Team of disabled athletes to ride RAGBRAI

If you think riding almost 500 miles across the state of Iowa is impressive, try doing it with a disability.

That's what a team of cyclists will do in a couple of days when riders will gather in Council Bluffs for the 47th installment of RAGBRAI. The team from Adaptive Sports Iowa consists of athletes with disabilities, who don't let their impairments prevent them from living life to the fullest. Adaptive Sports Iowa provides those athletes with a variety of sports and recreation opportunities. Thirteen of them use wheelchairs to get around, either because of spinal cord injuries, spina bifida or a host of other reasons. Others are visually impaired, some with limited vision and some with none at all.

All of them have found a way to participate in RAGBRAI, which the team is doing for the ninth time. Those in wheelchairs use specially designed bicycles that they can power with their arms. The visually impaired people ride tandem bicycles – with two seats – so a sighted person can sit in front to steer.

Hannah Lundeen is the coordinator of Adaptive Sports Iowa. She said the group has one rider with a degenerative eye condition, who will likely go blind. His vision has become increasingly blurry, but he's still going to ride his own bicycle. He'll have a partner traveling near him who will help him with verbal cues.

The group ranges in age from 13 to 70. The team will be 70 members strong, about half of them with disabilities and the other half support crew.

Lundeen said the hand cycles used by people in wheelchairs are lower to the ground and are usually tricycles.

'It's very tiring to power a bike with a hand crank,” she said. 'Our hand cyclists have to do a lot more training than our upright riders.”

Lundeen said the important thing to remember with hand cycles is putting the rider in the correct position.

'We want to make sure they're using the right range of motion to protect their joints, because if they're not fitted right, the motion can hurt shoulders and wrists,” she said.

Lundeen said the group consists of people from all over the state, so it's hard for them all to get together for training sessions. That said, the group did meet a few weeks ago when it went on a 30-mile ride along the High Trestle Trail in central Iowa that goes through Slater, Madrid and Woodward.

'We went on a 95-degree day,” she said. 'That trail is exposed, and it was very sunny. We wanted to hang out as a team, and after the ride we all grabbed dinner together.”

When the group is not riding RAGBRAI, it meets for lots of other sports such as sled hockey, downhill skiing, wheelchair basketball, track and field, and beep baseball, a modified version of baseball for visually impaired people.