The spot where I ride in the morning is explicitly chosen because it’s a six mile loop where I feel very safe for various reasons. Getting there is a different story. Fortunately, there’s very little traffic at that time of day and I’m pretty alert to what’s going on around me.
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I’m less worried about traffic than about other people at that time of morning. There aren’t many places I can ride that don’t involve riding through some pretty sketchy areas, and there have been several instances of cyclists getting pushed off their bikes and mugged recently. 
Anyway, I am going to try and ride every day this month. My criteria are just “some miles over and above my commute.” I took my Co-Motion and tacked some scenic MUP miles onto my morning commute. It’s not much, but it felt good (even though I had a headwind most of the time).
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If I were trying to get my cycling groove back I would NOT try to ride every day in October. Not riding your bike for a month would be a better idea. Go do some hikes or something.
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More power to you. The wind on Marine Drive is next level piercing.
4 am sounds like an awful time to drive, but possibly some sort of fun on a bike.
who would have thought!
That reminds me of when I learned my way around Portland on my fixed gear. Fun miles are the best miles.
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There’s something I experienced riding in the UK that I think is missing from the organized cycling scene in the US that would help more people engage with riding on a consistent basis. We joined a cycling club after a couple months living in York because we kept trying to do long rides and getting lost and getting home after dark.
The club has been around since the 1890s, is a serious racing club with a summer TT series, Wednesday night fast ride, youth development, former Olympians among the membership…
However, one key feature was the “Sunday Clubrun” - an all-day ride that varied seasonally from 70-100+ mi with a cafe stop for lunch. Average pace was 16-18 mph over challenging terrain. Saturday had similar rides at 3 different paces. There was a consistent core group, known tongue-in-cheek as the “irregulars.” Some were former racers, some had been riding with the club for 40+ years, occasionally a strong junior rider would join us. There were one or two guys who were generally responsible for route planning and it was different each week. There were typically 3-12 riders (more than 10 and we’d usually split the group). There were clear expectations about fitness and ability to ride in a group. The only racing I did with the club was the club TT series and their hillclimb TT (on my steel bike with fenders and dynamo, of course).
Around the Boston area, my sense is that the racing clubs have no interest in strong riders who don’t want to race. A couple shops organize long “adventure rides” but different riders turn up each time so there aren’t well-established norms of riding decorum. I spend the first 20 miles figuring out who the sketchy riders are and rolling my eyes as people go off the front trying to prove themselves. Not sure how to change this situation. Are there clubs in other parts of the US that span as broad a swath of cycling as I described above?
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I have a friend in Portland Maine who belongs to a club that sounds like that. He and his wife love it and actually met there. Serious about cycling but social and supportive with different levels.
One big problem I’ve seen in the US is that there’s a club/team split, where the latter is just racing racing racing even if you’re not actually racing and the former is mostly retirement age folks who do a very gentle weekly ride in the summers, an annual century, and are stalwarts of the local charity ride circuit. There’s not a lot of middle ground. The new wave of mixed surface adventure stuff is new enough that there’s a pretty wide assortment of people showing up, as you say.
I guess i wish there was a more mature middle ground in US amateur cycling that countenanced the competences you get from racing or whatever but didn’t center them. It might take a short talk from a ride captain about minimum AND maximum speeds, as well as a willingness to kick sketchy people out of the group. My local neighborhood ride (that got 6-12 people at least, weekly) got canceled because it kept ending with hospitalizations. That’s just incredibly dysfunctional.
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Blame USAC and LAAAAAAAAAAANCE
And Strava and decades of centering racing in all bicycle marketing. Roadies were competitive dickbags before lance out-doped his competitors, and they now have a plethora of tools undreamt of in 2004.
Usac aren’t really villains in my story, honestly. They sort of fumble around trying to channel grassroots interest in racing.
There actually IS a group that’s kind of like what you described above, but unfortunately for me, it’s in the suburbs 25 miles from where I live. They have A, B, and sometimes C groups with clear expectations for ride speed and rider behavior. I just can’t get myself over there without getting up at, like, 5 and spending an hour on the train + navigating sketchy suburbs.
There’s another group ride that’s very racer focused, but the organizer has tried to get a more consistent B group to form. The problem is that everyone always tries to go with the A group, so instead of having two packs, you end up with one fast-as-fuck group and a long tail of dropped riders who are apparently too cracked to form another group.
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I decided I’m not going to Strava anymore so I wrote up a route on rwgps and I’m going to try on Saturday
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riding bikes rules
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Dude, we should ride bikes. I just gotta get it together.
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Riding bikes indeed rules.
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Xpoast Hy wtf
I rode 65km
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I did 41 miles this morning look at us
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Y’all inspired me. 5 and a half miles!!
lol it was mtb though
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