First Ride In A Long Time

Last Thursday I went for the best road ride that I’ve done for a long time. I met up with old friends and teamates Mike, Gary and Al. But first, a few comments on the riding leading up to the ride.

A bit of background. A couple of weeks ago there were several local news reports that police officers were handing out tickets or warnings to cyclists that didn’t stop at stop signs. My first reactions were those of disbelief. Typical thoughts ran through my head such as “don’t they have anything better to do?” I’ve also thought for many years that stop signs in general are completely unsuitable for cyclists. For an excellent presentation on why this is so, check out this video:

Bicycles, Rolling Stops, and the Idaho Stop from Spencer Boomhower on Vimeo.

I also read readers comments from the news, and was further dismayed that a good portion of the readers agreed with ticketing. I couldn’t believe it. A lot of the people supporting tickets claimed to be cyclists and commuters! Fast forward to Thursday. I’m riding my bike down the 10th Ave bikeway. No big deal I thought, I bike commute to work all the time. Except this was different. I could have sworn that I was thrown into the middle of a crit race. Cyclists were going hard, speeding away, swerving around people. It was insane. In this one brief ride I saw at least three commuters scream through stop signs without slowing or even appearing to care that pedestrians were wanting to cross the intersection. This shocked me even more than the news reports from two weeks earlier. It took all of 5 minutes of this to convince me that police should be giving out tickets. I was appalled at the behaviour and nuisance caused by many commuters. On the positive side of things, it was great to see so many people on bikes and the crit was kind of fun.

Okay, back to the road ride. Gary and I met Al in front of his condo in Yaletown and the three of us rode out to Cornwall to meet Mike at Yew Street. Once we were all together I went to the front so they could all see the back of my BC Masters Champion jersey. I needed to remind them of the caliber of rider they were with. We did a nice ride out around UBC where Al decided to put the hammer down on SW Marine. I use the term “hammer” loosely - it was like a hammer to me. I won’t speak for the others. By the time we got to Granville my neck was killing me but my legs were ok. We then did the Iona loop. On the return, Al took off again following two triatheletes. It was then a moderately painful ride back over the bridge and up Cornwall and back home.

I didn’t get sore or still the next day or two, so I guess that means I’m in moderately ok shape. My legs are still a bit tired though and my shoulder is sore. Such is life.

Ride to Iona from Doug Smith on Vimeo.