By Susan Bromley

Staff Writer

Brandon Twp.-Stephen Lyon smoked for 30 years until the “great recession” hit him in the pocketbook in 2008.

He had been quitting smoking for three decades, but after losing his job with a bank, he finally gave up his 10-pack of Marlboro Red cigarettes a week for good, and when he found a $15 bicycle in a garage sale, started a new habit.

“I thought I would ride a bike and keep the extra weight off that I had been promised would join me when I quit smoking,” said Lyon, who rode 500 miles across Iowa last month. “Cigarettes didn’t kill me, so I switched methods.”

This was his second year participating in RAGBRAI, The Des Moines Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. The event, a non-competitive

ride touted as the largest bike-touring event in the world, has been held since 1973 and had 20,000 participants in 2016, including Lyon, his friend Tom Hammond, also a Brandon Township resident, as well as a group of bikers from Wisconsin that they joined, as well as jugglers from that call themselves “Team Road Show” and perform on unicycles.

Lyon and Hammond drove down to Davenport, Iowa, on the Mississippi River and got picked up by the blue Wisconsin bus, which transported them and their fun-loving friends that juggle fire for entertainment to the location of the ride’s start, Glenwood, on the border of Nebraska.

Lyon called the ride a “7-day rolling party,” with the shortest days averaging 50 miles and the longest day just over 100 miles on hilly terrain. Registration is limited, but riders join along the west to east route anyway, which is on paved roads

except for an optional gravel road loop, which Lyon also did. The bikers take up a full lane.

“It’s absolutely packed with people, as far as you can see forward, as far as you can see back, it’s nothing but bicycles,” he said. “You have to be careful, aware of who is in front of you, who is behind you. Not everyone is safe and not everyone is sober, but all the drivers in Iowa know to stay off the road. We only saw two dozen cars the whole time. Drivers are on the side roads, but they know to stay off the roads of the route during this time.”

No map was necessary for the bikers, who just follow everyone in front of them and camp each night at the stopping points, whereever they can find a spot to pitch a tent, or even just find a plot of grass wide enough for a body, as Lyon said he and his comrades did one night in a tilled farmer’s field. On other nights, they slept behind a John Deere tractor store, and on the grass in front of a Target.

But sleep they did, after days that began as early as 5 a.m., or as late as noon for the hard partiers, and were spent riding in temperatures that reached well into the 90s, with high humidity, and no shade as they passed miles upon miles of corn and soybean fields.

“You’re tired, yet charged by everyone else you’re around,” said Lyon. “Some people don’t take the time to get in shape and are exhausted, and other people who pretrained had more fun at night.”

Lyon, 57, had 1,000 miles of training for this year behind him that began in April. He has come a long way from those dark days of unemployment and not feeling very good about himself. Bicycling provided the light and focus he needed and he went from riding 5 miles a couple days a week to riding the DALMAC, the Dick Allen Lansing to MACkinaw bike tour, every year, as well as various campout rides.

In 2010, Lyon found a full-time job in information technology with Ford Motor Company, but he kept his bicycling passion, rides on gravel roads in the area with the Flying Rhinos bike club from Clarkston, does self-contained rides in

which he keeps camping gear with him, and now he has five bicycles as well. He rode a Specialized Roubaix for the RAGBRAI.

“I’m an extrovert, so I fill the empty space with words, I daydream a lot while riding and I cuss the hills, I swear at them,” said Lyon. “I love the riding, but love riding with a whole lot of people who love riding,”

“A hundred miles is an awful lot of work, even with training,” he continued. “Not everyone does it, but it’s the sense of personal accomplishment.”

He still has the $15 bicycle that got him started and is one year older than his son, Matt, 29, who now rides it.

Lyon, who is married to Alisa and also has a daughter, Michelle, 27, plans to return to RAGBRAI next year, but he is already signed up for another ride in September— the Great Allegheny Passage and Canal Trail, which goes from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C.

He also has advice for anyone looking for a new, healthy habit: “Get a bike, you won’t regret it.”