Here we are at 40 years! How has the club managed to survive this long? Members and former members reflect and speak out about the club and what it has meant to them. Here’s Joan’s comment.

DSSF can most succinctly be summarized by one phrase: Open Arms. The immediate acceptance and support I received from the club has been amazing. It’s not just me, and it’s not just at this time. My first rides with DSSF go back to the days when David Gaus was president; then as now, the club readily welcomes all. In these dark days of cloudy social-factioning, that’s a pretty special thing. When you add in being a transwoman who shows up to road rides with a mountain bike, well that club kindness is a pretty remarkable thing! This is why I keep showing up to rides – for the people who make DSSF what it is, and for the super friends that I’ve made there. We’re all pretty lucky to have each other, so let’s keep our arms outstretched in support of one and all. Big HUG!  

— Joan

Bob Krumm was the first president of Different Spokes, which he helped found in 1982. In 1985 he relocated to New York to begin a new job and penned this farewell message to the club published in the June 1985 Chain Letter. He recounts the short history of the club and how it came to be. Bob will be coming from New York to join us for our 40th anniversary bash at il Casaro restaurant. He along with fellow founder Dave Freling and early members will reflect on the import and significance of the club and its effect on their personal lives. Our anniversary bash will be on Sunday September 18. For details and to make a reservation, go to the club website event listing here.

Different Spokes: Personal Reflections, by Bob Krumm

Whenever Different Spokes oldtimers get together we recall the early days, how San Francisco had probably been ready for a gay bicycle club years before Different Spokes actually began. The scene was particularly ripe in 1972 in the midst of the national fitness craze and the Gay Games of 1982 here in the City.

Organizing Cyclists.
In the late winter of 1982 the Gay Olympics Committee announced in the B.A.R. that gay athletes in particular sports should start unifying to become teams for the games representing San Francisco. Jerry Ford, a member of the Games committee also had an interest in bicycle racing. He assumed the role of organizing a bicycling team for the Games.

Early meetings took place at the offices of the Games on Castro. Throughout the spring and summer of 1982 interest in the biking contingent grew. Regularly five to ten people attended meetings and twenty to thirty others expressed continuing interest. The people who became involved were either interested solely in participating as racers in the Games or had an interest in bicycle touring and recreational cycling. Early on everyone agreed to keep the two groups together. It was thought that a touring/recreational club would have the ability to nurture a racing team.

Decide and Ride.
Starting in March of 1982 riders informally met at McLaren Lodge on Sunday mornings to caucus and set off on an informal ride. These rides were the predecessor to “Decide and Rides” and were the only formal activity of the group.

On May 27, 1982 the group felt it was necessary to raise money for a mailing. A bake sale was organized and all the proceeds (less than $40) was used toward a mailing directed at people interested in racing.

Several months later the touring/recreational side of the group becames disenchanted with the racing focus in preparation for the Games. Four individuals—Dave Freling, Brad Ennis, Lenny Thomas and I— met at the Sausage Factory and began discussing ideas about developing an organization that was not affiliated with the Olympics. Other early participants included Howard Neckel, Jim Frizzell, Curtis Ogden, and Dale Miller. Many of us rode as a group in the 1982 Sequoia Century, which was a thrill for all of us.

“Flying Faggots”?
Plans were laid for the first meeting of the new club, which was held at my home on August 5, 1982. Ten people turned up for the meeting. At this meeting Different Spokes/San Francisco was officially named. Rejected names included Cy-Clones, Flying Faggots, and Chain Reactions. We all had a deep feeling of excitement about the prospect of finally acting on our ideas. We had talked relentlessly about it all during Olympics meetings. Finally we were actuallly doing it.

Rides started to be organized. A photo of a group departing on a ride to Orinda was published with a story in the B.A.R., which generated the first influx of new members. As a result this small circle of early members and friends began to shift to a broader group of people with varied interests in cycling. It was a bit of a watershed time for us. Still we had not developed a formal membership nor did we have any rules or bylaws.

A Growing “Different Spokes”.
An informal steering committee had emerged during the fall of 1982 comprised of Lenny Thomas, Dave Freling, Brad Ennis and myself. Brad left in early 1983 and Melanie Scott stepped in to take his place. I generally chaired the meetings along with Lenny. Dave handled the fiscal matters and Melanie handled the secretarial duties.

