Imagine yourself riding a bicycle from one area of Iowa to another, every day for one week, while enduring the grueling July heat.

Tough for anyone who is only a casual cyclist to fathom, but reality for those 10,000 riders participating in next week’s RAGBRAI, a highlight of the summer for most riders.

“[RAGBRAI] is like Mardi Gras on two wheels,” said Wade Franck, manager of Skunk River Cycles. “There’s beads involved, there’s costumes involved, for certain people there’s also a lot of drinking, but if you want it to be a bike ride, it can be a bike ride. If you want it to be a family event, it can be a family event.”

Understandably, some may not know what RAGBRAI is. Indeed it does sound like a very long, very silly word from a Sesame Street episode, but it actually stands for the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa.

This “ride not race” as Franck said, is a more personal challenge for him. Not everyone can say they have completed a 472-mile bike ride, so when Franck finished for the first time, he said it was a great feeling of self achievement.

“There’s definitely an aspect of personal challenge that comes with this event,” Franck said. “Could I ride my bike across the state of Iowa the last full week of July? When you finish though, the sense of accomplishment is just overwhelming. You feel like you survived; you made it.”

For Franck, this year marks his 16th RAGBRAI. And while he may be considered a tenured veteran of the ride, there are people like ISU student Ross Hackerson, junior in history, who could still be seen as a younger rider.

Hackerson will ride in his sixth RAGBRAI, and looks forward to some of the many festivities the host towns will hold.

“I’m a big fan of the food,” Hackerson said. “Getting to the next town is always nice because they have food all the riders can have. Sometimes there’s nice scenery too, but other times it’s just corn and it’s flat everywhere.”

Hackerson’s favorite culinary experience was in Iowa City. Pizza on Dubuque was one of his favorites. Unfortunately for him, the route will not going through Iowa City, so Hackerson will have to wait for another RAGBRAI.

The reason he began racing was because his dad asked him to come along when he was in high school.

Now an upperclassman at Iowa State, RAGBRAI has become an annual family event as Hackerson will participate in the bike ride once again with his dad joining in for a few days during the route.

“I’ve done the ride mostly just to spend time with my family,” Hackerson said. “I’ve been doing it since high school, but it was my dad who did it for quite some time and wanted to take me with him so I went with.”

Ever since the first ride when two Des Moines Register columnists decided to take a bike ride across Iowa for a week and see what kind of experiences they had, the event has gained notoriety across not only Iowa, but the world.

Throughout Franck’s 16 years of participating in the ride, he has seen people come from Italy, Japan and Spain just to take part.

And while after a certain number of rides the event may get old, the experience of meeting new people from across the globe and finishing the route never will.

Both Franck and Hackerson admitted to thinking about not doing the RAGBRAI at some point so they could do a different event.

“Iowa’s nice and everything, but I spend all my time here,” Hackerson said. “So if I were to take a week off from work, I’d like to go somewhere in Colorado where there’s mountains. RAGBRAI is more about the environment, and it’s not as challenging as other rides, so if I wanted more of a challenge I’d go do the Triple Bypass or ride my bike in the Rockies or something.”

And even if both men decide to try a different ride sometime in the future, the love of cycling will never decline for either of them.

“There was one year I skipped RAGBRAI because I had done it for 10 or 12 years straight and I was feeling a little burnt out on it and skipped it,” Franck said. “That whole year I felt there was a big chunk missing. Even though it’s August and you probably don’t want to look at another bike again for awhile, by the end of August you’re thinking about RAGBRAI.

“So if I were to not do it again, I’d  have to replace it with another event,” he said. “But it’s been an important event in my life for a while and it always will be.”