Meredith
Posted: March 17th, 2010 | Author: julie | Filed under: Inner Richmond | Tags: Inner Richmond | 5 Comments »
Outside the Velo Rouge Cafe
Inner Richmond
Friday morning
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I’m not completely convinced I’m a city girl, although I’ve lived in San Francisco for more than two years and the Bay Area for 15. Every time I’m in nature, whether it’s a wide open space with rural rolling hills or a green forest amidst the mountains, I find myself taking a deep breath and coming down a notch. Some people meditate or do yoga to feel grounded. Me? I ride a bike.
Growing up, I wasn’t athletic by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I attempted to forge a letter from my mother when I was 10 years old just to get out of P.E. class. But because of both a corporate team-building event in New Zealand and the disappointing reality of having to rule other sports out after three reconstructive knee surgeries, I fell in love with riding a bike. Being a cyclist is now part of who I am. It provides me the opportunity to go places, see things and interact with the world in ways that many people aren’t able, or simply choose not to. I love everything about riding a bike, whether it’s the monotonous spinning of an 80-mile road ride to Pt. Reyes, figuring out a technical section of singletrack on the dirt or powering to the finishing line in a local criterium. To that end, I race several times a month, whether it’s on a road, mountain or cyclocross bike.
Many of the bike races in Northern California are held in the middle of nowhere—tiny little pastoral towns you’ve likely never heard of: Milton, Snelling, Leesville. It’s just you, a couple hundred other bike racers crazy enough to drive 3+ hours to compete against each other and the cows. As much as racing is about pushing yourself to your physical limits, it’s also about community. The cows, they don’t say much, but the friendships I’ve made through cycling have stuck more than I ever would have thought. Although I never had a nickname growing up, now I’m almost universally known by everyone in the cycling community as “Mo,” a combination of my first and last name initials. The nickname, much like the friendships, has stuck as well.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in Southern California, but driving in San Francisco, well, it drives me crazy, so I commute to work by bike as well—I live off Geary, near Trader Joe’s and work in SOMA for a public relations agency, Spark PR, focused on high tech companies. Thanks in large part to the work of the SF Bike Coalition, SF is a great place to be a cyclist—and I don’t just mean for those riding neon-pink bikes with orange rimmed-wheels and wearing skinny jeans. I’m luckier than most of my racing “peers” who live elsewhere in the Bay Area since I’m able to incorporate a lot of my training into my work commute. Sometimes I go through “the Wiggle” while other times I ride through the Presidio. I haven’t had too many problems riding in the city, although I’ve had a couple really close calls with cars turning right without using their signal, not seeing me and forcing me to grudgingly turn right with them, lest I become very quickly and very well acquainted with their vehicle.
My favorite story about riding in the city is a classic “only in SF” tale that involves being knocked over by a fellow rider in the Mission. Riding home from work one evening, I passed a rather peculiar-looking woman, also on a bike. Unlike me in my bike shorts and jersey, she was wearing big black boots, a little pink tutu that revealed her massive white thighs and a sparkly little crown on her head. Besides rolling my eyes over her choice of clothing, I didn’t think much of her and continued on my way up 17th, crossing Mission Street and then Valencia. I was stopped by a red light at Sanchez and when it turned green, I continued up 17th, but veered widely to the right in the intersection so as to cross the curving trolley tracks at a perpendicular angle. Before I knew it, the pink-tutu wearing rider quickly came along my left side and gracelessly rode parallel with the tracks. As her rubber tires made contact with the metal tracks, she and her bike immediately started uncontrollably sliding with unstoppable momentum. Her bike slid into mine and pushed me towards a parked car; she then hit the car herself and crashed onto the ground with aplomb—directly in front of me. I grabbed my brakes in an effort to stop but got tangled in the mess and came to an abrupt halt with one hand on the parked car and the other hand on the ground, my bike awkwardly toppled over underneath me. I gathered my senses and looked up at the rider splayed out in front of me. She lay on the ground spread eagle, with her crown a couple feet away and her pink tutu up to her waist, revealing the bottom half of a leotard… and the fact that she was not a “she” at all. Ah. Nevertheless, she immediately jumped to her feet, adjusted her hair and exclaimed, “Oh my god, my face, my make-up! I’m going to be late for my performance!” I shook my head and let her know that we had to get out of the way of the fast approaching trolley. After some minor adjustments of my own, I rode away fairly unharmed but knowing that I had one hell of a San Francisco story on my hands.
***
You can see a slideshow of Meredith’s photo shoot here.
Meredith’s links:
San Francisco Bicycle Coalition: www.sfbike.org
Dolce Vita Cycling: www.dolcevitacycling.org
Northern California and Nevada Cycling Association (NCNCA): www.ncnca.org
Spark PR
Twitter: www.twitter.com/meredithob