We met monthly in various homes, our mailng list grew to 150, and meetings drew as many as 40 people. Matters discussed included ride rules, publicity, BART passes, scheduling of rides, a newsletter, outreach, etc. The first newsletter was published in December 1982 just before Chirstmas.

In February 1983 memberships and dues were offered and we instantly had 25 paying members. In April the meetings had become so large that they were moved to the Community Room at the library in the Haight-Ashbury. Later in the spring the steering committee was informally elected as the first officers of Different Spokes.

New Face, New Energy, Some Folks Move On.
By late spring membership had grown to 75 and by the end of 1983 it stood at 116. At about this time the early founders and core group began to disperse and new leadership within the club began to emerge.

In those days, as today, the club’s success was built upon the special efforts of members who contributed in ways beyond the mere payment of dues. Those people channeled their special interests or abilities into service for the club. They have all brought to it a vitality that has made us unique and become our trademark.

The June 1985 meeting will be my last. From there it’s “Eastward Ho” to New York. What a pleasure it has been to be associated with Different Spokes over the years. There have been good times and bad but the sum total has been immensely rewarding and gratifying. Bicycling together has a way of cementing friendships. This is something we have all appreciated from Different Spokes regardless of our length of time with the club.

From here on I’ll be happy to serve as the “New York correspondent”. I plan to catch up with the Manhattan club, Diff’rent Spokes, and will report on their scene. Meanwhile all you friends and cross-country cyclists, please look me up when you arrive in New York and we’ll go on a two-wheeled tour of the town!

For some time the Different Spokes ride calendar has been heavily populated with rides that start outside of San Francisco. The notable exceptions are the Early Bird and Hump Day rides, which are quite numerous, and of course the monthly Jersey Ride. When club rides start in San Francisco they mostly go to Marin—think Tiburon loop—and less frequently take in San Bruno Mountain. That isn’t to say that the San Francisco members don’t ride in San Francisco—I’m sure you do because when I lived in San Francisco I did a lot of my riding within the city. There is something to be said for the convenience of simply stepping outside your front door and taking off for a ride. Getting outside of SF for a ride—as opposed to riding from SF to outside—involves more time and the hassle of getting “there”: taking BART or Caltrain, or taking a car and possibly crossing a bridge. That’s extra time to get ready and then travel before you even get to pedal. For a Saturday or Sunday ride maybe that’s something to look forward to. But for any other day—and most weekends—it’s just a lot easier to start from home especially if you have to work that day or have a typically busy Bay Area life.

That is, if you live in San Francisco. In the early days of the club that meant almost everybody (“There are gay men and lesbians living outside of San Francisco??”) The initial outreach that formed the club was, believe it or not, putting flyers on bikes that the founders noticed parked mainly in the Castro district as well as posting them in a few local bike shops. So the early club was overwhelming San Franciscan. When word spread about the club it didn’t take long for the suburban members to come out of the closet/woodwork and join. Where members live now is more dispersed throughout the Bay Area. Currently about 55% of you live in the city, 15% in the Midpeninsula or South Bay, 20% in the East Bay, 5% in the North Bay, and 5% outside the Bay Area. So we’re still a majority San Francisco club but more of us reside in the suburbs now. (Calling San Jose a ‘suburb’ is a stretch—it’s a big city in its own right.)

Even the club ride leaders who live in San Francisco like to lead rides outside of the city. But the ride leaders who live in the suburbs rarely if ever lead a ride in or just starting in San Francisco. This is entirely understandable: riding in the city has its attractions but it’s a taste that is acquired rather than coming naturally. Almost everything is denser in SF—peds, cyclists, cars—and lights and stop signs are everywhere (which some, ahem, consequently ignore). One nicety is that the average speed of cars in San Francisco seems to be much lower than in the suburbs where I live and car drivers in SF generally speaking seem to have more experience driving alongside cyclists. But cycling in the exurbs, or at least in areas with more open space, is what drives folks to get in their car/BART/Caltrain and escape the confines of the City even while that open space is slowly been consumed by development. The difference is that in San Francisco you can still walk almost everywhere but here in the ‘burbs it is much more difficult to navigate life without a car. More cars, higher speed, and less experience with cyclists equals more danger for cyclists. Yet somehow the exurbs are preferred for riding!

