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BIKE CHALLENGE PHOTOS BY TOM BOSS
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IT’S BEEN SIX months now and we all seem to have answered the “challenge” (and get to keep the bikes!). It turns dark at 5pm these days, so my bike commutes from Novato to San Rafael and back are on temporary hold (plus, it’s friggin’ freezing out there this December). I plan on resurrecting my weekly rides once the rainy weather dries out and the daylight hours draw longer. I never did fall, so Kristin’s advice proved prophetic, as any good mentor’s should. Lea wasn’t so lucky. In September she badly bruised her leg while attempting what she describes as “an Evel Knievel maneuver” over a speed bump—her nostalgic recollections of cruising Ocean Beach no doubt suppressed these types of memories. The accident put her out of commission for about six weeks—and way behind pace on her mileage totals. Tom Boss and MCBC say they’ll extend her time to complete the challenge by however long her doctor kept her grounded. For Nakiesha and her still-painful foot tendons, the Bike Locally campaign posed both a physical challenge and a psychological one. With all her plans to ride to the store, her office, run errands and meet up with friends, she says she became “overwhelmed” when confronted with so many time-consuming rides. “Argh! It’s too much,” she recalls thinking. “I’ll just take the car.” But when her car went kaput for a couple of weeks the Bike Locally Challenge “really clicked.” “One morning, riding to the Larkspur Landing ferry, I looked behind me at the line of cars stretching all the way to Fairfax,” says Nakiesha. “Even at my casual pace I was dusting the commuters! I noticed this, too, at the grocery store amid the cacophony of horns and agitated drivers vying for parking spots. Not me!” I imagine all six of us can attest to smugly coasting past commuters in stopand-go traffic, or zipping straight up to a shop door while drivers circle in vain for a decent parking spot. Hopefully, we six motorists-turnedbikers can also retain our semblance of empathy for drivers who find themselves stuck going 4 mph behind an out-of-shape Schwinn jockey struggling up Los Ranchitos Road against the wind. Because there’s no denying that even in Marin the relationship between motorist and cyclist can be at times uneasy. “I have been yelled at, thrown dirty looks, thanked and reprimanded for using my bike bell,” says Anjuli. “If there is one thing about riding that I have learned, it’s the importance of proper bell etiquette— that, and padded riding shorts.” But if there’s one of us who has changed the most during the Bike Locally Challenge, it’s certainly 70-year-old Lea, who’s used her alone time on the bike paths of Marin to completely rethink how she wants to spend the rest of her life. In fact, she’s decided to leave her partner of 20 years and relocate to her second home in the Sierra foothills—a snowy little town called
Jack, 7, and Sam, 3, with their dad and his latest freebie.
Pollock Pines. She says the move has been exciting, “except when the power goes out.” She gives no small amount of credit to her new life on two wheels for the decision to free herself from the shackles of Novato. “I ask myself,” writes Lea from her snowedin El Dorado County cabin, “was it winning the challenge that gave me the confidence to leave? I don’t know. Was it going to the orthopedic surgeon and feeling like a real jock that made me re-evaluate my life? I don’t know.” Adds Lea: “By the way, I do not hold the MCBC responsible in any way for my life change... that is, unless they want to be.” ●
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IN SOME SMALL way, I’m sure the MCBC is responsible for a life change in all six of us bike-locally challenged. This may simply be from the health and environmental benefits of riding instead of driving, or having a better understanding of how bikes and cars share the commute—from the point of view of the commuter not protected by two tons of steel. Or perhaps we’ve come to the realization that we need an entirely new life itself—and moved to Pollock Pines. I imagine we’ve all gained some amount of perspective from our seats atop the Gutter Bunny Express—and we’ll never drive past a cyclist or cycle near a driver the same way again. There’s an old Sugarcubes song in which Bjork sings, “That girl on the bicycle showed great interest in all the motor crashes in the neighborhood—she looked quite innocent, she showed great interest— after she got that bicycle.” By the way, that cyclist Henry Wells nailed with his Duryea Motor Wagon in 1896 was named Evylyn Thomas. History may have forgotten you, Evylyn. But I know six people who never will. ✹ Tom Boss says the success of the Bike Locally Challenge has spurred the MCBC to make it an annual contest. Visit www.marinbike.org next spring for a chance to enter the 2011 ‘challenge.’ Email Jason at jwalsh@pacificsun.com.
Comment on this story in TownSquare, at ›› pacificsun.com DECEMBER 10- DECEMBER 16, 2010 PACIFIC SUN 17