Your Club at Work:

Reach the Beach Training Rides Still a Go!

Reach the Beach Training Ride, Washington County Wanderings, August 22. Ann Morrow, Dick Weber, Barbara Brady. This is where Dick and Barbara went right, and the others went left for a shorter ride! (Photo by Kathleen Hellem)

You may have foreseen this and here we are: NO Reach the Beach on October 11. The organizers from American Lung Association had moved the beloved event from May to August to October holding out hope, as we all were back in the spring, that this coronavirus thing would be over in the fall and our lives would easily change back to what we knew to be normal. No such luck. The state of affairs with COVID-19 numbers and the Centers for Disease Control and the State of Oregon all led to a conclusion that it would not be prudent to sponsor an event-type ride with rest stops, finish lines, partying, return buses and way more people at the beach than considered safe by most anyone’s standards.  ✎

Hopefully, Reach the Beach will be back next year, in May, and we will enjoy this traditional ride all the more, having been deprived of the route, the support and the wonderful amenities in the crazy year of 2020.

Prior to this announcement on August 21, the Reach the Beach organizers had been scrambling to come up with SOMETHING to assuage the many prospective participants who weren’t keen on riding and joining in at crowded rest stops and the celebratory dinner with a few hundred strangers. Additionally, some were a bit anxious about the new date in mid-October. That could be a beautiful fall day or a gullywasher prelude to winter.

MY RIDE was conceived. My Ride lets Reach the Beach participants just do their own ride wherever and whenever they want, alone or with a small group or their team. Click here for Reach the Beach My Ride FAQ.

First and foremost, and before the cancellation of the actual ride, Dick Weber felt that we, Portland Bicycling Club, should get back in gear and resume the usual training rides which had been discontinued back in March. Working with Julian Dillon, the new executive director of American Lung Association in Oregon, we determined that we, PBC, would post a suggested training route each week to print out and utilize for riders needing some guidance. We are trying to share more information so people can contact us if they have questions or concerns. We are using our usual sequence of training rides and starting up more or less where we left off in March, but timed so the last ride will fall shortly before the previously mentioned October 11 real ride date. Now, that is not as important, but we have started so we will stick with it.

Dick Weber, having picked the training ride torch back up, lit it and resumed leading informal rides on Saturdays as published weekly on our web site. Anyone can join us on any given Saturday. Click here for PBC’s Reach the Beach Training Rides.

Additionally, we discussed the fact that offering the MY RIDE option is great except perhaps for the less experienced riders. For those who want to support the ALA but are not avid cyclists, putting together a route of 55 miles or 75 miles or especially 100 miles could be a formidable obstacle to success. So, in addition to the weekly training route suggestion, we will also include some various MY RIDE route suggestions.

Our primary objective is to help participants achieve their Reach the Beach cycling goal, whatever that is. But an additional benefit for PBC is the awareness it brings our club as we put ourselves out there and get involved.

Thank you for your interest and support.

Ann Morrow, RTB Training Series Ride Co-Leader