Iron Fist

I found myself seized by a peculiar sort of madness last week, and signed up for the full 10-bridge version of the annual Providence BridgePedal. Once a year, all the bridges crossing the Willamette River in Portland are closed off to vehicle traffic all morning long, and thousands of cyclists pour across them in all their spandex-and-Lycra clad glory.

I’ve been wanting to go on this ride since I first found out about it, but I usually ended up having to work on Sundays, and last year I was given an invitation to go white water rafting that I just couldn’t pass up. This time, I told myself, this time I’m going to do it! This time these bridges shall be mine!

I tried to coerce my coworkers:

Me: BridePedal next Sunday! Let’s do it!

CW: Uhh…sure. What are you thinking, the 6-bridge version? I think I’m up to that.

Me: I WANT ALL TEN.

CW: That’s 36 miles! C’mon, I work a desk job. I’m not in that kind of shape.

Me: Neither am I, but by God I am going to make all ten of those bridges submit.

I shanghaied my friends:

Me: BridgePedal is coming, Niels. Let’s do it! I need to get one of these in before I die.

Niels: All right, I’m in. What time do we need to be down at the waterfront?

Me: 7:30AM.

Niels: You know I don’t get up before noon on the weekends.

Me: You would if we were going surfing. It’s the BridgePedal. Carpe Diem, sucka!

I ultimately rounded up four friends, who in turn I believe must have each convinced 5,000 other people to go too. Briefly I found myself thrilling about what it would be like if we really got this whole bike-commute movement underway and everybody biked to work every day. This fantasy of a cycling utopia was quickly dispelled once it turned out that even when it’s only bikes on the road, people can still manage to get in to some serious pile-ups. At least one person ate it half-way across the first bridge. Sadly, one member of our group took a nasty spill on a side road a few blocks before the second bridge, and ended up having to bow out and take a bus home.

Right before the rest of us prepared to make our triumphant passage across our third bridge of the morning, I discovered that even cyclists can experience gridlock. I imagine this is what rush hour in Beijing must look like:

It was as we shuffled along through this bottleneck that we decided that we were going to break ranks with the rest of the riders as soon as opportunity presented itself. Out of all those bridges the ones we wanted most to cross were the two that were highest and normally verboten to cyclists because they are major freeways. The others we all had routinely crossed at one time or another anyway. So it was that after the crowd made its slow compacted way over the Ross Island Bridge, we powered ahead and up to the top of the Marquam Bridge. We stopped here to take a breather and replenish out water supply from the rest station.

From here we coasted easily back down into town, building up speed and turning left when everyone else went right, skipping two bridges and rejoining the migration right before they started climbing the span of the Fremont Bridge, where we again stopped to enjoy the view and take a few photos.

Our timing was just about perfect, too: not more than fifteen minutes after we finished crossing this bridge, they began closing it off to cyclists and re-opening it for cross-town traffic. It was at this point that, having conquered six bridges (plus three more that we’d crossed in the past and so felt free to add to our total), we could officially say that we were mostly done, and veered off into Northwest Portland and its rich selection of bars and eateries.

I’ll get that St John’s Bridge some other day. I don’t know if I’ll partake of the BridgePedal next year: it was tons of fun, and truly needs to be experienced at least once, but the fact that there were parts where there were so many cyclists crowded together (and not everyone is a safe rider out there) that you literally end up slowing to a crawl and having to walk is a bit off-putting.

Maybe I’ll just sign up for the 6-bridge ride next year.

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