Death Ride

Ian and I did the Berkeley Death ride: a few of the steeper ways up to the Grizzly peak/Skyline ridgeline linked together. It's not as bad as some of the death ride variations i have seen, and not close to the nifty 1050, but still hard. Marin Ave. is just ridiculous, and was a pretty poor way to start the day. After that, we picked off the other climbs: South Park, Centennial, Toyonal without too much suffering. We weren't breaking any records, but we weren't going slow either. Unfortunately, the BPD had closed off the road down to Tunnel after Toyonal, so we took Centennial down, and then rode up Claremont. At the Claremont 4 way... more cops! And these cops were total jerks. I watched in awe as one of them walked up to one unfortunate person's car and yell at the driver. Most of us just got the standard patronizing BPD treatment. So we couldn't finish the death ride, but we did most of it. We did the Euclid climb to make up for it. I found out later that the road had been closed because a cyclist was killed by a car on the road a few hour earlier. It goes without saying that the media blamed the cyclist. One report actually wrote that the cyclist "rammed" the car. No word on whether there were any recent bullet rammings in Oakland on that day.