Saturday, November 3, 2007

Alley Cat



Earlier this week I did something I never did before. I went on an Alley Cat. An Alley Cat is a bike race. There are checkpoints that you have to go to before you return to the start. On this race we were able to choose which checkpoint we went to first. After choosing the first checkpoint you had to do all the checkpoints in order after that. I had never heard of this before, but someone told me about it, so I took my bike out and tried it out. I went into this knowing full well that I had no chance of winning. I was doing it more for fun. I am not in enough shape to be able to win a bike race. Also the top finishers got prizes since it cost $10 to do the race.

The race was setup where we just had to go to five different places on Purdue campus. That might seem like an extremely short distance, but it was not since we had to do the checkpoints in a certain order. I went from the Memorial Mall to Hilltop to Lynn Hall to Westwood(where Cordova lives) to the Northwestern Parking garage to the Purdue Village to the Memorial Mall. If you were to connect the points it would make a star. The path was purposely designed not to be efficient. This way you have to go across campus many times. I think it was about 9 miles in total.

Map of ride

This event was announced through the Facebook group Purdue Critical Mass. Which is a group that organizes bike rides around Purdue about once a month. The point of the group is to do large bike rides as in lots of people. These types of events are very popular in Chicago. I personally have not had a chance to do one yet. I hope to go on the next ride.

All you need to do these bike events is to have a bike.

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