For many of us the “gold standard” of recreational cycling is not just getting out of the city but getting out to truly rural areas where you are surrounded by nature—such as it is—rather than detached single family dwellings, lawns, and lots of cars. That’s why so many San Francisco cyclists head across the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin where more open space exists mainly due to agricultural trusts. Relics of open space exist around the Bay Area but they’re hemmed in by expanding urban lines. State, county, and regional parks as well as water districts and a few land trusts limit some development. But private lands such as ranches are fair game for housing. With the “housing emergency”—that really should be called a growth emergency—we can expect our existing open space to be eroded at a faster pace, making it even harder to get away from city and suburb. Although you wouldn’t notice it if your world has devolved solely to San Francisco, here in Contra Costa County country roads have vanished to be replaced by suburban tracts well within living memory. For example I recall doing club rides amidst empty grass fields in what is now Danville and San Ramon. Those spaces are now middle-aged neighborhoods that one would never realize were green hills just thirty-five years ago. Even today the City of San Ramon continues to expand on the west side of I-680 into the hills, green just two or three years ago are now encrusted with enormous housing developments such as The Preserve.

It’s going to be harder and harder to find those elusive country roads and the ones that seemed safe now are going to have increasing amounts of traffic as housing density increases. Some of those quieter roads make enticing cut-through routes for commuters when the freeways are jammed. For years beautiful Pinehurst Road in the Berkeley/Oakland hills has been a ‘secret’ route when Highway 24 is clogged since it’s so easy to get to via Highway 13 and 24. This narrow, curvy, and otherwise quiet road regularly has commuter cars speeding at 40+ mph trying to make up for lost time by racing down the grade hellbent. I learned the hard way not to cycle on Pinehurst from 3 to 7 PM on weekday afternoons. The same is true for Redwood Road: commuters use it to bypass 880 and 680 and race their cars as if they had the road all to themselves. In this respect as cyclists we are experiencing a form of ‘habitat’ loss and we have to move further and further away from the core Bay Area to ride quiet roads.

One solution is to switch roads: go off-road. From San Francisco it’s not that difficult to get to the beckoning dirt roads of Sweeney Ridge to the south or the Marin Headlands to the north. However unless you drive to the start you will still have to deal with cycling on roads to get to the good stuff and if you drive you’re becoming part of the problem. A few years ago I led a dirt ride in the Headlands after a long hiatus—like, decades—and discovered that there were a lot more cyclists particularly on ‘gravel’ bikes’ using the Headlands on a Sunday. It wasn’t unpleasantly crowded; in fact, it was great to see so many other cyclists. But it also intimates, perhaps sadly so, that to enjoy cycling you may have to get off the streets and cede them to automobiles.

A drastic solution is to move out of the urban center to places that offer more peaceful roads like Mendocino, the Gold Country, or Central California. If you’re stuck in the Bay Area for other reasons, then it’s not an easy solution for you. People fleeing the Bay Area for quieter locales is why Lake Tahoe is currently experiencing a housing shortage. We take the problem with us because we are the problem. Nonetheless it’s become a thing to cash out your Bay Area home and move to, say, Oregon where it’s less crowded. And Oregonians complain about being Californicated!

The less obvious solution is to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse: look for the attraction in urban riding. Urban riding is not just to be tolerated but can be embraced for its hidden attractions. Number one is convenience and time savings: it’s just outside your door and preparation time is minimal. You spend more time riding, less time in its penumbra, freed sooner to get on with your busy life. The second is exploration: there are a lot more streets in cities and suburbs than in the countryside and each one may hold something unexpected and glorious. In the case of a club ride to Pacifica this past spring, David Go. found us a cute little coffee house just off the well-trodden path. This coffee house (I use the word ‘house’ hesitantly because it was smaller than an apartment living room) had delicious coffee and treats as well as a comfortable and sunny back patio where we schmoozed and lapped up our caffeine. The third is you go slower. Slower?! Well, not all the time but those stop signs and red lights plus pedestrians and cars can be viewed as impediments or as a siren call to chill and enjoy the ride. Or, you can use the opportunity of each stop light to work on your track stand and your subsequent sprint. When I lived in SF I got tired of unclipping (and in the old days unclipping meant getting out of your toeclips and straps) at each light and pretty quickly learned how to track stand. Fourth is the innumerable opportunities to check out another eatery. We’re not like Italy where you can cycle in the countryside and in the middle of nowhere find an incredible inn serving farm-to-table meals. More likely you are to run into a McD. But in urban settings like SF you will pass by many of the estimated 10,000 restaurants and food stands we have. Fifth, the majority of streets in San Francisco actually don’t have lots of traffic despite the density because city drivers tend to use the wider thoroughfares and avoid the lesser streets with lots of stop signs. Those streets are admirably comfortable for cycling. For example, everybody likes to take the Great Highway when heading north or south. But most of the numbered avenues are relatively calm as well. And some of the houses have very interesting front ‘yards’!

