I did the Marathon Crash Ride for the third year in a row
The LA Marathon route cuts across the city from downtown to Brentwood on the west side, where it does a loop and ends at the Century City mall. Prior to the pandemic, the marathon route actually cut all the way through Santa Monica to end at the ocean.
For over a decade, cyclists have been riding the marathon route at 3-4 AM the morning of the marathon, after all the barriers are in place to stop cars. It's a wonderfully eerie way to experience the city - you get to navigate around gigantic maintenance trucks as they place and fill water stations, move barricades around, and sweep the road. You get to bike down Hollywood Boulevard with nobody around and see all the lit-up buildings in complete silence. There are some amazing hills you get to bomb down, too.
The cyclists who do this route tend to bike the OLD marathon route, starting a few miles into the course and ending at the beach, at the entrance to the Santa Monica pier. This means that we spend only the first two-thirds of the ride on the marathon route. (Well, mostly - the route zigzags a bit off and then back onto Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills now, but the cyclists tend to stay on Santa Monica and skip the zigzags in that area.)
This year brought the coldest weather I've experienced since I started doing the ride - my gloves were doing pretty much nothing for my hands. In the past I've biked all the way home from the end of the ride, for a total distance around 30 miles, but it was so freezing and we were so beat by the end of the experience that we took the train home.
The funny thing about this route is that in the three years I've done it, I only managed to stay with a large group of riders once. Both other times, I either left before or after the main group (there is no organization or coordination in leave times) and ended up mostly alone for the majority of the ride. So the feeling of excitement and community you get with a group ride usually only happens for me at the very beginning, when everyone is grouped up at the meeting point, waiting to see when everyone else will leave. Here are some extremely dark, blurry pictures of bikes at the gathering point. They're hard to visually interpret but whatever emotion you derive from them is probably accurate to the feeling of being out at 3 AM with like 400 people on bikes:
The final three pictures depict a guy on a tallbike who was using some kind whirling sparkler device that I've never seen before. I have no idea what it was but it looked cool as shit. If it hadn't rained so many times recently I would have been pissed about it, but the streetscape was damp enough today.
Every year, you can easily find people online wondering whether the Crash Ride has been "canceled," or whether it will be "finally stopped" - it will never be stopped. It will always happen. The reason for this is the same reason the roll-out time is inconsistent: there is no organizing leadership for this ride. It just happens.
It USED to be organized. Originally, it was an organized race event managed by Wolfpack Hustle, an LA alleycat race organization. If you'd like to see what those races were like, I highly recommend this vimeo mini-doc. It's a great watch: