Issue #15: The time is now

The shadows of giants

By Miles Cooper

Sometime in the 2010s north of San Francisco…

It’s 1am, and I think I’m somewhere between Sister Three and Four on Marin’s Seven Sisters. The moon brightens the night, splashing off the ocean to the right. Spectacular vistas. And I’m not seeing it. I’m cracked. Alone. The night is warm, and I’m contemplating laying down in the golden grasses by the road to sleep for a while. And knowing that sleeping could mean missing morning routine — making breakfast, packing lunches, and getting the kids to preschool. Sucking it up and limping home it is then.

How did I get here? Chasing. Grasping at the wheels of insanely strong riders on the weekly Wolfpack Hustle night ride out of San Francisco. I held on until I couldn’t hold no more. The Hustle crowd started out mostly on fixed gears, rearming as the pace accelerated when road bikes began to outnumber the fixies. An eyeball-tearing, lung-scorching, yes-drop ride that got inspiration from its Los Angeles parent. It is my fight club, a break in the trial lawyer routine, the riding equivalent to throwing punches, getting bloodied, and loving it.

Ridgecrest Boulevard on one of the “Seven Sisters,” in the daylight. Photo: Zachary Morvant / @zmorvant

Sometime in the 2000s in Los Angeles…

A few folks gather in 2004 to ride bikes and explore nighttime Los Angeles. Less traffic. More joy. The counterculture attitude strikes a nerve in car-dominated Los Angeles. Word spreads. Within a few years what becomes the Midnight Ridazz sometimes attracts upwards of a thousand people, their own form of traffic congestion, socially rolling along stroad-y multi-lane boulevards. People within the group get to know each other, share similar interests, and develop subgroups. One such group, led by the indomitable Roadblock (Don Ward’s alter ego derived from his outsized frame), is the original Wolfpack Hustle. The group tears across the LA basin, with spins around LAX and Magic Mountain not unheard of. At one point the group identifies the closed-off LA Marathon course as a challenge, leading to a few years of the unsanctioned Marathon Crash Race before the thousands it draws collapses the non-event under its own success. Another gambit involved racing — and beating — a Burbank to Long Beach jet flight during the 405 highway closure in 2011. Cheeky stuff.

The nighttime is a perfect time for the two-wheeled to reclaim the streets. Photo: John Maniquis / @john.maniquis

Sometime in the 1970s in Palo Alto…

A lanky rider named Jobst Brandt becomes known for his Sunday rides, mustering out of his house on Middlefield Road. How far will they go? Where? Only Jobst knows (ish — because opportunity dictates the route). The ride would never be easy. Decades before Bicycle Quarterly inspired the new all road generation, Brandt blazed trails on road bikes, tearing the legs off all comers, drawing future names like Tom Ritchey, Eric Heiden, Gary Fisher, and countless others into his orbit. Brandt was crossing snowy Sierra passes with names like Tioga, Sonora, Ebbetts, and Monitor before they opened to cars well into his 70s. And his Alps rides made the Sierra trips seem tame by comparison.

Jobst Brandt in 2008. Photo: Richard Masoner, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

February 2026 in San Francisco…

Reading about riding — and the impact that reading had — inspired this piece. A recent American Randonneur article pointed me in the direction of a book, Jobst Brandt Ride Bike! I bought it to put out at our office as a beautifully structured book to flip through but had gotten distracted by other things. I left it unread. As I tidied up one afternoon, I picked it up and flipped it open. I read through a few paragraphs and took a seat for what I thought would be mere moments. Two hours later I was still there. As I read about the Jobst rides from the 1970s and 1980s, I thought to myself, “I missed it. The good stuff happened, and I wasn’t there.” Two thirds of this was true: good stuff happened and I wasn’t there.

But did I miss the “it” that the Jobst rides contained? I thought about Wolfpack. While a caboose, I was there as the group mastered outsized rides at speed. Local riders would wake to entire regions of Strava leaderboards getting overturned, KOM through 10, by a Wolfpack outing. I thundered across the LA basin on one of those Marathon Crash outings. That fixed gear intensity generated its own bike punk scene. And that I watched, gladly on the spectator side of the rail, as editions of the Mission Crit turned part of San Francisco’s Mission District into a fixed gear racing spectacle where an amazingly inked crowd welcomed everyone to the racing mosh pit.

San Francisco’s Wolfpack Hustle rode hard and recovered harder, ending the ride at a bar. Photo: John Maniquis / @john.maniquis

As you may be able to tell, these moments make me nostalgic. They were amazing. Awe-inspiring. And yet ephemeral, like tears in rain… (with a nod to Bladerunner’s Roy Batty who said that best.) Everything has an arc: The good stuff happened. Most of us weren’t there. But we didn’t miss it. Because in this granfalloon, society’s energy and epic swirl means the good stuff is happening. Right now. And while nostalgia has its place, looking backward all the time means not embracing right now.

Right now groups are coming together. In my hood, any given day one can easily tap into the energy out there: Fat Cake. 707. JSV. Aftercake. Tranquillo. And those are the groups that have gotten big enough to have names. There are groups that self-select within a bigger organization, those that take things to 11 in their own ways. “There’ll be a group within the group. These guys are a real tight unit. You’ll see them. You’ll know it.” (Gary Busey as Angelo Pappas, Point Break, 1991, Director Kathryn Bigelow.)

Scenes from Fat Cake Club and the Mission Crit. Photos: (top) Emily Bei Cheng / @alpinemily, courtesy Fat Cake Club; (bottom) Joe Flannery / @joe_flan

And while I use riding as an example, there are as many ways to be inspired as there are humans out there. As I reflect on these inspirations, the groups I’m drawn to, there’s a pattern. There’s an almost maniacal monofocus. A can-we-do-this-and-survive ethos. And I believe and I recognize (I hope) that I’m not a lone madman dreaming I’m awake, that you’re still reading this because you too have had that metallic taste in your mouth, had electricity run through your veins. Almost everyone works to improve themselves and the world around them in myriad ways. For many of us that involves testing ourselves. That test can be climbing a mountain for some. It can be walking around the block for others, as those who’ve had to recover from injuries might know.

Recoveries aside, we can’t be all gas, all the time. That’s what folks say. That crushing glacier known as polite society, accelerated by the milquetoasting and ever expanding algorithms, seeks to grind down our individual sharp and rocky edges. If you’re the type to push that envelope, to go further, you’ll need to learn to ignore the critics. They will always criticize yet never create.

Create the change

So when you next read about something amazing and get that twinge — “I missed it” — recognize it for what it is: Inspiration. Humans being amazing. Draw inspiration from it and determine how you’ll contribute. Everyone adds to humanity’s narrative in their own way. What you choose can define you. The time to make that contribution is now. So what are you doing still reading this? Adventure is right outside the front door. Get to it!

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Further reading for those who want more:
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (2015) by William Finnegan
Jobst Brandt Ride Bike! (2023) by multiple authors