happened in November, one of the worst times for cycling retail in Iowa, and I cannot believe all the missed opportunities. 

But what do I know? I'm just some greasy bicycle mechanic.