I have been wanting to give a recap on my week at RAGBRAI and figured I might as well dust off the MS blog site and give it another guy. Looking back at my blog posts it has been a few days short of 2 years since I last posted a blog out here! COVID came and ruined a lot of things including my posting out here so sorry about that. I am hoping to get back to writing blog posts and you will get an idea as to why later in this blog. If you have read my blogs in the past, welcome back! If you are new here I highly recommend scrolling through some of the earlier blogs to get an understanding of my journey with MS. It has been a pretty wild journey that last 4 years.
Now on to RAGBRAI. For those that don't know RAGBRAI stands for Registers Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa and it was started 49 years ago by a couple of Des Moines Register reporters who enjoyed riding bikes. It has turned into a huge biking event that takes place the last week of July every year. I really didn't know what to expect from the event, I had ridden across Iowa in a more self sustaining ride so I knew what it would be like to do the 'ride' portion of it but man was that only part of it! I quickly came to realize that RAGBRAI is much more of a week long festival than it is a bike ride. Now this may be different based on the team/people you ride with but for my team it was a festival! The goal was really to hang out with an incredible community of riders drinking cold beer, eating good food from vendors, and enjoying the beautiful landscape of God's country. It took me a day or two to adjust to this approach for riding across Iowa but once I got adjusted to the pace and the reason for doing RAGBRAI that the team had I really enjoyed it. Overall I really enjoyed the ride and the company! I appreciate all the Tappers that allowed Cris and I to join them this year!
I have spent the last few days really reflecting on the WHY. Why did I want to ride RAGBRAI? What is/was my goal and did I achieve it? There are really two different answers to the WHY question. The obvious answer is that it is super embarrassing to be a somewhat avid bike rider in Iowa and having to tell people I have NEVER ridden RAGBRAI. I couldn't continue to live with myself answer the question with, 'no I haven't done RAGBRAI and I don't really have a good answer as to why not.' I can now answer the question with a resounding YES!
The second reason for doing RAGBRAI is a little more complicated. If you know anything about me, my competitive nature, and my journey with MS you know I am a little bit of a unicorn. If you were to look up the definition of MS on the internet you will often see something about how it is often a disabling disease. It paints a very bleak outlook for people with MS. If you examine my life you honestly don't see that, I do crossfit three times a week, I just rode nearly 400 miles across Iowa on my bike, I play soccer with the high school boys I coach, the list goes on and on. Despite all of that I still get put into this MS box that makes people think I am fairly disabled simply because I have MS.
Some examples of this have happened over the last month as I prepared for my ride across Iowa. I injured my wrist several weeks ago(I wouldn't suggest doing a back handspring goal celebration at my age) and did a couple sessions of PT. On the initial forms there was a question about different diagnoses so I mentioned that I had MS. At the start of the session I was doing some warm up motions for my wrist that looked like I was throwing an imaginary dart. Super simple motion for my wrist and the PT lady makes a comment that essentially says, pay attention to your body because I don't want you to fatigue yourself doing these motions. This was just after we had discussed my MS a bit so I could only assume she was referring to a common symptom of fatigue in MS patients. But I felt put in a box based on the narrative that MS is a disabling disease. I don't want to be insensitive here because MS can be disabling and I know people who have been effected greatly by MS but not every person with MS is disabled and unable to throw an imaginary dart.
There were other stories where people questioned how fun it would be sagging(riding in the support vehicle) all day during RAGBRAI, only mentioned because they knew I had MS and assumed I wasn't planning to ride every mile of RAGBRAI. Little do they know I could probably ride circles around them. But there I was put into the same disabled box due to this disabled narrative that follows people with MS. All of this really leads me to the other answer to why I did RAGBRAI. From the moment I was diagnosed with MS my goal was to change the narrative. It was to show MS and everyone else that just because I have MS doesn't mean I am all of the sudden disabled and can't do cool things in life. Doesn't mean I can't ride across Iowa, or play soccer with my kids in the backyard, or lift heavy things for fun. I can do all these things and I know there are countless other people with MS out there that can do the same thing.
I am sick and tired of being put in a box. I am sick and tired of people assuming I can't do challenging things just because I have MS. It isn't necessarily their fault so I am not here to blast the people who have said these things. I am here to blast the narrative. I am here to change the narrative, not for those who don't live with MS but for those who do. I strongly believe there are people living with MS today that believe the narrative. Believe that they are all of a sudden incapable of doing challenging things because the narrative says they can't. I did RAGBRAI to have another notch in the belt that challenges that narrative.
I did RAGBRAI because I can. I did RAGBRAI because I am just stubborn enough to challenge that disabled narrative. I did RAGBRAI to push the boundaries of the things that people with MS can do and to show to those out there spreading the narrative that it is an antiquated narrative that needs to be adjusted. I did RAGBRAI to prove to others battling MS that they too can push their own boundaries and achieve things that they maybe previously thought they couldn't.