Subject: A short History of the Chicken

I was asked by Matt Adams to write something up about the Chicken and I wanted to share it with all you chicken enthusiasts.



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I first heard about the Chicken Ride in 1989. It was just called the 'Friday Morning Ride' or the 'Friday Ride' and really for even the next 10 or 15 years after that and in fact for the original members that is the way they will always think of it to themselves. It was said that if you went on the Friday Morning Ride and you could cross the line first you could win a rubber chicken. That was the story. At first I just thought it was an urban myth. Greg Lemond had just won the Tour de France by 8 seconds over Laurent Fignon and you could ride for a rubber chicken for free around the Paradise Loop? What kind of a magic world were we living in? It was already the stuff of legends even then. And who put it on? No one. It existed wholly on it's own with no sponsor, no organization, no leader -- just the same as it continues today -- but it always seems to take place.

If you go back to the original forming of the ride and drill through the mantle into the core, it started as a splinter group of the Marin Cyclists ride on Friday mornings that Harry and Marsha Rethers led on their tandem for many years. Then an upstart group of young and junior bike racers including, Chris Elke, Rob Elke, Jimmy Robinson, Ravan Moezzi and Dario Frederick (among others) pushed the pace off the front of the Harry and Marsha group and broke away and formed there own ride, sprinting for the natural finish line (that everybody in the whole world has always sprinted for since just after time began) when they roll off that hill -- the bridge over the road at Marin Country Day School. At the end of one of these early splinter group rides, the rider who had come in second stopped, after losing the sprint, pulled to the side of the road and picked up a rock and handed it to the winner and said. "Here, now you have to carry this next week to even it out." As though he was ballasting a jockey and saddle weight for a horse race. And, in fairness and without protest, the winner put the rock in his jersey pocket and brought it the following week. And with each successive week the rock changed hands, er -- jersey pockets, until it was astutely pointed out by someone that crashing with a large rock hard rock in one's pocket could lead to a frightful bruise.

So it was suggested that something should be substituted that would take the place of the rock, that would symbolize the rock, but would be a little softer to land on in the event one were to make an unscheduled departure from his or her machine. And so, as the first prize/ handicap was being awarded so was adopted simultaneously, the first safety measure of the Friday Morning Ride. Whether other objects or talismans stood in place of the rock in the interim before the first rubber chicken was officially baptized and sworn in to service is not known to me. I also can't say definitively who originated the idea of the rubber chicken -- but I can confirm that by 1989 -- one could, with the right combination of tactical nous, mental acuity, raw speed, brute force -- and savoir faire -- they could -- in theory -- win a rubber chicken. It was said.

This oversimplified greatly the actual chances of doing so, however.

A rookie in the early days had about as much chance of winning a chicken as he did of stealing the Hope Diamond on a tour of the Smithsonian Institution. It would have taken a little more than luck. You had to take on a small band of the hands down fastest bike racers in the county. On their home court. On a seven mile stretch of public road they had already ridden hard every Friday for the last five years memorizing every seam in the pavement and grain of sand on its venerated parcours. For a greenhorn to take on these guys for a chicken would have been like a pole vaulter going to the Olympics from the Republic of Klopstokia and trying to win the gold medal with a broomstick. These guys were hitters. They had an all for one one for all mentality that was part three musketeers and part pride of lions -- employing tactics that were shockingly similar to those used in the wild: Surprise attack, run down by superior fitness, or the most cunning and clever of all, orchestrated panic that morphs into a surgical guided ambush. A lion specialty.

And so in 1989, I started to go on the ride. And I got dropped every single Friday for the next six months -- anywhere from instantly to soon thereafter. It was probably close to a year and 40 or 50 chickens later I saw an actual finish unfold with my own eyes. And, as is so often the case, in the intervening moments between desperation and despair, something heroic and noble was discovered in the pursuit of the unattainable. And I discovered that the chicken was born in that grandest of all traditions of hunter and hunted, victor and spoils, centurion and gladiator, senator and slave -- where greatness is not only measured in victory but even in the bravery to fight at all -- where a member of the proletariat can dry his hands on the sandy floor of the arena, draw his sword, and take on a king.

That, metaphorically, is as near as I can get to the spirit of the Friday Morning Ride, of the Chicken. It is a laboratory crucible. It is a small window through which are sometimes revealed in fleeting moments the kernels of inscrutable truth that are inside all of us. And not only in the riding moments -- sometimes in the talking moments too -- tiny particles of meaning which, as we try to grab them, are always, just out of reach, stubbornly undefinable and ultimately unknowable -- composed of an impossible blend of concrete certainty and ethereal myth -- but whose promise alone brings riders back again and again to witness.


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Steve