If you’re looking for something more challenging, the City has several loops where you can bust a gut. The Early Birds head up Twin Peaks by Corbett Avenue. This is part of a great training loop of about five miles and you can always do several laps if you want more. The Presidio Hills loop is another challenging ride with five or six short, steep climbs. Of course, there is always the race loop in Golden Gate Park where you can do training races Tuesday early evenings during the summer. And the oval track at the Polo Field in the Park is the classic place to work on your sprint speed or just chill with your buds as it is so easy to converse at length without shouting doing laps. If you’re after this kind of cycling, you’re probably not too interested in what the aesthetics of your surroundings are so it won’t matter whether you’re riding in the city or the country. If you’re a member, be sure to take a gander at our club RideWithGPS collections for more ideas on where to ride your bike in San Francisco.

AIDS Lifecycle is almost upon us, taking place June 5 through June 11. As you know it’s a week-long charity ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles to raise money for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Los Angeles LGBT Center. This event started in 2002 taking over the California AIDS Ride, which started in 1993 and which was run by for-profit event promoter Palotta TeamWorks.

Fading from memory is that both of these charity rides had a progenitor, the AIDS Bike-A-Thon that ran from 1985 to 1994. Who ran those fundraisers? We did, or rather the previous members of our club did. An account of the first Bike-A-Thon can be found here.

Michael John, or “MJ” as he was familiarly called back in the day, was the club’s second president and also for a time the editor of the club newsletter, The ChainLetter, when it was printed (!) and long before it died and was reincarnated as the club blog. He recently sent me a scanned copy of the Bay Area Reporter (BAR) account of the very first AIDS Bike-A-Thon of April 6, 1985, which you can read below.

A few notes about the article. Gene Howard, the last of the 62 riders to arrive in Guerneville was at the time one of the very few ‘elderly’ members of Different Spokes; he later perished in a terrible house fire unlike so many of the gay men in the club who succumbed to AIDS. He was a real sweetheart. The article mentioned the first person to arrive in Guerneville without mentioning his name. It was almost certainly Bruce Matasci, another club heartthrob. Bruce had been a semi-pro racer, having raced against Greg Lemond when Greg was a very young up-and-coming junior (and thrashing all the senior racers in NorCal). Bruce died of AIDS in 1991. Dr. Bob Bolan chased Bruce all the way to Guerneville but never caught him much to his chagrin. (No shame, Bob, Bruce was a monster on the bike even though he was no longer racing.) Bob was an AIDS doc in SF at the height of the plague and was the head of the SF AIDS Foundation at its very beginning. He later relocated to LA and is still the longtime medical director of the LA LGBT Center. Bob is still tearing up the roads down south.

Note that the fastest average speed for the hundred miles was 17 MPH. That’s average–an unpaced 100-mile time trial, and by the way the route had over 7,000 feet of elevation gain! Although Different Spokes of that era was a club composed for the most part of recreational and touring cyclists there were members who were very, very strong.

$33,000 seems paltry today. A top fundraiser for AIDS Lifecycle does well above that alone. In today’s dollars this would be just about $89,000–still just a modest sum. But you have to remember that charity rides were in their nascency back then and the entire event was organized in just six weeks. Everything from recruitment, fundraising, PR, logistics was put together quickly. And, this was long before social media existed so getting the word out was literally by word of mouth.

The other thing that may be difficult to imagine for those who did not live in that era is that these were very dark days in the LGBT community. Gay men were dying like flies. With no cure and no effective treatments let alone understanding of the disease, despair cast a dark shadow. Members would disappear for an interval, reappearing as gaunt wraiths, and then passing. Or suddenly their obituary would appear in the BAR. Those of us who lived through that time lost many friends and that grief and loss left a heavy mark.

