6,000 Bipedalers

I did the New York City Century bicycle ride yesterday for the third year, which means that this blog is now two years old because an account of my first Century ride was one of the first entries. I recall saying some fairly benign things about Mayor Bloomberg at the time since he has tried to promote mass transit use and bike commuting. If he hadn’t decided to buy himself another term in office, I might have repeated them.

The ride was great as usual, and the weather cooperated, which is saying something this year. Friday and Saturday were miserable, grey days with a permanent mist falling that would have been most annoying and left us riders soggy and ill-tempered before hitting our third borough.

Instead, we had a spectacular day with fluffy white clouds mostly keeping the sun off our backs. The route took us down through Manhattan to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, then south under the Verrazzano and past Coney Island to the Atlantic beach along the Rockaways. We came back over a bridge across Jamaica Bay where at the highest point you can simultaneously see planes landing at JFK and the full skyline of midtown and downtown Manhattan from the east. It was really cool.

The Bronx portion of the 104-mile route was shortened, but there was enough to get a feel for our gritty urban environments and to practice threading the needle through heavy traffic and run red lights en masse—always a special joy.

My buddy John and I needed serious R&R at the 80-mile point and sacked out in the grass under one of the East River bridges in Astoria, then, remarkably restored, soldiered on across the Triborough and the Bruckner to hit the finish line in Harlem at just under 11½ hours from the 6 a.m. kick-off. We got a T-shirt and cheers from two volunteers holding a sign that read ‘Yay!’

Transportation Alternatives, the sponsor of this 20-year-old annual event, is one of the savviest, most professional advocacy groups I have ever encountered, mixing fun and sophisticated seriousness in just the right portions. They’ve accomplished a lot, and I’m proud to have joined up my first week in New York.