Ice Bike Racing - 2009 version

The Minnesota Human-Powered Vehicle Association's 18th Annual Ice Bike Races drew a small enough crowd that I was able to win my class. (No other women showed up -- the only way I ever win these things.) Temperatures hovered just below zero Fahrenheit (minus 18 C), and the ice was rough. It had rained a few times early in the season, ruining the surfaces of most area lakes. Nonetheless, we had a little group of loyal ice bikers and a few spectators when we met on Medicine Lake, just west of Minneapolis. I rode a Greenspeed GTO recumbent trike this year, but the overall winning times were put in by riders on conventional 2-wheelers.

Ice-Biking

What do you do in Minnesota if the temperature is dropping from 22 to 13 degrees (minus 5.5 to minus 10.5 C), and the wind is gusting to 36 mph? You go to the Ice-Bike races. These weren't the January 28 mountain bike races on a Minneapolis lake described in a New York Times article, or the mountain bike race in Bloomington, Minnesota that was also mentioned in that article. These were the Original Minnesota Human-Powered Vehicle Association 16th Annual Ice Biking World Championship races on January 27. We may have to retire that "world championship" name now that there actually ARE some (quite a lot, in fact) other ice bike races in the world.