Bike-A-Thon was not just a fundraising event but one of the first ‘lighthouses’ shining a path: the community could unite and everyday people rather than just medical researchers could do something to get through the plague years and provide some hope that we would see an end.

Can you imagine that? And here we are today!

You’re probably somewhat aware that the club has a “Short ’n Sassy” interest group. We coined this nomen for those who like short(er) and slow(er) rides than what you typically see on our ride calendar. Very generally that refers to rides of about 20 miles at no more than a B-pace and typically not a lot of elevation gain and certainly nothing steep. Our usual rides are closer to 40 miles with lots of elevation gain and nothing less than a B-pace.

We’ve had just one ride, a shorter version of the Jersey Ride, with this initiative and so far no one is clamoring to lead this type of ride. Perhaps flying under the radar is our Hump Day rides, which are all under 25 miles at an unspecified pace but they are no-drop. Hump Day has three options. The Lake Merced option is fairly flat but the Marin Headlands and Presidio Hills routes are pretty climby even if short.

Our shorter/slower rides got me thinking of what other local clubs do or don’t do about cyclists who want something easier. So I decided to look at the websites and ride calendars of other clubs to see if they try to reach out to this population and if they even offer rides that might fit this description. What I found is actually a bit better than I had anticipated. Of the 19 other clubs, five mention nothing about short/slow rides at all nor seem to have anything like our Short ’N Sassy. Of these five, one (Grizzly Peak Cyclists) is definitely a big club, well more than 700 members. In the past GPC has offered ‘new riders’ rides; GPC does have a once-a-month all-club ride with a short/slow option that does have a ride leader.

The surprise is that the other 14 clubs offer something although exactly what is offered may or may not be well attended. Typically these clubs have more regularly scheduled rides eg. ‘mellow Monday’, ‘Easy Friday’ etc. These rides are on the calendar sometimes without a designated ride leader so it’s unclear if they actually take place or not. Basically it might be a decide-and-ride: whoever shows up goes and does some sort of ride. That’s the problem with a regularly scheduled ride: you need a cohort who will lead this ride on a regular basis, so it tends to be the larger clubs who can provide this just from sheer numbers or else they have short ride evangelists who have stepped up. And just because a club offers an easier option for a ride does not mean that the easier options have a ride leader, ie. you are free to start the ride and do the easier option but the ride leader(s) are doing the more difficult option. In other words an easier route is made available, period. Rides that have a bail-out option are probably better supported since you can ride with everyone else but then drop off earlier.

A large subset of easier rides are morning ‘coffee’ rides, either before work (6:15 AM!) or during the morning (eg. 9 AM). None of them are after work rides like our Hump Day. The one real effort is the Feather Pedals subgroup at the Valley Spokesmen Cycling Club in Dublin. Feather Pedals offers prep rides from January to April for VSBC’s annual Cinderella Classic. Since the Cinderella is female-only, FP tends to be female heavy but males are welcome as well. The astonishing thing about FP is that their rides regularlly host 30-50 participants. That’s a fantastic turnout. After the Cinderella, which is in April, FP offers a monthly social ride for the rest of the year. But note that the spring FP rides are a training series, so they might start short but they progressively increase the difficulty so that riders are prepared for the metric-length Cinderella Classic.

Some of the 14 clubs offer rides that are kind of short ’n sassy but diverge in some way. For example ACTC has short rides under 20 miles but they are climb heavy. Other clubs have A-pace rides but they’re 30 or more miles; this is similar to our Social A rides—just slightly shorter than typical Different Spokes rides but led at a slower pace.

