Tour de Wyoming coming

The 2019 Tour de Wyoming will be heading out from Thermopolis this year on Sunday, July 14.

The tour started in 1997 when 45 riders gathered in Powell for a six-day ride up and over the Bighorn Mountains and has grown into an event featuring hundreds of riders from across the country and Canada.

This year the group will leave from Thermopolis to start the 365-mile ride that includes riding to Basin for the first day, then traveling the backroads and badlands to end their second day in Cowley. From there, they head northwest into Montana, spending their third night in Red Lodge.

Day four sees a lot of uphill and downhill riding as they head into Powell for the night before starting day five headed toward Cody. They will spend their final night in Meeteetse before heading back to Thermopolis on their sixth day of riding.

Five local riders will be pedaling their way through the scenery including Melissa Johnson, Arlea McCumber, JoAnn Moore, Michael Pickett and Barb Vietti.

Vietti has been doing the tour for quite some time, her first in 2006, just as she was turning 57-years old. She continued the ride until 2016.

At first she was talked into it by her son, Will, who was a college athlete in great shape.

“Silly me,” she said. “But, we both did great.”

She took the last two years off, but will be doing it again this year and her daughter, Laura, will be joining her.

“The training is pretty intense,” she said. “You can’t hop on a bike and ride 60 miles. So, I have been working out on my ‘trainer bike’ in my basement for several months to get my training started. And now I am trying really hard to get rides outside on the roads.”

Vietti said the challenge this year is going to be the weather. She admits she’s a fair weather rider and really doesn’t like to ride when it’s cold and rainy. That has cut into her training rides, so that hasn’t gone as originally planned.

“Its important to train with long rides because you need to get used to sitting in the saddle (bike seat) for hours at a time,” she said. “It is also important to train going up hills. And, maybe the most important part, is to carry enough water and snacks because if you don’t, all the sweating and heart rate elevation and heavy breathing may cause your body chemistry to go haywire and you ‘bonk’ (Google says it’s a condition of sudden fatigue and loss of energy which is caused by the depletion of glycogen sores in the liver and muscles).”

All in all, Vietti says the Tour de Wyoming is an incredible experience that is a test of our own ability to set a goal and complete it, and also a way to meet a great group of people who are all interested in getting a lot of great exercise while touring Wyoming, silently traveling an average of about 13 miles per hour.