Little 500 riders take 1,200-mile biking trip

As if 100 laps in the world’s greatest college bike race wasn’t challenging enough.

A month after the final bike crossed the line and the dust clouds settled at Bill Armstrong Stadium, two Women’s Little 500 riders set off for a summer ride that turned into two weeks of adventure.

Finishing the 22th Annual Little 500 Women’s race in 7th place, junior Caitlin Van Kooten and senior Julie Bembinista, two riders of Teter’s cycling team, decided to bike to Bloomington from Boulder, Colo., with three other friends.

Fourteen days later, the two Teter riders had strengthened friendships and quads during the 1,200-mile ride.

“We didn’t plan pretty much anything. We winged it every night,” Bembinista said. “Whenever we’d toast at dinner, we’d toast to ‘We’ll figure it out later,’ and that was pretty much our motto the whole time.”

After an 18-hour train ride from Buffalo Grove, Ill., to Boulder, Colo., the two joined three friends from previous cycling club trips they had taken, Colin and Garrett Henry and Adam Lueken.

“The whole point of the trip is Garrett wanted to ride his bike home to Indiana, so he kind of talked us into it,” Van Kooten said. “This year none of us could go on the cycle trip, so we decided we wanted to do our own thing.”

The group’s “own thing” included adventures of new people, one night without dinner and one hose shower.

“Our first riding day out of Boulder, it had been so windy, and we were all wiped out,” Van Kooten said. “We get to this supermarket, and we still have another six or seven miles before these campgrounds. So the boys are sleeping in the parking lot and the local pastor offered for us to stay. People were just so helpful along the whole way.”

Though she said the hose shower was not enjoyable, riding out of Denver, Colo., was the toughest part for Bembinista.

“The streets in Denver are not good at all,” she said. “They had big cracks and my wheel got caught and I tried to correct myself and I overcorrected and I crashed. It wasn’t anything serious, but I got scraped up a little bit, and my camera case that was attached to the handle bars in my bike fell off and a car ran over my camera. That was pretty rough for me.”

The riders hit strong winds early on in their trip. Crosswinds slowed the group down and tired the veteran bikers.

“It was almost enough to just knock you over when you were standing there – when you’re on a bike, you had to lean over and put your weight,” Van Kooten said. “But we were able to ride in a formation and rotate out so that we took turns who was in the wind.”

With a route that was constantly changing, the group encountered many different things. After riding for 15 miles and not seeing a single house, the group came across a race-car track that was having what Van Kooten said was its media day.

“We all got to ride in these race cars around this 3.1-mile, really nice track,” Van Kooten said. “We got up to like 120 miles per hour. That was really cool.”

While the 1,200 miles across U.S. terrain is not the cinder track in Bloomington, the long, slow-distance miles helped to make the riders more efficient.

“Long, slow miles are good to build up your base for when you do speed training,” Bembinista said. “In the long run, it’s going to help since we were carrying our own gear. I think mine and Caitlin’s bikes were 50 pounds, so we had an extra 30 pounds of weight we were lugging around. So our legs definitely got stronger.”