No mention of short/slow rides:
Sunnyvale Cupertino Cycling Club
Veloraptors (Montclair) [easier pace rides are all over 30 miles]
Grizzly Peak Cyclists (Berkeley)
Cherry City Cyclists (Hayward)
Golden Gate Cyclists (SF)

Some kind of short/easy rides:
SF Cycling Club: Friday morning coffee ride is “inclusive”
Benicia Bicycling Club: TThSa A & B rides (A is 14-16 mph, B is 10-12 mph)
Solano Cycling Club: (Fairfield) Weds Cantelow ride is 20.4 miles, 1180 ft. elev gain.
Eagle Cycling Club (Napa): Weds Carneros ride is 20 mi/B-pace, no drop; Sat is regular 20-30 mi, B-pace
Santa Rosa Cycling Club: has A & B pace rides but all over 30 mi; Fri A pace ride but it’s 32 miles.
Davis Bike Club: Tue “easy” bakery ride, Sun no-drop ride
Sacramento Wheelmen: “constitutional” rides to Folsom Lake and back (flat, variable pace)
Marin Cyclists: Wed China Camp loop (20-35 mi); Mon through Fri Paradise Drive (23 mi, A-B pace but no leader)
Diablo Cyclists (Walnut Creek): Sun breakfast ride (20 mi, flat but ‘moderate’ pace (note: equivalent to our C pace))
Western Wheelers (Midpeninsula): Mon “Socially Paced” coffee ride; occasional A pace rides
Almaden Touring Cycling Club (San Jose): misc short rides but hilly
Fremont Freewheelers BIcycle Club: daily Show ’n Go rides; Sun social ride
Oakland Yellowjackets: offers ‘light’ option to rides
Valley Spokesmen (Dublin/Pleasanton): Feather Pedals

On Easter we decided to head up to Sacramento to do an old Different Spokes ride that is no longer fashionable, the American River Bike Trail (ARBT). Back in the day this was called the Jedediah Smith Memorial Trail. The club first went up there courtesy of Derek Liecty and Richard Palmer on May 6, 1984. It was usually offered once a year in the spring or sometimes in the fall. No one in their right mind wanted to be on the American River in the summer as it would so hot one would faint from the heat and humidity. It got San Franciscans out of their comfort zone, ie. away from the Gay Ghetto and summer-long City fog and into the heartland of the Traditional Values Coalition and valley heat. It’s a beautiful paved trail that manages to avoid Sacto’s suburban sprawl and render the appearance that you’re out in the country (except when passing under the overpasses).

The ARBT starts in Discovery Park, which is just to the north of old town Sacramento, and continues for over 32 miles to Beals Point at Folsom Dam and then slightly beyond. The trail parallels the American River, wiggling along its banks amidst numerous river parks small and large. Even though you’re passing through several suburbs—Carmichael, Rancho Cordova, Fair Oaks, and Folsom—you rarely espy the urbanity as the planners have done an excellent job of preserving the river as is. The ARBT is technically a multi-use path but it’s unlike the ones we have in the Bay Area. The paved trail is primarily for cyclists and it has a painted divider for each direction, upriver and downriver. Although pedestrians can and do use the path, they are advised to use the dirt shoulder and walk facing cycling traffic. Skateboarding is banned. In comparison MUPs such as the Iron Horse or Contra Costa Canal Trail are free-for-all zones open to any user and there is no attempt to organize traffic nor limit users other than to the 15 MPH speed limit. Thus the ARBT is actually a great place to ride and better than the adjacent city streets since it has almost no stop signs and very few crossings.

Although it’s often described as ‘dead flat’ the ARBT is not exactly flat as a pancake. There are innumerable small ups and downs that are insidiously wearing. The only climb to speak of is the short ascent from the town of Folsom up to dam level. All in all it’s about 1,100 feet of gain over the length of the trail. As the day progresses the wind changes from usually downstream to what can sometimes be a steady upstream headwind as the Valley heats up and sucks air up the Delta. But there are so many places to stop to rest, get water, find a restroom, and relax on benches or lawns in shade or in sun that temporary relief is literally just at your feet. Although there are no food concessions on the trail itself, you can exit it at various points and search for the nearest fast food or other local restaurant in the suburbs themselves. At Beals Point there is a snack concession stand but its hours are mostly limited to summertime when the crowds throng the lakeshore. So for food it’s best to bring your own and you can enjoy a snack anywhere you like along the trail.

Roger and I last rode the ARBT in 2019 during the time when a long section of the trail at Lake Natoma—about 20 miles up the river—was closed due to a landslide and then a breeding pair of bald eagles established a nest there that had to be left undisturbed. We were forced to ride the south side of the river that year. It had been three years since we’ve ridden the trail and even longer for the closed section.

