You'd have to be a little brave, or a little something else, to have a body that has received no preparation, no training, no exercise and still decide to participate in a stationary bike race, riding hard for 25 minutes, your teammates around you, fanning you, depending on you.

Some of the 1,000 competitors participating in Saturday's Great American Bike Race were in that condition. Doing it because it was for the kids, this annual fundraiser for cerebral palsy.

"What am I getting myself into?"Darla Barkley, 53, of Mandan, remembers thinking after some in-shape 20-somethings she knows told her the race almost killed them when they participated last year.

But unprepared Barkley pedaled through. Five miles in 25 minutes, in the Century High School gymnasium, where the energy level was maybe as high as the volume level of rock music that was beating motivation into the racers.

Another woman, same untrained condition, but younger, nearly fell off her bike at the end of 25 minutes. "My legs were like Jell-O,"said Jessy Redinger, 30, of Bismarck.

And then there were the competitive team members who had trained hard and were racking up in the area of 12 to 14 miles each, but that wasn't easy either, apparently. Proof was in the pain: the sweat, grimaces and flushed faces.

"It's worth the pain," said Bryan Wetch, 50, of Bismarck, whose face was glistening sweat after 12.72 miles on the bike. He lost a relative to cerebral palsy.

So there were, arguably, gutsy performances all around. But the racers, ages 7 to 79, the conditioned, the unconditioned and everyone in between knew who were the most courageous ones of all.

They were the ones sitting in wheelchairs throughout the gym - the quiet ones. Some can't talk. Many can't walk.

But they all seemed to be smiling.

"If you can sit in a chair (all the time) and smile, that says something,"said Bruce Klootwyk, race director.

They were celebrities on a Hollywood scale this day.

"His class just worships him,"said Pam Berreth, mother of Hunter Berreth, an outgoing talkative wheelchair-bound fourth-grader at the Steele Dawson School.

Hunter's class, organized by teacher Gladys Geer, raced as a team, calling themselves Hunter's Roughriders.

Hunter, surrounded by classmates, said GABR day is special for him in part because he gets to be around "some of his own kind,"other kids with cerebral palsy. They're in the same boat.

"You're in a chair all the time, every day. Some people have speech problems. You can't play sports,"he said, trying to explain his life.

Bike race proceeds are used to try to make the kids' lives as easy as possible by trying to make up the difference between what insurance will pay and what equipment - such as lifts for family vans - actually costs.

When the race started in 1997, there were 10 teams that raised about $10,000. Last year, there were 89 teams raising $180,000. This year, it grew to 100 teams - from Bismarck, Jamestown, Steele and Dickinson - that rode a total of 7,700 miles. The grand donation total will be available soon.

(Reach reporter Virginia Grantier at 250-8254 or at virginia.grantier@bismarcktribune.com.)