Grant Lampert

Grant's 365-Day Bike Challenge - (3/19/2021 through 3/19/2022)

If you happened to be traveling though the Prior Lake, Savage, or Lakeville areas this winter and saw a lunatic riding a bicycle on days (or nights) where no sane human would usually be out riding a bike, odds are that lunatic was me!

Last year I decided to ride a bike every single day for a year, no exceptions, to bring awareness to the fact that people with cystic fibrosis (CF) never get a day off from dealing with CF. As far as we've come, we're still not done.  I'm in this until it's done! Mason never gets a day off from dealing with CF. Nobody with CF gets a day off. I want to give them all a day off. Would you like to help?

Before I continue, let me just say that while what I did was difficult at times and there were definitely days where I really didn't want to ride, I always remembered that Mason doesn't get to take days off. If he doesn't feel like doing a Vest, skipping it isn't an option if he wants to stay healthy. If he doesn't feel like taking his medications, skipping them isn't an option if he wants to stay healthy. So no matter how cold it was or how tired I was, I had no excuse to miss even a single day.

If you read through the content below and are entertained by the craziness of it all, please consider donating to the CF Foundation to help find a cure in honor of Mason and for everyone dealing with CF.  My challenge was difficult at times but it was temporary. I'm going to keep riding even after the official end of the 365 day challenge, but at some point I'm going to miss a day of riding and my health isn't going to suffer because of it. People with CF don't have that luxury.  They can't just stop doing vests and taking all of their other medications. Until they can. Help us make that happen!

And now for some frequently asked questions and interesting facts about my 365 day bike riding challenge in Minnesota:

How many miles did you ride?

2,640 miles.  That's roughly the driving distance from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles, California!

I didn't set out to ride a specific number of miles, mostly because I knew I'd have to fit some of my rides into a window of only maybe 30-45 minutes per day. I also found out very quickly once the weather got cold that riding even 4 miles per day in the winter is a much bigger challenge than riding 10+ miles per day in the summer. But even without a specific mileage goal for the challenge before I set out, I still ended up covering quite a few miles.

Don't you fall down a lot when riding a bicycle on snow and ice?

Yes, you do. Or at least I did.

I got better at staying upright as the winter went on and I was pretty lucky in that I never got seriously hurt from falling, but I fell quite a few times in the winter before survival instincts kicked in and I got better at not-falling down. If I could have done one thing differently during the challenge it probably would have been to bite the bullet and spend money on a set of studded bike tires for winter riding to keep from wiping out as often as I did when hitting patches of ice covered in snow.

What was the coldest temperature you rode in?

The coldest air temperature was -16°F. The coldest windchill was about -35°F on a couple of days.

Keep in mind, those windchill temperatures were before factoring in any speed that I was riding into the wind, so the “feels like” temperature when riding into the wind on those days was actually well into the -40°s (!). People with more sense than me might have worn something like a full-face helmet to keep their face from freezing on those bitter cold days. Unfortunately I had neither a snowmobile, a motorcycle, nor enough sense to have just bought one of those helmets, so I made due with my bike helmet and part of my face being exposed even on the coldest of days.

What was the hottest temperature you rode in?

104°F according to my home thermometer. The official high temp. was 102°F in Minneapolis.

It was sunny that day too - not a cloud in the sky. Of all the times I rode, this one was probably even more dangerous than any of the icy winter rides. I put a rack on the back of my bike for this ride so I could carry over a half gallon's worth of water bottles, thinking that half a gallon of water would be more than enough. It turns out I was very wrong.

I had consumed almost all of the water by the time I was halfway done, and by the time I got home I had stopped sweating entirely. I was getting an awful headache and I started to struggle to pedal the bike at all, even very slowly. I seriously underestimated how much the heat would affect me and rode way too far (about 11 miles total) and started out way too fast.

Don't try that at home kids. Heat stroke is no joke ™.

What's the weirdest thing that happened during the year?

My eyes froze shut.

