The Wheelsucker Does the Baltimore Halloween Critical Mass Ride

What a BLAST!!!!

Getting tired of "going crosseyed and blowing snot bubbles" trying to hold Ace’s wheel when he goes hard for the FIFTH TIME!!? Think you have done the Davidsonville ride routes a few times too many? Do you find yourself looking up and thinking that Steve Owens has been on the front pulling too long? Tired of being dropped on the South Polling House stairstep EVERY RIDE!?

Maybe its time to try something a little different. Take a walk on the wild side; try a Critical Mass ride.

It turns out that the Wheelsucker, for all his earnest appearance, is a wee tiny bit of a closet revolutionary. Not enough to actually get out there and DO something revolutionary, but just enough to look at some situations and think perhaps someone else should start the revolution and fix the situation, while the Wheelsucker quietly cheers from the sidelines.

Having heard about Critical Mass rides, the Wheelsucker had always wanted to do one. They are held in major European and North American cities, typically the last Friday evening of the month. After being frustrated the last two months by being tied up at work on a Friday evening and unable to leave in time to get to Baltimore, this time the Wheelsucker abandoned his co-workers at 5:10pm and raced to Baltimore.

The Baltimore Critical Mass ride, as documented on Meet Up and Facebook, meets at the Washington Monument on North Charles Street. After wasting twenty minutes looking for a parking spot, the Wheelsucker found one, put his fixie together and changed into cycling clothes. Having been warned by cycling friends and team mates (Thanks, Tom!!) that hipsters don’t like lycra-clad racers the Wheelsucker was NOT WEARING TEAM KIT!. He wasn’t even wearing any visible Lycra. He did have cycling shorts on underneath his canvas cargo shorts, which he thought would improve his street cred, but which stood out like a sore thumb; more on this later.

This was the Halloween Critical Mass ride, and riders were encouraged to wear Halloween costumes. The Wheelsucker was not organized enough to come up with a costume and his priority was being seen by drivers, so he wore light colors, a reflective chest strap, mounted lots of lights on his bike, and used a white helmet.



Not knowing Baltimore, the Wheelsucker had to find his way back to the Washington Monument on his bike, but once there joined a group that quickly grew from five riders to over one hundred. The Wheelsucker wasn’t exactly counting, but it was a large group. The Wheelsucker noted that NO ONE was wearing team kit and in fact NO ONE was wearing lycra; most but not all wore helmets. And there were some GREAT costumes. The Wheelsucker’s favorite was a stretchy (read skin tight) reflective silver pair of pants worn by a fetching young lady. She also had a small winged dragon on her right shoulder.

As for the bikes: There were some race bikes, and variations on not-quite-race-geometry road bikes, but there were also pieced together fixies, city bikes, mountain bikes, hybrids, folding bikes, perhaps the only common element being they all had two wheels and handlebars. Brakes were optional, but brakeless fixies were a small minority. After a long cold wait the route for the night was announced.

Not knowing Baltimore, the Wheelsucker was familiar with the destination names, but had no idea where they actually were.

A Critical Mass is not a race. It is not even a hard group ride. This Critical Mass group was not interested in risky riding, but was simply riding at an easy pace on some nice routes in Baltimore. Keeping the group together was a priority. A large group of cyclists riding easy spreads out to about a long city block, so occasionally a green light changes to amber and then red before the entire group has passed. A couple of riders going through the intersection as the light changes simply double back and casually stop in the middle of the intersection such that they block car traffic from entering the intersection from either side even though they have the green light. The rest of the group pedals through, waving and thanking the drivers (and the blockers) for letting them through, and as soon as the group is through the intersection, the blockers follow, and cars are free to flow through.



The Wheelsucker considers that this is technically illegal, but laws aside there are situations on group rides where it is best to consider a group of riders as if it was one entity rather than 100+ individual vehicles, even if local laws are not wise enough to reflect this. Perhaps this will eventually be corrected, but much like the city of Annapolis needing to actually connect the short lengths of “cycling paths to nowhere” such that one could actually ride somewhere in Annapolis on a bike path, the Wheelsucker is not expecting this during his lifetime.

Perhaps the more important question would be how much of a disruption this was to the drivers of the cars forced to wait for 15 seconds at a green light? Well, most people were clapping and cheering as the group rode by, and when we did hear car horns they were typically short tapping blasts that suggested support rather than frustration and anger. How one interprets the meaning of car horns depends in part on whether one is an optimist or a pessimist. And if you were a car driver so annoyed by being delayed for fifteen seconds after your light turned green, TFB (you see, the Wheelsucker is trying to adopt the Critical Mass partly hipster-driven culture).

The Wheelsucker rides almost exclusively on roads. As mentioned above there are no useful – to the Wheelsucker -- bike paths in the Annapolis area; even the B&A trail has a ridiculous speed limit and far too many intersections. So he rides on roads with a healthy paranoia; paranoia fueled by the knowledge that while the majority of car drivers are not actually out to get cyclists (unfortunately a very small number actually are), a significant percentage are not paying sufficient attention (texting, updating facebook and chatting on the phone being more important to them than driving) to assure a cyclist's safety.

