I have somehow acquired the running of two cycle groups in South Perth. How this happened, i don’t really know. I have only been in Perth for three years and there are guys that have been riding with this group for a lot longer than that.

I guess that i just like things to be organised.

The saturday ride was always run by Simon who used to work at the bike shop where we meet. Life was easy then. You turn up and he just yells out where we are riding, and you start pedalling. The sunday ride was a lot more chaotic. Often people would turn up and everyone would look at each other and go “where are we riding today”.

This must of irked me a bit as i started working out the route beforehand, so when everyone turned up the person who yelled the loudest usually got their own way. This turned out to be me.

So, the sunday hills ride started to be a regular thing. Often, especially during winter, there would only be a few riders. However, as more people came out, more came to realise that we were actually waiting for the slower riders at the top of the hills.

Now you have to understand the mind of a cyclist. To be better than someone, you have to hurt them. I don’t mean punch them in the back of the head (although there are a few…) but i mean that if you can go faster, harder, stronger than someone else and they have to hurt themselves to keep up with you, then you must be the better rider. This applies to hills, sprints and first to the coffee shop.

So the Sunday hills ride took off and steadily grew. Last week we had 36 turn up for a 85km jaunt through the Perth Hills. Luckily we actually got enough seats at the coffee shop in Kalamunda.

So, what happened to Saturday. Well, we were all going along fine when Simon tells us that he is leaving and will be working at another bike shop. We were a bit unsure about the new guy as he had a lot of ideas that he wanted to bring into our ride. We were happy to do what we had always done so, again, he who shouts the loudest wins, and i started organising the saturday route as well.

Isn’t technology a wonderful thing. There is a website called Mapmyride.com and I found that i could pre-plan a whole bunch of rides to make sure that they covered enough ground and i didn’t get lost. This allowed me to send out an e-mail during the week so that come saturday/sunday morning, people already knew where we were going. This allowed the slower riders to check for short-cuts or at least know the way home if they got dropped.

So now if you go to the website below and in the keyword search put in sth perth, it has all the planned routes that we take.
http://www.mapmyride.com/search

So my weekends now revolved around taking groups of cyclist out for their weekly ride (much to the dismay of my wife). Saturday isn’t too bad as most of the routes have been done before, so most of the old hands know the way. Sunday, however, i sometime feel like a tour guide. Telling where to regroup and when to turn, dropping back to make sure we have everyone, then going to the front to make sure we are going the right way. Anyway, that just seems to be part of the job.

So, if you are in the South Perth area and are looking for a ride on Sat or Sun then we would be happy to show you around. We always meet at the carpark behind BikeForce (intersection of Canning & Berwick) and always leave at 7AM.

Hope to see you on the road.