John Ferguson, with his distinctive white beard, often seen cycling on local roads when leading a tour group or commuting from his home in West Bay, recently completed the ride of a lifetime.

Ferguson was one of more than 25,000 cyclists from 17 countries who covered 424 miles across Iowa in six days as part of the annual RAGBRAI ride last month.

“I don’t know why I waited until I was 65 to do this bike ride, because it was just magical,” he told compass.

During the epic bike tour, he was on the road for six to seven hours a day and managed an altitude difference of 5,500 meters.

“They say Iowa is flat, but that’s nonsense,” said Ferguson, recalling the many uphill stretches RAGBRAI took him on. “My legs felt it every day.”

On one stretch of road, he said, he drove over a mile at a 12% gradient – “It’s like driving over the Kimpton Bridge, but imagine it’s twice as steep and a mile long.”

Seven months of training

Living on a really flat island, it’s not easy to find a place to train for those climbs. Ferguson says the only way to prepare on Grand Cayman is to ride the East End Queens Highway loop into a headwind.

He began training for RAGBRAI in January of this year and logged more than 3,000 miles before boarding the plane to Iowa last month.

“All that training still didn’t prepare me for these climbs that never end. It’s just up and down,” he said, adding that he sometimes cycled downhill at speeds of 42 miles per hour, immediately followed by a steep hill where he could only reach speeds of 4 miles per hour.

After returning to the Cayman Islands from Iowa, he rested his tired legs for five days, riding on four wheels instead of two. However, on Friday 2 August, he got back on his bike and cycled to George Town for a TV party at Constitution Hall to support Cayman Islands’ Jordan Crooks in his Olympic 50m swimming final.

On four of the six days of RAGBRAI, he rode off-road, on gravel roads that were bumpier and much more difficult to navigate than the asphalt roads.

RAGBRAI was founded in 1973 by the Des Moines Register newspaper in Iowa and is an acronym for the Register’s annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. It is the oldest and longest multi-day cycling event in the world.

This year’s ride started in Glenwood on the Missouri River and ended in Burlington on the Mississippi. RAGBRAI riders have a tradition of dipping their rear wheel into the Missouri at the start and their front wheel into the Mississippi at the end – Ferguson said he was very happy about that.

He posted a photo on social media of himself ecstatic as his front wheel floats in the Mississippi at the end of the grueling event.

“RAGBRAI Magic”

“It was the most incredible experience I’ve ever had, I can’t remember when it was,” Ferguson says of RAGBRAI. “I’ve now made some friends that I feel like I’ve known my whole life.”

“I can’t really explain how magical RAGBRAI really is.”

“RAGBRAI magic” is a phrase drivers hear often, he explained, telling a story that he believes sums up the words.

Ferguson, who performs as the pirate “Dry Rot” every year during the Pirates Week festival in the Cayman Islands, said he was biking to his campsite in Glenwood the night before the ride began when he heard someone shouting “Dry Rot! Dry Rot!”

“I looked around on my bike and thought, ‘I’m in Iowa. Nobody in Iowa knows my pirate name is Dry Rot.’ That was the weirdest thing. Then I saw a guy on a bike coming toward me on the street, waving his hand and yelling ‘Dry Rot.'”

It was a friend he had met in 2015 while cycling along the north coast of Jamaica and had not seen since.

“There were tears,” Ferguson said, recalling the roadside reunion.

Ferguson was part of a 210-strong team riding across Iowa, but because thousands participated in the event, he often didn’t see his teammates until he arrived in town at the end of the day’s ride, where they all pitched tents in specially designated campsites.

One of the towns they passed through was Greenfield, which suffered severe damage from a devastating tornado in May. The town was affected by Hurricane Ivan, Ferguson said.

Organizers had asked city officials if the ride should bypass Greenfield this year, but they said they wanted the cyclists to go through. “On that day, cyclists spent more than $55,000 in cash,” Ferguson said.

“I emptied my wallet,” like many others, he added.

In the small towns the cyclists passed through, there was plenty of support from locals. “There were Girl Scouts selling lemonade and church ladies handing out slices of apple, rhubarb and blueberry pie,” Ferguson said.

After a hard day of cycling, the cyclists were treated to live music from local rock bands, as well as barbecues and beer tents in the evenings before settling in for the night in the tents and sleeping bags that were transported from town to town by relief teams.

Ferguson, who works for Paddle Wheel Adventures and leads bike tours on the island, says he has already signed up for next year’s ride and hopes to organize a team from the Cayman Islands to accompany him.