The really cool thing about the Critical Mass ride was that the Wheelsucker felt quite safe from cars. The group was so large, and there were so many bike lights (many flashing), that a driver would have had to have been literally blind to not see the cyclists. And the drivers were cool. While the Wheelsucker always tried to pay attention; after all there were about 100 other cyclists to avoid, many sections of Baltimore street were cobbled, and there were the usual major city downtown road hazards to avoid, the ride felt very safe and low stress. Bystanders outside bars and restaurants were frequently cheering the Critical Mass group, with the riders cheering back. The only other times the Wheelsucker has EVER been cheered on a bike, was during a futile late race attack that saw him off the front by himself in a ToWC crit, and once while climbing the Sierra Nevada in southern Spain, with snowbanks on either side of the road. Perhaps the cheering Spanish car drivers saw this as something along the lines of Don Quixote?



While some of the group fit the hipster stereotype, many did not. While no one was “organizing” anything – it was group anarchy – one of the people who posted the start location and time on Meetup was a female bike shop owner who was clearly past 39 years old. She was riding a nice road bike and dressed in Dorothy from Wizard of Oz costume. There were several Captain America/super hero variations, a few bats, a fox, a number of zombies, a helmet decorated to be a skull, and more.

The Wheelsucker continues to be amazed at what an experienced rider can do on a fixie without brakes, including some fun skid turns, track stands, and complete control of the bike in the group. Many – perhaps most – of the group actually used their bikes for transportation all or most of the time, not just for training and recreational racing as the Wheelsucker and most of his team mates do. It occurred to the Wheelsucker that this “parallel universe” of cycling was probably just as credible – maybe more so – than his own.



After riding to several locations including Fells Point, and the downtown “Occupy Baltimore” protest, the group ended up at Baltimore Bicycle Works for the “Alley Cat” race. Right next to major railway tracks and under a bridge, this has the authentic “gritty urban” vibe. The Wheelsucker was confident there were no 1%ers anywhere near the venue.



The Alleycat race was a race to various locations in downtown Baltimore. The racer picked which order they wanted to get to each location in, and had to get their sheet initialed showing they were at that location. While racers were exhorted to ride safely, the Wheelsucker suspected that the approach to winning this race was to know Baltimore like the back of one’s hand, and to ride fearlessly with complete disregard for red lights and car traffic. Not knowing Baltimore and simply unable (perhaps when the Wheelsucker was in his late teens or early twenties) to ride fearlessly, the Wheelsucker declined to participate in the race. But he did video the “le mans” start.





Hanging out at Baltimore Bicycle Works waiting for the race to start was an opportunity to meet some of the riders and chat, and to admire some of the bicycles. One rider was riding a magnificent Jamis carbon and aluminum track bike with American Classic track wheels. Being a true track bike it had shaped and streamlined frame tubes, track handlebars and the seat tube curving around part of the rear wheel. While I was admiring the bike the owner proudly told me he did not own a car, so this was his transportation. And it sounded like he had ridden fixie-without-brakes, in the downtowns of big cities, in the dark, enough to be comfortable doing it. Or maybe his being a twenty-something had something to do with it.

The Wheelsucker is not twenty-something. No one was checking ID (and how well can you judge someone’s age in the dark, while they are wearing a Halloween costume?), but the Wheelsucker suspected he was one of the oldest riders there. While many seemed to be early twenties, clearly some were thirties and forties, and a few were older.

But he was finally spotted when he ventured inside Baltimore Bicycle Works to warm up briefly while waiting for the race to start. Apparently the Wheelsucker’s clothing: cargo shorts hiding his black lycra shorts, a partly clear partly white rain jacket, and highly reflective straps on his chest made someone else inside the store think that the Wheelsucker’s costume was based on the Beastie Boys, so he asked the Wheelsucker if that was the costume, but then taking a closer look at the Wheelsucker he realized the Wheelsucker was old enough to not have grown up with the Beastie Boys. Indeed, the Wheelsucker has heard of the Beastie Boys (from a much younger person he used to sail with), but has no idea what their music is like, or more important, how they dress. He was advised to describe his “costume” as Beastie Boys if anyone asked :-)

Fortunately the Wheelsucker had taken his team mates advice and was not wearing ANY team kit (the ABRT sticker on the top tube of the bike would have been spotted under close examination), and the cargo shorts effectively hid his black Lycra shorts, while the rain jacket and a Patagonia heavyweight zip top hid his black Lycra jersey. But if the “hipsters” held any disdain for a racer trying to be hip – the Wheelsucker has been told that the two groups despise each other -- they hid it well, and the Wheelsucker felt quite welcomed. The Wheelsucker will be back, and encourages his team mates to try the Baltimore Critical Mass ride.

Perhaps you should leave the team kit at home.

More images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/extrudedaluminiu/sets/72157627881248311/

Video: Marc Hartley's video

Alleycat Race Results: http://baltimorevelo.com/2011/10/halloweenscape-alleycat-results-and-photos/

TAKE BACK THE STREETS !!!!

Baltimore Critical Mass Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/106747452707771/

Meetup Biking in Bmore page: http://www.meetup.com/Biking-in-Bmore/