Dina and I went for a ride Friday morning to talk about her life as a researcher and in other roles in medicine, RAAM, LOTOJA, losing weight, and how bicycling has become a wonderful and positive part of her life.
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| Dina Hannah is all smiles Friday morning for a ride up Emigration Canyon. |
I met up with Dina at 7 am on Friday morning, arriving at the same time at the Rotary Park parking lot, Dina hopped out of her car all smiles, happy to be riding bikes and to talk about her life, RAAM, and her accomplishments before and since starting to ride regularly in 2006.
We exchanged pleasantries at the mouth of the canyon and I could see that Dina was still beaming from her time in the Race Across America (RAAM) race just weeks ago. As we pedaled up the canyon at a moderate pace, I asked her about the record-setting attempt in her RAAM age category.
Dina only joined the 4-woman team in November, giving her just 7 months to train. It's not the say that she was out of shaped (having won 2 LOTOJA races in recent years), but the 3,000 mile RAAM takes a bit more preparation than riding 200 miles from Logan to Jackson. Because she was a part of a 4 person team (meaning she didn't spend a lot of time on the bike all at once), she never had to do serious endurance training, by which I mean 200-300 miles training rides.
Dina and her team, which was made up of Coloradoites, were accompanied by a dozen crew members, who played the role of massage therapist, bike mechanic, RV driver, chase vehicle drivers, navigator, chef, nutrition specialist, and more.
As you may imagine, getting decent rest between short but hard pulls on the bike was a bit of a challenge in a short RV barreling down the highway across America trying to keep up with the rider on the road while attending to all other duties as well. "Showers we kinda out of the question," Dina told me as we passed Ruth's Diner in Emigration Canyon. "Sleeping was a bit of a challenge, as well. After one of my first legs when my fatigued body was telling me to sleep, I thought that I'd be able to catch some sleep in the back of the RV, away from the chaos and noise in the front. I was wrong. Whenever the RV would hit an uneven patch of pavement or pulled off the road, the back of the RV was at the end of the whip effect that rippled through the vehicle. I was thrown several feet in the air toward the ceiling over and over again, and I knew that there was no way I would get any sleep back there."
A little later in our morning ride, Dina told me, "After trying to sleep in the back of the RV, I tried to sleep in the bed space on the side of the RV while the retractable side was still inside the vehicle. This required me to crawl into a very, very small space with one tiny window and lock myself inside. I couldn't open the 'door' to the sleeping space from the inside, so the crew gave me a hatchet in case anything happened."
"You slept in a locked, confined space inside the retractable side of the RV with a hatchet at your side while you sped across America?" I asked.
"Yes," Dina replied, laughing.
Even though Dina and her team did not beat the Womens 50-59 year old record for RAAM set last year (falling short just 13 hours due to 50 mph headwinds in Kansas, 120 degree heat in southern California, torrential rain storms in West Virginia, and more), they did win the 2012 race for their age category... by more than a day.
"We talked with last year's record setting team after our race and told them about the heat, and the rain and wind. They said that they only had about a half hour of rain in 2011 and not many other memorable or negative experiences with the weather. Now I'm not complaining, or saying that we should have set the record, or that we would have without the setbacks, but it was definitely a different race, so we had to take that to heart so that we didn't get down on ourselves for not breaking the record."
Dina's team had a little fun with her after she claimed she had seen an alligator in the middle of the road in Missouri. "It turned out it was an armadillo, as the team told me once I got back onto the bus, terrified." A similar mishap happened later on down the road when Dina saw several donkeys behind a fence (which she didn't see) on the side of the highway. Terrified once again by the seemingly harmless (and fenced in) donkeys, her team once more had a bit of fun with her.
"Before and after the race, I have gotten emails from women and men from all over the world asking me about my story. I used to be severely overweight, and only started riding after I was introduced to a bicycle commuting challenge at work. I went out and bought a bike in 2006, it took me a long time to ride to work that first time (Murray to the University of Utah), but I was hooked." She began to ride nearly every day, and challenged herself to do the 2008 Cycle Salt Lake Century. After that and several more centuries, she entered LOTOJA, taking 6th in her age category. Since then, she has lost hundreds of pounds, won LOTOJA twice, and has hopes of organizing a two-woman relay team for next year's RAAM.
Dina is a great example to everyone, women especially, that anything is possible and that lives can change through bicycling. Now get out and ride!
Ha ha...about the donkeys...I was pretty sleep deprived, standing on a mountain climb in the middle of the night. It was pitch black and a little misty when in the distance I heard a very strange noise. The noises multiplied and began to draw closer...I realized they were made by a herd of stampeding donkeys but I didn't see that they would have been stopped by a fence. All I knew is that I wanted to get moving up that hill! I was teased from then on about the Zombie Donkeys coming to get me! :-)
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