RAGBRAI is an annual bike ride across Iowa. This documentary shows what it means to those who ride it.
They ride and ride and then ride some more, tens of thousands of them. All ages, sizes and shapes, they ride across Iowa every year in the summer heat.
They have been doing this for decades, participants in RAGBRAI, a cumbersome acronym that stands for a joyful annual event, formally known as the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa.
This is the largest bike-touring event in the world, the oldest and longest too. Some have been doing this for years and some will be doing it again in July and some of them powerfully pepper “Shift: the RAGBRAI Documentary,” a compelling and polished new one-hour film that is at once entertaining and enlightening.
It is the work of many people from the Des Moines Register newspaper, primarily two energetic young staff members named Courtney Crowder and Kelsey Kremer.
You may recognize Crowder’s name. A native of Glenview, she was once a bright byline in this newspaper. From about 2010 to 2015 she wrote hundreds of stories for the Tribune, most of them focused on celebrities.
She was drawn west to a position at the Register with the promise that she would be able to realize her lofty ambition which was, she says with typical enthusiasm, “to change the world by writing long-form stories about people.”
She has done so, after spending her first months at the paper detailing the television antics of Iowa farmer Chris Soules, who starred in the 19th season of “The Bachelor” and later got in some serious trouble back in Iowa for leaving the scene of a fatal traffic accident.
She then wrote about the 2016 presidential caucus cycle; the struggles and triumphs of transgender Iowans; murder, sexual assault and other criminal matters; and various social issues and causes.
She did such fine work that in June 2018, she was named the paper’s Iowa columnist, only the fifth since World War II and the first woman so designated. The paper’s executive editor, Carol Hunter, wrote at the time that “I’m betting her fresh perspective will prove illuminating.”
That’s a fine word, “illuminating,” to attach to “Shift.”
Though Crowder had been covering the event for some years, when photo editor Kremer suggested to her in early 2021 that it might make a documentary, the pair got to work. “I had met so many riders and heard so many compelling stories that I knew I might be able to get to the heart of the matter, find answers to the ‘Why are you doing this?’ question,” Crowder says.
Their film gives us a short look back, traveling to the ride’s origins in 1973 when a pair of clever Register writers named John Karras and Don Kaul gave birth to the event. “They were both serious bike riders and they ginned up this idea to ride across the state and have the paper pay for the endeavor,” Crowder says.
Thus did they become the Woodward and Bernstein of the bike world.
“They understood, as I believe, that Iowa is best told by traveling the roads and the towns’ main streets and meeting and talking to people eye to eye,” Crowder says.
That first ride attracted some 200 other bikers and it grew larger and larger. It has been and remains a seven-day-long event, covering 450 miles to 500 miles, with various towns hosting riders for overnight stays. Of course, not all riders tackle the entire course and, naturally, many of them are doing it for the fun of it all, riding and partying with friends and strangers. “It is on one level sort of like a rolling carnival,” Crowder says. “But there is deeper meaning to be found.”
In advance of last year’s ride, she interviewed at some length 40 participants, finally deciding to focus on a smaller number and they wound up with stories that shine, people who shared themselves.
We meet Andrew Boddicker and Ian Zahren, two gay men who grew up in rural America and, after living big city lives elsewhere, returned to the small Iowa town of Lansing, where they found one another, fell in love and have crafted fulfilling lives as school music teachers, community leaders and are as happy as can be.
There’s a woman named Torie Giffin, who first rode as a single woman in her 30s. When she returned decades later, she had been married, divorced and was accompanied by the youngest of her three children, who had been given a chilling cancer diagnosis. When the little boy becomes the target of nasty invective, Giffin fights back with cool courage, which compels others to leap in with encouragement and kindness.
There’s wildly bearded and passionate Adam Lineberry, riding with his 9-year-old son Liam, and talking frankly of how he became addicted to drugs as a teen and of his struggle out of that dark pit. He rides in Iowa and elsewhere in the country to raise money to build a rehab center, at one point saying that he considers riding “freedom on wheels.”
A Black woman named Dayna Chandler lost her husband when they were young parents to a freak car accident. With three young children, she started biking as a way to heal. A Des Moines school counselor on the cusp of retirement, she has become determined to, as she tells Crowder, “put more Black butts on bikes.” Toward that end, she has started a chapter of Black Girls Do Bike.
Working with 10 colleagues, Crowder and Kremer, who traversed the course by car, wound up with some 70 hours of film. In the artfully edited final version, you get a sense of the excitement of the ride but also the stunning landscape, which one rider calls “a canvas that God has made for you.”
With the energetic backing of editor Hunter, the film and accompanying stories became the paper’s major project for this year. Made on a $30,000 shoestring, the film premiered at Des Moines’ Varsity Cinema in early May.
Crowder and Kremer are on the hunt for more screens and they deserve to find them. So far planned is a July 16 screening in Crystal Lake.
That’s just before this year’s 50th RAGBRAI takes off on July 22 from Iowa’s Sioux City and ends in Davenport on July 29.
Crowder again will be writing about this year’s ride. It’s her job. But also, she and her husband, South Side native Scott Graca, who works as a data analyst, have fallen hard for Iowa, all of Iowa. “Chicago will always have my heart,” she says. “This was a big move for both of us but we have been able to discover our real selves here and we have come to know that in this world there is more that connects us all than divides us.”
