After a log where I recounted riding my bike in the outdoors, it’s not time to return to the real meat and potatoes of my winter training—piling up ghost miles riding my bike in my basement and straining to stave off the madness that threatens to overcome me as I spend far too many hours indoors. (For those new to the term “ghost miles”, these are the miles that I credit myself on Strava for riding indoors via the sneaky and should probably be illegal method of manually updating my rides. I calculate my ghost miles by taking the average MPH of my last outdoor ride and multiplying it by the time spent on my trainer, with a max MPH of 17, because, really who am I kidding?) You see, I work at home, and I rely on outdoor bike riding to keep me from losing my mind, having heartfelt conversations with my wireless router and jarring my bodily waste for “sippin’ season”.

So far it has worked—or my router is going through a really sullen stage. But even riding outdoors has its shortcomings, because I also do that by myself. Well, except for the squirrels who accompany me sometimes—who are also very sullen these days—maybe it’s me? But I digress, sometimes I like to ride bikes with people, and an easy way to do that is to join any of the many local group rides that take place here in the Bergen Backwaters.

The group ride that I enjoy frequenting has many of the characteristics I enjoy in a group ride: there’s a group of people on bikes, it doesn’t start too early nor too late and it doesn’t take took long—because I have essentially become an Uber service for my daughters as they are ferried from event to event on weekends as I attempt to text back and forth with my router. This group ride starts at the Cycle Sport shop in Park Ridge at 8 am and meanders through the nearby towns. It probably has more stoplights than it needs, but I don’t mind as I join the ride to socialize rather than display my mightiness.

An Aside on Group Rides

I have participated in many group rides in my time, and they are a nice way to pad one’s mileage count while enjoying the company of others. Group rides are, of course open to mostly anyone and this means there’s a wide array of skills and fitness levels represented. This diversity, while adding to the novelty of riding with a wide range of people, can pose challenges, which I will list here, because this is the internet, and cats. The internet loves cats.

You, as a group, are judged by your dumbest participant. This doesn’t seem fair, but it’s a sad, inevitable fact. The headline in the local newspaper will not ever read “Local group ride consisting almost entirely of level-headed upstanding members of the community is dismayed that one outlier participant broke numerous traffic laws and harassed an elderly couple on their way to church services. This isolated event is in no way indicative of the manner the group ride usually behaves itself.” Rather the local newspaper headline will state “Drivers harassed by gang of bicycle madmen. Farmer’s market ends Sunday.” The only way to avoid gracing the local paper is to try and make the dumb guy less dumb. It’s a formidable challenge, but it’s better than sharing a headline with breaking news about the farmer’s market.

You will ride faster than you told yourself you would. Never trust the guy who says, “I’m going to take it easy today.” A group ride is alleged to be a social gathering, and it is, but it is also a gathering of competitive people. And when the pace in a group ride increases, these competitive people somehow act competitively. It makes no sense to turn a group ride into a race—it’s akin to showing up to a bar and deciding to match shots with a guy named Mongo who’s picture is on his beer mug—but that is what happens, everyone gets excited and rides faster. Which brings me to…

No one will remember who “won” the sprint except you and the guy you beat. “Oh, you won the sprint? Great, where do you want to get breakfast? I have to get back early to reset my router.”

I will, of course, return to the Park Ridge ride this Saturday, and I would advise you to not join, as there’s plenty of people already participating. I am still on pace to ride 10,000 miles and my weight has not risen to the warning section of my Steven Seagal scale, so it would seem that all is well.