If it was clear and sunny but extremely cold and windy I'd begin to squint. The problem was, I couldn't then un-squint because my eyelashes would freeze shut (see the picture above where my whole face is frozen, which was taken on the coldest day I rode).  I'd end up having to stop and put my face in my coat to warm my eyelashes enough that the ice would melt before I could open my eyes again to continue. Usually I wore sunglasses or clear safety glasses when I rode to keep wind and debris out of my eyes, but on the coldest days the frame on the glasses hurt my nose too much so I'd just go without them. Having frozen-shut-eyes was the unfortunate trade off sometimes.

What's the strangest thing you saw when riding?

Deer didn't seem to know what I was when I was on a bike, or at least they didn't react to me the way they usually react to a person on-foot.

The deer seemed more curious about me than scared as long as I wasn't riding too fast when I first encountered them. There were several times where I was able to ride within a few feet of deer as they just stared at me instead of dashing away. Oddly enough I got a similar response from other humans when they saw me riding on extremely cold days or when I was riding as it snowed heavily...

How did you ride if you had to travel anywhere?

We didn't travel especially often over the year, but there were a few times where we left home to visit family or to go camping or to celebrate a holiday etc. On those days I either took a bike with me in my car or I was able to borrow a bike if necessary. I even had family members who brought me a bike on the coldest day of the year so I could get my ride done that day and keep the streak going. If I knew a bike wouldn't be available where I was going beforehand, I just took one with me no matter how little sense it made to be hauling a bike along otherwise. No days off. No excuses.

How many bikes do you need to be able to ride every day for a year?

I suppose a person could ride every day for an entire year with just one bike if they got really lucky with nothing ever breaking or if they always had spare parts and tools readily available in the event something broke unexpectedly. That single bike better have some good low gears for winter riding at the very least though, because you definitely need those low gears to push through thick snow on the winter days where it can't be avoided. But I ended up using several bikes. One of my hobbies is fixing up old bikes so I had several bikes available to ride if/when I needed a backup.

I did end up breaking a few things on my bikes throughout the year, and I can't stress how much more convenient it was to just have a backup ready to ride instead of having to scramble to fix a flat tire, a broken chain, a broken shift cable or whatever else happened to break just to keep the streak alive.

One other major consideration was salt in the winter. If you only have one bike, it's probably going to get damaged/ruined if you're riding it daily thorough the salty water and slush typical of Minnesota roads in winter. The two bikes I rode most often in the summer aren't particularly new but they're both fairly nice – one's an old steel framed mountain bike I'd just spent a ton of time rebuilding prior to the challenge so I wanted no part of the salt ruining that one, and the other one is a road bike with narrow, slick tires and I imagine it would have been pretty treacherous to ride that one in snow or on ice.

So in anticipation of the winter, I ended up fixing up a very broken early-90's mountain bike for my winter riding to keep my nicer bikes nice. This worked out really well – it was a bike that was easy to ride once I got it all put-together but wasn't a bike I could ride as fast as my others. Since there wasn't a whole lot of fast riding to be done in the winter though, that old bike was good-enough and it did the job admirably considering it was ridden daily through conditions it was certainly never designed to handle even once.

Where was your favorite place to ride?

There are lots of places I like to ride, mostly places where I'm not riding alongside much car traffic and where there aren't many pedestrians walking where I'm riding. But my absolute favorite place probably sounds like a weird one to a sane person:

There is a small lake near my house where a fellow on a side-by-side plows a path around the entire lake on the ice for reasons unknown. On days where there was just a little bit of snow covering the ice, I found I could ride my bike on that lake for as long as I could withstand the cold. No cars to worry about at all. No people taking a walk to worry about passing or warning that I was passing them. No hills. Almost no traffic noise. Just an open, flat, peaceful rural lake that I could ride on for miles without a care in the world aside from staying warm.

Conclusion

I got the opportunity to do something crazy that I never would have thought to attempt without Mason inspiring me to do it. It's my hope that somehow, some way, Mason gets to experience what I was able to experience when I pulled into our driveway on the last day of the challege – the sense of accomplisment for conquering something that seemed almost impossible just a year earlier and the feeling of being able to look back on it like it was almost a dream in the past rather than a daunting challenge that's still in front of him.  

If you decide to donate, please do so in honor of putting end to CF and giving everyone a well deserved day off.  Let's allow everyone to feel what it's like to look back on CF one day like it was just a dream and to experience the day where they feel the satisfaction of knowing their challenge is complete and that they've won.