The LA River Ride this year was hot, literally. Of everything I could say about the day, the heat is the most noteworthy. According to the Weather Underground, the temperature was 97 degrees. Although at some points on the roads, a cycling computer read well into the triple digits.
The Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition (LACBC) did a fantastic job of providing water stops. Hollenbeck Park had restrooms and large water reservoirs (and music!). Maywood and Dills Parks were also great! There were small Clif bars, peanut-butter pretzels, water, electrolytes, and trail mix with nuts and rice crackers.
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| Hollenbeck Park |
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| Maywood Park |
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| Dills Park |
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| Aquarium of the Pacific |
I am extremely grateful to all the volunteers who made these rest stops possible. I am also grateful to Wayne "Ridetime" Howard for taking us on the Metrolink Metric Century the weekend before the LA River Ride. Riding in the heat for the majority of the day helped us prepare to successfully complete this ride without incident.
We completed 70 miles in about 7 hours, for some segments we were going 16-18 mph. I will caution riders that the segment of the river trail around Firestone has some really nasty underpasses. The trail zig-zags around some large curbs after going over a kind of bump and there is no visibility for riders coming under the roadway. I'm not complaining, it's always great to have an underpass, but these ones are gnarly and we had a rider from our group collide with another rider in a head-on collision. It's unclear who (if either of them) violated the centerline rule, and I'm not saying the trail should be removed or redesigned, but I am urging all cyclists to ride safely in this part of the course. Riders that passed us, walking their bikes, mentioned that someone always "goes down" in this part of the ride, every year.
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