The Think Tank

As many of you know because you so generously donated on my behalf, Joel and I took part in Reach the Beach, an annual bike ride fundraiser for the American Lung Association.

This year’s ride caused a bit of a stir and earned some airtime on the local news stations because the police in Amity – the halfway point on the 104 mile ride from Portland – setup a sting operation for bikers who ran a stop sign.  I have definite opinions on that, but I will address those in a bit.

All in all the ride raised more than $600,000 dollars for the ALA, which is a great accomplishment and an event record.  The ride was limited to 3,000 riders and sold out more than two weeks before the deadline.

The ride itself proved to be very pretty and mostly enjoyable, but much more difficult than either Joel or I thought it would be, and I had anticipated it being pretty tough.

Everyone I spoke to about the ride insisted that it was very flat, and indeed there was a significant portion of dead flat land from Newberg to Grand Ronde, but that leaves about 75 miles of climbing.  It wasn’t always super steep, but it was pretty constant.  As is clearly evident in the picture above, I am not a pristine physical specimen, but even still, this was pretty tough.

In fact, it was so hard that neither Joel or I finished.  Joel made it 50 miles and I got as far as 82, but eventually the hills and killer headwind were too much for me.

Click through for the full details.

From an organizational stand point, I was very disappointed in Reach the Beach.  We arrived around 7:15 and got in line to pick up our registration packets shortly there after, but it took more than an hour to actually get our stuff.  That meant that we didn’t get on the road until 8:30 or so… which wouldn’t have been that much of an issue, except they didn’t keep the course open any longer due to the hangup with registration.  That meant that we hit the first three rest stops about 10 minutes before the closed, and the last several were already closed by the time I got there.  That was a bummer.  Fortunately, Mom, Maure and Elisha were in the van acting as our very own support vehicle, so they kept us well stocked with sandwiches, beverages and snacks.

Joel was pretty exhausted when we started out.  The sale of his new home closed the Friday before, and he had all of 48 hours to move himself, his roommates and his dad into the new place, then he set off for a week long work trip to the east coast.  He arrived back in PDX at 10pm the night before the ride, so he was understandably worn out.  Unfortunately for him, the road didn’t care about his troubles and took its toll on him, especially his knees.  By the time we got to Dayton he was pretty well spent, and that was before the headwind started.  When we arrived at the half-way point in Amity, he called it quits.

And that brings us to Amity.

The Amity PD setup a sting operation on the last stop sign before the rest area, at the local middle school.  According to the police chief, the citizens have been complaining for years and years about bike riders, focusing on two main complaints: 1) blowing stop signs; and 2) riding several abreast on roads and slowing down traffic.  According to the Chief Brown, he is a big supporter of the ride and the cause both, but “we just want them to obey the laws.”

Now, I am the first to admit that many biker’s are inconsiderate, and many blatantly break all sorts of traffic laws.  Those guys piss me off and they deserve to get tickets.  Just like the people in automobiles piss me off when they do the same things, or the streams of pedestrians who blindly waltz across the street against traffic lights and crossing signals after Blazer games.  They deserve tickets too.

Undoubtedly some of the riders in Amity deserved tickets.

But having been there and seen it myself, this had nothing to do with keeping people safe or “educating the riders” as Chief Brown said on the news.  It was about earning revenue for the city of Amity, pure and simple.

As I mentioned before the police setup shop on the last stop sign before the big, main rest stop (which was also one of four possible starting points).  I don’t know if you have ever been to Amity, but it is a pretty small place.  The downtown area is bisected East-West by Hwy. 153.  The middle school that was our rest stop is two blocks off of that main drag, providing many stop signs along a relatively well traveled road within a just a few blocks of the police operation where rolling through a stop sign could be considered dangerous, for both cars and bikes alike.

But they didn’t choose to focus on any of those stop signs.  They chose the one just before the rest stop, on a very quiet side street.  I was at the rest area for 30 minutes and not one single car passed that intersection in that whole time.  If safety were their concern, and the bikers were so blatantly causing issues for people, why did they focus on this quiet street when there was a much bigger safety concern just two blocks away?

Then there was how the police setup their sting.  They parked two cruisers on the cross street, facing in opposite directions, making it look to many riders like they were there to block cross traffic for the ride – a very common event for organized rides with thousands of participants.  Several riders I spoke to thought that was the case.  Even Mom, while driving the van, thought that was what the cops were doing until she talked to someone and found out they were handing out tickets.

Then there was the type of infraction they were citing.  The rider in front of me rode up to the stop sign, slowed down to no more than 1-2 miles per hour, checked both directions on the completely empty street, then rode through the intersection.  That earned him a $317 dollar ticket.

All told the cops pulled in a little over $4,000 bucks they otherwise wouldn’t have had, handing out a total of 15 tickets.  (Some reports say 17 tickets.)

Which is my final point.  3,000 people signed up for the ride, and three of the starting points were before Amity, meaning that a very large percentage of those 3,000 riders were passing the stop sign where the police made their stand.  Even if you assume a 50% dropout rate among those people (which is way higher than it was), you still are still looking at many hundreds and probably thousands of people passing through Amity during their great big sting operation where the cops were finally doing something to put all the hordes of dangerous bikers in their place… they handed out a grand total 15-17 tickets.

That doesn’t make this sound like such a huge problem that the police force needed to dedicate officers to this “educational” operation.  Especially when you consider that there were at least two other crimes that happened on Saturday in the thriving community of Amity: some fine, upstanding Amity citizens littered a section of road with thumb tacks which caused a bunch of flat tires; and, taking the prize, a business on Main Street fell victim to an armed robbery.

Any way… back to the ride.

After lunch, Joel called it quits and I continued on alone.  We had been hanging with the same group of people the whole day, but quite a number of them disappeared at this time.  I don’t know if they gave up or if I got slower, but I barely saw another biker after Amity.  What I know for sure is that a weather front was moving in off the coast, and it kicked up a hell of a head wind.  The road between Amity and Grand Ronde is almost totally flat, and I was banking on it being a stretch where I could relax and gear up for the last batch of hills over the coast range.  Instead, I wound up fighting the fierce head wind the whole 25 miles, barely able to get out of my lowest gear, which is usually reserved only for climbing the steepest hills.

That stretch really took it out of me.  I also started getting a cramp in my left calf, which made things that much harder.  I put a heat pack on my leg, and that helped for quite a while but around the 78 mile mark I hit the hills and things got really tough.  I really wanted to finish, but my legs were starting to turn to Jello, so instead of meeting me at the next rest area Mom decided to move up the road about one mile and wait for me there.  If I was OK, she would move up another mile.  We leapfrogged that way until the 82 mile mark, where the real hills start.  I got up the first set, but I was seriously dragging ass.

About then a race official drove by on a motorcycle and told me they were closing the course. If I decided to continue on I would have to sign a waiver saying they were no longer responsible for me.  I told him that my family was just up ahead, and when I reached the van I called it quits.

Dinner was included with our registration, and we had purchased additional tickets for Mom and Maure and Elisha, so we continued on to Pacific City for dinner.  The ride officially ended at 6:30 and the crew was right on the money taking the finish line down and breaking up the other ride-related stuff.  Had I continued on, I would have arrived well after everything was torn down, and I wouldn’t have been alone.  I was not impressed by that.

All things considered, I enjoyed myself on the ride but I think that it was organized very poorly.  Given the organizational issues, I am tempted not to ride it again, but then I sort of do want to do the ride again next year just so I can say that I actually reached the beach.