Lana Hochreiter feels blessed to do what she loves and to help others achieve their goals
By Anelia K. Dimitrova
It’s always been about the beat for Lana Hochreiter.
She spins along with it.
She teaches it.
She is it.
At 85, she is a spunky spin instructor at the Cedar Falls Rec Center.
Trim, agile and petite, she’s comfortable in her age bracket.
Today, Lana wears a top that says, “What happens in spin class stays in spin class.”
And the message, along with her nurturing nature, brings out smiles in her spinners.
Behind her glasses, her sky blue eyes glow with goodness. The watch on her left wrist is not a fad, it is at least 10 years old, and worn from usage. Her nail polish is not a fashion statement either; it hides the stains she’s got from gardening.
A dash of hairspray in her short hair signals she’s ready for spin class.
She puts on her cycling shoes, then places her book of playlists and workouts on the top of her bike panel and thumbs through to the right page.
Today’s music, scribbled on the page, features “Take My Breath Away,” the 1986 song from the movie Top Gun; “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” from the musical The Lion King, as well as Bonnie Tyler’s 1983 hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”
Last week’s theme was “Desire,” after the popular U2 song.
It was not just a music preference, it goes so well with Lana’s life.
“It’s also the desire to be fit and to be healthy, and for me, it’s also the desire to help others,” she says. “I just want to encourage people to do things they didn’t think they could do.”
She follows her own advice.
When Lana recovered from open-heart surgery about a year ago, she returned to teaching the spin class after just six weeks.
To mark the occasion, she called her first post-surgery session, “The Beat Goes On,” after the 1967 song by Sonny and Cher.
“My heart’s beating. And it’s beating better,” she says. “And then the beat of the music, ta ta ta ta ta. In my heart and the music, the beat goes on.”
Lara’s spinners loved it and some were amazed at her fast return to the gym.
“And so were the doctors,” she says.
She is convinced her dedication to spinning has a lot to do with her speedy recovery.
Learning to bike on the farm
It all goes back to Lana’s childhood.
She recalls that as a 5-year-old on the family farm in Franklin County, she often hopped on her bike, a hand-me-down from her sister, Sharon, to deliver lunch to her dad, Carl.
Carl sometimes worked on the other side of the 80-acre field, so it took quite a bit of pedaling for Lana to bring him his sandwich and chips.
In the basket on her bike, Lana would also tuck a cookie for herself, so she could keep her dad company for lunch before heading back to the farmhouse.
“We’d usually find a fence post to lean on and then sit on the ground and talk about anything,” she says.
Now, 80 years later, that story still pulls at Lana’s heartstrings. She loved her lunch duties because her dad’s stories were fun to hear and because he knew how to listen.
“He was a great dad and he was interested in my life, too,” she says. “Until his last breath he was interested in my life.”
Lana’s early years on the farm taught her resilience and showed her that hard work pays off, a lesson that stayed with her.
In the mid ‘60s, she came to Cedar Falls in search of a new life and brought along her passion for biking and exercise.
First RAGBRAI: Riding 540 miles in 1985 with teen daughters in longest ride
In 1985, Lana, then 45, signed up for her first RAGBRAI. It happened to be the 13th edition of the (Des Moines) Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa, which started in 1973 as a six-day ride, and has since become the “largest and longest recreational multi-day bicycle ride” in the world, according to the event’s website.
Widowed at the time, Lana saw the ride as a way to uplift her two teen daughters after the passing of their dad, Kenny, at the age of 49, two years prior.
The girls had wanted to go on the adventure with their friends but they needed an adult to accompany them, so Lana agreed to chaperon everyone.
To train for the ride, they each logged 1,000 miles on their bikes.
When the kickoff day arrived on July 21, 1985, they were ready. They started at Hawarden, a town of about 2,700 in Sioux County, and ended the ride in Clinton, a city of approximately 25,000 residents in Clinton County a week later. At 540 miles, this ride became the longest one in the history of the event, according to RAGBRAI’s History in the 1980’s.
That ride was also notable for the fact that it happened to be No. 13, and some superstitious riders pressured organizers to assign it a different number, but they stood by their decision
“It was my first [ride], that’s what I knew,” Lana says.
Riding in it was a big accomplishment then for Lana and her daughters, as they made lots of memories.
But it is an even bigger accomplishment in retrospect, as with time, its preciousness as an unrepeatable adventure has only grown.
Apart from the memories from that ride, which are now etched in the family lore, and sometimes retold during holiday gatherings, Lana has a special memento from that year – the patch she earned.
It stays in the kitchen drawer alongside two dozen patches from subsequent rides.
As she tells me the story, she dumps the badges on the kitchen counter for a show and tell.
Each one brims with memories.
Meeting future husband in 1990 on RAGBRAI
But perhaps the most life-changing one is her fifth ride she signed up for, in 1990, where she met her future husband, Curt.
It was RAGBRAI’s 18th edition, the fourth longest ride. Lana and Curt happened to travel on the same bus as members of a club called Cedar Valley Cyclists.
The participants started at the Missouri River, where they dipped their back tires in the water. The first three days of that ride were gorgeous and “among the nicest” in the history of the event, but then the winds changed, making the 86-mile stretch from Hampton to Oelwein “one of the toughest.”
