Where it all began — the origin story, Lansing, and the first RAGBRAI route guesses.
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In this holiday show, Adam and Michael go down memory lane from 2022 and look ahead to the Road Adventures of Cycling Men of Leisure for 2023. Will you join them? They talk about the highlights of their adventures from the year and what's to come in the new year.
They also check in on the ongoing route-guessing contest — Adam has yet to submit his own entry, and Michael still insists he already knows the route.
In this bonus content episode, Adam and Michael guide you through selecting your choices for their route-guessing contest. For anyone who wanted to enter but didn't know where to start, this one hands you the statistics to make an educated guess.
They break down the history: across 49 years, RAGBRAI has used just 14 different start towns (Council Bluffs, Glenwood, and Sioux City lead with seven apiece) and 12 end towns on the Mississippi (Davenport and Muscatine top the list at six). With the ride having visited roughly 80% of Iowa's 947 incorporated towns, the guys narrow down where a realistic guess should begin and end.
Then come the tiebreaker numbers: routes have ranged from 400 miles (1977) to 540 (1985), averaging 467, with a typical day around 68 miles — plus the trivia that 1980 held both the longest single day (114 miles) and the shortest (25). Equal parts cycling history lesson and friendly needling over who's actually going to win the bourbon bet.
The one that started it all. This is an announcement of a contest to kick off the podcast — you can win a Cycling Men of Leisure T-Shirt and a Cycling Men of Leisure ballcap. The contest is geared at kicking off the Road Adventures of Cycling Men of Leisure podcast and celebrating 50 years of RAGBRAI.
Guess the 2023 RAGBRAI 50th-anniversary route — the expo town, every overnight town, and the finish — for five points per correct town, with total mileage across Iowa (minus the century loop, without going over) as the tiebreaker. Adam swears he's already cracked it "through mathematical calculations, wizardry, and some witchcraft," but he and Michael are both ineligible to win.
Along the way they let the secret out: after recording in private for a while, the full podcast is set to launch January 1, 2023 — a cycling-centered show about their friendship, their road adventures, and everything in between.
That's all of Season One — the three launch episodes that kicked off the podcast in late 2022. The story continues in Season Two.