Pinellas County Crawl: 100 mile pedal on bmx bikes in support of Radshare.
Pinellas County Crawl: Saturday, January 29th.
One Hundred Miles. Twelve Towns. One County. One Day.
All on bmx bikes.
This ride was organized to help raise awareness for Radshare: A non-profit aimed at closing the opportunity gap in action sports and helping riders in underserved communities.
Radshare can always use our help, if you can spare a couple bucks for a great cause, here’s a link to contribute:
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I woke up at 1:30am on January 29th to heavy winds blowing over the potted plants on our porch. A strong nor’easter had just begun it’s final push into the state of Florida, not only bringing in 30mph wind gusts, but a sustainable, daytime high of 50 degrees.
We planned as best we could, but none of us were truly prepared for how difficult this was going to be…to start, the cold winds blew against us for the first 57 miles of the pedal…
Despite the conditions, we pulled through. What we thought was going to be an uneventful pedal, turned into some wild, unexpected side adventures: A detour to see a natural spring, scouting of some new street spots, and stumbling upon a primate sanctuary with a resident group of chimpanzees and an orangutan.
Niles Harper summed up our trip best:
“From the outside, this ride sounds ridiculous. ‘Let’s take the most inefficient bicycle and ride 100 miles in one day.’ What? Who wants to do that to themselves? We found ourselves asking that question multiple times as we pushed through 30mph gusts of nearly ice cold wind for nine hours. The strange thing that I noticed immediately is just how human it is to go through a struggle together. The banter of how dumb we are for doing this, the chattering teeth and stiff fingers. Everyone is hungry, everyone is thirsty, and everyone needs somewhere to pee. We’re in this together. At a time when so much of our daily news cycle tells us just how divided we all are, here we are struggling together. A bunch of Florida dudes on one of the coldest days of the year, legs cramping, head-first into the wind, having a blast. We aren’t the first to do it, and we won’t be the last. But we did it together, and that was most of the fun.”
Riders on the trip: Gavin Guinan, Terrance Devon, Eric Fabisiak, Dan Dellorso, Niles Harper, and Matt Coplon.
JR Hobbs joined, however, for his own safety, had to leave early due to a flare up of a previous knee injury.
Thanks to Adi Gilbert for both his support and for creating an amazing poster for the trip.
Thanks to Jenni Guinan and Kelly Kennedy for trip support.
To Dig Bmx for hosting our adventure on their Instagram Stories.
To Profile Racing for the support with snacks and sprockets for those riders who needed to upgrade their gear ratio.
Thank You!
-Matt Coplon