By the time Lana and Curt dipped their front tires in the Mississippi River, in keeping with the ride’s tradition, they had become friends.
The adventures and the adversities of the week spent riding 495 miles together bonded them forever. They married on Oct. 19, 1991, at Nazareth Lutheran Church in Cedar Falls.
For the next 33 years, they rode through life’s peaks and valleys side by side, creating a loving blended family for their 11 adult children.
Then on Jan. 5, 2025, Curt passed away at the age of 90.
“He was such a sweet man,” Lana says. “Great support, he was awesome, he always showed an interest.”
A special token of their first ride together hangs on the wall of Lana’s living room as a tribute to their journey. It is a framed illustrated map spotlighting the towns they rode through in 1990.
With Curt now gone, that map takes on a different meaning.
“It’s the only one I have,” she says.
Spin classes in the community
Throughout the years, Lana took part in spin classes in town. While working on her own fitness goals, she realized that a lot of her fellow participants needed encouragement to reach theirs.
By that time she was 68, and still working her day job at Caring Transitions, an estate management company in town.
One day, Lana told Kay Cervetti, the owner of The Training Center, where she worked out that she wanted to teach spin classes.
“I see a class and I see me teaching it and on Tuesdays and Thursdays and for people who are beginners or have new knees,” she told Cervetti.
“When do you want to start?” Cervetti asked.
Shortly after this conversation, Cervetti sent Lana to Chicago to be certified as a Schwinn Cycling instructor.
For Lana, it has led to a long journey of teaching spin classes in town.
During the pandemic, the biking class at the Rec Center was canceled, but Lana did not back off on spinning.
She rode a stationary bike in her garage three or four times a week.
Once the restrictions were lifted, Lana returned to the rec center, where her daughter, Kim, teaches low-impact aerobics and sometimes subs for her mom and others in the spinning class. Kim was one of the teen daughters Lana took on her first RAGBRAI 40 years earlier.
Blessed to love what she does and help others
On Friday mornings, Lana wakes up ready. She sips coffee at her kitchen table as she reviews the playlist and the workout plan for the spin class. The music list for the day is cued to the Spotify account on her phone.
She has curated more than 200 playlists over the years and uses such prompts as the weather or her own mood or current events to pick a theme that will motivate the group.
“During the Olympics, I had ‘Go for the gold’ theme,” she says. “And if it’s raining and raining and raining, I’d do, ‘Singing in the rain,’ theme.”
Lana wants the spinners to enjoy the ride as much as she does and set aside their worries while they work out.
Her own motivation comes from a seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of inner desire to keep helping others.
Life’s taught her how to survive.
And it has been replete with blessings and challenges that have strengthened her along the way.
The rare blessings she’s enjoyed make a long list: She had two good marriages, raised seven children, became a grandmother to 25 grandkids, and a great-grandmother to a dozen great-grandchildren. She’s a lead singer in Sweet Adelines, a barbershop harmony women’s chorus in town, she plays bells in her church’s bell choir and, for the past 10 years, she has decorated the window ledges at the cardiac rehab center at UnityPoint. Recently, she volunteered, along with two other instructors at the rec to coach the Dream Team, a group of boys who are preparing for RAGBRAI, and volunteers as an usherer at the Cedar Falls and Waterloo community theaters.
“I am blessed to be able to love what I do and be able to help others in the process,” she says “I am really blessed.”
On the other side, where the headwinds and the steep hills are, she has pushed through this: She’s been widowed twice and survived open heart surgery, among other challenges.
In her spin class at the rec center Lana applies the wisdom she’s gleaned in her journey.
Her charisma rubs off on her students.
“I adore her,” says Holly Postel, one of the spin class regulars. “She’s humble, she’s kind, she’s energetic. She is shining.”
Fellow spinner Donna Burton, who joined the class two months ago, chimed in:
“She’s very inspirational and encouraging, especially to new people.”
The atmosphere in the spinning class is akin to that of a social club, an extended family of sorts, really, where laughter bubbles and teases abound.
But they all listen to Lana’s commands.
“Let’s come out of the saddle,” Lana says and the spinners follow.
They lift their bodies into a standing position while keeping their feet in motion.
From time to time, a spinner shouts out an animal’s name and they all try to imitate the moves.
“Duck,” one of them shouts, so they all lower their bodies as they pedal.
As the song “Happy Together” plays, Lana asks everyone to go at their own pace.
“Don’t let anyone push you into what you are not ready to do,” she says.
It was great advice for beginners like me.
“And in life, too,” Lana later jokes.
Lana’s passion for biking is a part of her magnetism.
Put otherwise, she’s figured out how to enjoy life’s ride.
On April 4, she took that up a notch by signing her name on the Cycling Legends Wall of Fame at the rec center.
The wall recognizes riders who have completed 50, 100, 250, 500 or 1000 rides at the rec center.
Lana wrote her name and a smiley face in recognition of her centennial ride that day.
“It’s something I wanted to do,” she says about reaching her goal. “I’m moving on to 150, God willing. I don’t think I’m 85.”