IOWA, Iowa — This year’s RAGBRAI is a dream come true for 87-year-old Jim Lundbeck and his daughter, Kelly Brooks. For the father-daughter pair, it’s been four years in the making.
They were supposed to do the annual bike ride together in 2020, but RAGBRAI was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I thought that I had missed my chance to do this with him,” Brooks said. “I didn’t think this would happen again.”
Not long after, Lundbeck started having seizures. He would freeze up and couldn’t speak, halting his plans to do RAGBRAI for the foreseeable future. One day in 2023, he had a seizure that caused him to fall over.
"This neighbor came over who’s a doctor and he said, ‘we better have an ambulance because he may have broken something,’” Lundbeck said. “The guy in the ambulance did a blood sugar test and my blood sugar was 40. Normal is 100. By the time I got to the hospital, it was 19.”
That was the day he found out he had an insulinoma, which is a tumor that grows on the pancreas.
“It’s super rare, they say it affects about one in 1 million (people) each year,” Kelly said. “It takes about 3 years to be diagnosed or caught. That’s about how long it had been for him.”
Days after his diagnosis, Jim had a surgery to get the tumor removed.
“He bounced back super-fast. I would say 6 hard weeks,” Kelly said.
Then, just seven months after the surgery and once he was finally healed, he decided to register for this year’s RAGBRAI. He asked Kelly to do it with him.
“I think just knowing that we did it together is really fun, to know we did it and that we achieved our goal,” Brooks said.
Lundbeck lives in Temple, Texas while his daughter lives in Salado, Texas. Those cities are between one to two hours north of Austin.
This is Jim's seventh RAGBRAI while it is his daughter’s first.