Man on 4,000-mile bike ride visits Fairfield

This is the week of the Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, a time when thousands of cyclists are embarking on a 427-mile journey from Council Bluffs to Keokuk, stopping in Fairfield along the way.

But truth be told, Fairfield has already been visited by a cyclist on a long journey. Just last week, a man named John Link spent a few days here in Silicorn Valley, pausing to catch his breath in the midst of a bicycle ride of epic proportions. Link is visiting friends and family throughout the eastern half of the United States, and he's doing it all atop his 1989 Centurion Ironman road bike.

Visiting Fairfield

The 65-year-old Link began this solo voyage from his home in New York City on May 28. By the time he returns to the Big Apple in late August, he will have traveled about 4,000 miles (in other words, the equivalent of almost 10 RAGBRAIS).

On Wednesday, July 17, Link rolled into the town of Fairfield, having completed just over half of his journey. The following day, he visited The Ledger for what is so far his only media exposure on the trip.

Link chartered a course through Fairfield because he has family here. His wife Lori is the sister of Jim Belilove of Creative Edge Master Shop. Due to a series of delays earlier in the ride, Link arrived in Fairfield later than expected and missed seeing his in-laws, who were, ironically, in New York visiting Lori. Nevertheless, Link stayed at the Belilove's home, and was able to catch up with friends he's made in Fairfield, a town he's visited about a dozen times before.

Route

His trip has taken him from New York through the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia and down through the Carolinas before finally turning north outside Atlanta, Georgia. He's gone through Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois and now Iowa. After his two-night stay in Fairfield, he headed for Grinnell, and later he'll visit Minnesota and Wisconsin, where he'll take a few days off to spend with relatives. After that, he'll travel down to Chicago and then east through Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania before ending up in his home state.

Link said the trek through the Blue Ridge Mountains has been the toughest so far, not so much because the inclines were steep but because they were so long. At one point along his path, he was going uphill for 13 straight miles. The steepest ascent he encountered was in Georgia, where he was finally forced to walk his bicycle. As a matter of fact, that hill was so steep that he could not stand flat-footed on the ground because he would have fallen over.

Routine

Link averages somewhere between 60-70 miles on days he rides, though he has gone as many as 101 miles from Carlyle, Illinois, to Springfield, Illinois. He usually rides for four days and then takes a day to rest. However, he is quick to add that 'resting” does not mean 'recuperating.” In fact, he's found that sometimes he is the most sluggish after a rest day from the lack of activity.

The best roads are the seldom traveled two-lane variety. And they have to be paved, too. Link is not comfortable taking his bike, with its ultra-thin tires, on gravel roads, though he's had to a few times. He also tries to avoid four-lane roads because drivers seem to be less courtesy and 'act like they're in a race car,” Link said.

Lodging

Link packed exceptionally lightly for this trip. His bike and luggage combined weigh only 49.5 pounds, and that's with an old steel-framed bicycle. One piece of luggage that is indispensable is his camping tent, large enough for one person to sit up in. Link sleeps in it about half the time, and the other half he's sleeping in a bed, either at a motel/hotel or more frequently in a friend's home.

Camping requires a bit more work, since it takes about an hour for him to disassemble the tent and pack all his gear on the bike, but it does feel more like home.

'I can visit friends or family for one or more days, and I can spend a night in a motel, but my tent is the place to which I always return, although in many different campgrounds,” Link wrote on his blog.

Food

For the past two years, Link has followed a specific eating routine when cycling. He eats very little in the morning and afternoon when he's making the most headway, relying on nutritious powdered drinks, healthy juices such as V8, or other snacks such as cacao beans and tea.

Link tries to finish his rides in the early afternoon before it gets too hot. By then, he's built an enormous appetite. He said he can frequently down a half-pound hamburger or steak, a bowl of chili and a desert or two. Though his evening meals are large, he's lost a few pounds since the trip began from so much exercise.

Injury report

Link calculates that he had finished 56 percent of his trip when he arrived in Fairfield. The days leading to his stop were very painful, not because of the terrain (which has been among the easiest) but because of Link's new shoes. Serious cyclists wear cleated shoes that lock into their pedals. Link had been wearing road-bike cleats, but the trouble with those is that the spikes are so tall that they're hard to walk in when off the bike.

To fix that problem, Link ordered a pair of mountain-bike cleats with shorter spikes. But it turned out that those shoes were a bit too large, and because they didn't fit securely, they rubbed back and forth on his feet and bit into his ankles. On July 16, after wearing the shoes for three days, Link wrote on his travel blog that he had just suffered 'the most uncomfortable day I've ever spent on a bike.”

Luckily, Link was able to order new shoes online, which were waiting for him when he arrived in Fairfield. After a few days with the new shoes, Link reports that his feet are healing.

While in Fairfield, Link went to a smoothie shop where he ran into chiropractor Haddington O'Heart. Link told him it felt like his ankle bones were out of place, and O'Heart suggested he see Dr. Mike McConeghey. Link saw McConeghey later that afternoon, who worked not only on Link's left ankle but also some lingering pain in his left arm related to a crash Link suffered while training for this big bike ride, and a knee problem Link has had for the past six years. Link said he was amazed at how much better he felt after just an hour.

Why do this?

Link was inspired by the story of Juliana Burhing, a woman who with only eight months of cycling experience rode her bicycle 'around the world,” going through the United States, Australia, South Asia, Turkey and southern Europe. In 2016, Link took a trip where he rode all day and stayed at a motel in another town. A few years later, he was doing two-day bike trips while staying with friends. But he still wanted something more.

In 2018, Link learned about this cycling adventure called the Trans America Bike Race, an unsupported race of more than 4,000 miles from Astoria, Oregon, to Yorktown, Virginia. The scale of the challenge was just what he was looking for, but not the location. Who would he stay with along the way? He didn't have many friends, if any, who lived along the route.

Badly wanting to conquer such a feat, Link planned a 4,000-mile journey completely of his own making. Instead of following a known path, he would chart a course through the eastern United States, visiting his six siblings, his mother, several cousins, in-laws and friends from grade school, high school, college, graduate school, and beyond.

Link is now putting his plan into action. He writes daily updates with photos of his trip on his blog, which you can follow at https://johnlinkbikingadventures.blogspot.com.