Screen captures all used with permission of Terry Barensten
Man, I used to hate these guys. You know the ones, tearing against traffic on Fifth Avenue or blithely hanging onto the door handles of SUVs barreling up Central Park West. More than once one of these guys — and yeah, gender profiling like crazy here, deal with it — would zip right past me as I was stepping off a curb to cross the street. Worse was trying to get into the bike lane on my tank of a Citibike in Central Park against packs of them hurtling up that first killer hill. Hated ’em!
No more.
Call it part of my Grand Pandemic Transformation. The GPT started when I got the stationary bike back last January knowing that I wasn’t going to be keeping the 6,000 daily steps going once the real dark and cold set in.
From the start, I’d cue up some high-energy music and find just the right video to watch while churning away on the bike. I especially enjoyed urban biking videos and delighted in tooling around Amsterdam or London although they were pretty sedate. Singapore was so clean it looked like a computer simulation of a city. I also tried out some of the more scenic types of videos but even the most beautiful beaches or mountain roads were a big yawn. I can see trees in 3D by walking two blocks to Central Park, thanks very much.
Give me some energy, some streets, some action!
Then I discovered Terry Barensten and his merry band of total urban biking lunatics (which I say with all due affection and respect, btw). I don’t know anything about Terry or the riders he follows with an impossibly steady camera but I’m hooked. He’s the urban biking equivalent of Ginger Rodgers. While she was keeping in perfect sync with Fred Astaire’s dancing, she was doing it backward and in heels. That’s Terry as he never loses sight of his racers no matter how nuts an intersection is or how heavy the traffic.
I’ve enjoyed tagging along when it’s just Terry tooling around the city on his own. There was a great video he shot shortly after the start of the pandemic where he pretty much had the streets to himself as well as one he did on a clunky ass Citibike. He also doesn’t limit himself to New York City as you can see if you go to his channel on YouTube.
But it’s the Monstertrack races that I always gravitate to when I haul out the bike at the end of a day when I didn’t get to the full 6,000 steps.
I don’t know the rules but I see that the riders have to hit certain station stops during the race to get their little pieces of paper marked before charging back into traffic. There are several of these races and each runs an hour to an hour and a half or more. These riders are in shape! They’re also completely out of their minds. The way they deal with intersections reminds me of what it was like on a bike out at Burning Man where I’d just have to fly into the mayhem and hope for the best (although I never had to worry about cars or cops out there).
I’m currently biking along with the lunatics in a race that was shot during the winter of 2019 and the real fun is tagging along behind the riders as they traverse “my” turf. Take Leonard, for example, the magnificent American elm who lives across the street from the Museum of Natural History on Central Park West. We’ve got photos of Leonard in every season so it was delicious to watch the riders race past that particular tree. Hi Leonard!
The race continued up Central Park West, a street I’ve walked and ridden countless times over the years. The riders tore around the circle at 110th Street and continued up Frederick Douglass Boulevard, aka 8th Avenue, to 125th Street which is The Main Drag of Harlem.
The stop to get their little papers signed up here was in front of the world-famous Apollo Theater.
They were now getting close enough to where I live that I began peddling faster as if I could get them heading down St. Nicholas. It worked! They got their papers signed and headed west on One Two Five with a quick left onto “my” street, St. Nick.
After not stopping by for a quick cuppa, the two riders tore on back down to 110th Street, the southern border of Harlem, and zipped past “my” bus stop by “my” backyard, aka Central Park. Like I said, my turf.
Now they got back on Fifth Avenue and headed south again. At this point, we were less than half the way through the video and I had gotten my miles in. Nice riding with you, guys, thanks for the adrenalin rush!
I’ll be back on the bike soon since it’s raining today and low odds I’ll get my full 6,000 steps in. It’s great to know I can simply log on and find Terry and the rest of the crew ready to tear up the streets with me riding at a safe distance.
Thanks, Terry!
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