I was eagerly looking forward to revisiting the ARBT. Although I’ve suffered through some pretty hot versions, I’ve always enjoyed the mesmerizing roll along the river. This year it was slightly on the cool side and that made the entire day a comfortable jaunt. The trail is well used by Sacramento denizens as well as visitors from the Bay Area (e.g. I saw a rider with a Dublin Cyclery jersey). But the trail wasn’t crowded at all perhaps because there is plenty of room, 32 miles worth! Picnickers and daytrippers were out enjoying the sunny day and the smell of grilling meat wafted pleasantly along the trail.

The peculiar thing about the ARBT is that I’ve never been able to go very fast on it. Perhaps it’s because I’m just not ‘very fast’ period. Although I can roll on my local roads at over 17 MPH, I have a really hard time keeping that speed on the ARBT. And it wasn’t just this day—I’ve been doing about 15 MPH on it for years. And this time I felt like I was struggling almost the entire day. We were passed by other cyclists with some regularity. The trail is used not just by the hoi polloi but also by the local racers and faux racers. It is somewhat unsettling to see guys roll by at speed on time trial bikes; technically there is a 15 MPH limit but it’s for show only—laughable really—because of the inordinate number of cyclists rolling by at pace. Nonetheless except at a few critical junctures there is rarely a crowd on the trail.

Many of those passing us were on e-bikes and there were more e-bikes in use than I had ever seen before except perhaps at the Stanford E-Bike Expo. The assortment was really quite astounding—e-cargo bikes with kids, e-bikes with trailers, urban bikes, road bikes, mountain bikes—you name it, they all had batteries. At one point we were passed by a couple and I tried to catch them. 17 MPH…18 MPH…20 MPH…22 MPH and I was gasping. This went on for some time when I came to the realization that they probably had Class 3 e-bikes and unless I was willing to risk my heart exploding I wasn’t going to catch them. Off they flew into the distance. This happened several times: we’d get passed, I’d speed up, I couldn’t catch up or I’d just run out of gas/patience. In any case I just wasn’t feeling it that day. I really felt like the caboose!

At about the 20-mile point you pass the Nimbus fish hatchery. This facility is run by California Fish & Game and raises salmon and trout fingerlings to release into the American River due to the natural run being blocked by the Nimbus hydroelectic dam, which creates Lake Natoma just below Folsom. Here you have to cross the river and climb to the north side before dropping precipitously back to lake level to continue upstream. This section of the trail is beautiful as you glide by the lake and beaches, which are often full of users in warm weather.

Where the trail passes through Folsom is the beginning of the climb up to Beals Point. As we started to climb I could see a well-kitted cyclist suddenly appear behind us. Of course I sped up. Then I stood up and climbed for all I was worth (which wasn’t much). In a vain victory we dropped him on the climb, perhaps a mere hundred foot vertical gain. That nearly killed me. So I crawled into Beals Point for a good rest.

Usually we carry a lunch with us to eat at the lake. But this time we were set on going to Julian’s Patisserie, which is a couple of miles back down the trail on the outskirts of Folsom. It meant leaving the trail and getting on Folsom-Auburn Road, a wide four-lane arterial with shoulders. The transition from no cars to mo’ cars was unsettling! Peace and quiet were replaced by anxiety and the loud whine of many automobiles adjacent to a sadly perfunctory “bike lane”.

At Julian’s, which has outdoor seating, all the tables were taken and it was closing soon. So we ended up missing out on his pastries and ended up next door at Coffee Republic, which has lots of outdoor tables and hardly a crowd. The sandwiches were fine but nondescript, nothing to write home about.

Back on the trail we took it easier, or at least we tried to. Unfortunately the afternoon headwind had appeared so it was a bit of a slog anyway and it felt like we were merely crawling along. By now the Sunday crowds were in full force, parking lots were full at most of the parks we passed. And who wouldn’t want to be outside on such a pleasant day? Sunny but not hot, a light breeze, and plenty of foliage to assuage the senses.

As has been becoming typical I developed a hamstring cramp and we had to stop. I downed some pickle juice—Pickle Power!—and rested a bit, then headed back even more slowly. I know that if I take it easy (or down a Coke, which alas I did not have) I can make it calm down. A few miles down the path I felt better and we were shortly back at Discovery Park. I can’t say I was beat but I was close to it—it was after all over 64 miles. And my average speed for the day? 15 MPH. Same as it ever was. At least I’m not getting slower quickly.