Sunday morning I wake up with a brutal stomach ache, so I decide to just do a short run later than a ride that morning. During that run I noticed a ton of people out on bikes. I’d never seen it before. All were on old beater road bikes, fixies, or mountain bikes. I get home, get some water and step back outside so as to not drip sweat all over the carpet. Across the street I notice a guy sitting at his car with a cooler. The same people I kept seeing out on bikes keep pulling up to him. I decide I need to see what is going on. I never see anyone other than the local bums out on bikes.
Turns out its a bunch of people doing a ‘courier style’ race. They put their own spin on it. At one station you have to catch and tackle a guy slathered in vaseline. At another you have to dive in a pool and get 41 cents in change out. At another you have to run into the mall and get a photo taken at the photo booth. At the one on my street you had to shot-gun a beer (they had root-beer for the straight edgers).
The whole point was to get a bunch of people out for a fun ride. Invariably a few guys start out riding hard, and once they do a few of the stations, they start having fun and get less competitive. A slip and slide station will do that. Most people had old or borrowed bikes, few had clipless.
The point was to just have fun. They got a bunch of people out, riding bikes, just having fun. I was almost embarrassed to admit I do triathlons. Seems to me we sometimes forget why we started riding a bike in the first place.