A Pack of Trouble on Wheels : Rules of Road Treated as Just a Rumor by Cyclists Who Make the CSUN Ride

It was a maneuver right out of prime time. An angry Highway Patrol officer sped past a large group of fast-pedaling cyclists after deciding the riders were taking up too much room on a narrow, two-lane road that meandered through the foothills of the West Valley.

The officer had spent a few minutes trailing the group, unsuccessfully looking for an opportunity to pass. Finally, an opening appeared and he made his move; he was in hot pursuit of the hot wheels at the front of the pack.

“It was pretty funny,” recalled John Wordin, one of the cyclists. “He flies past us with his siren on and pulls this Jim Rockford move. I mean he speeds past, does this 180-fishtail and blocks the whole road.

“Then he gets out and starts reading us the riot act for not riding single-file. He starts yelling, ‘I bet you don’t think I’m going to write 60 tickets.’

“Heck, we knew there was no way he would.”

As it turned out, stunt-man feat notwithstanding, the officer let the riders off with a stern brow beating. Yet the run-in was hardly the first--and certainly won’t be the last--for the group, which meets twice weekly during the summer for a 25-mile ride through the Valley.

The ride starts every Tuesday and Thursday from the front lawn of Cal State Northridge, on the corner of Lindley and Nordhoff. Riders of all abilities converge for the 5:30 p.m. cruise, which winds its way through the rush-hour traffic of heavily congested roads and less-traveled streets around the Chatsworth Reservoir.

But motorists competing for road space might call it the Route of All Evil. These cyclists, who take a Tour de Chance riding alone on city streets, become brazen antagonists when bunched into a speeding pack.

Wordin adjusted his racing shorts, exposing a tan line at mid-thigh of his shaved legs. He glanced at the wireless heart-rate monitor mounted on his handle bars. He checked his watch. It was time to ride, and his pulse rate was sure to quicken, if not from the pace then from wheeling and dealing with less-than-yielding motorists.

A few days before the Aug. 9 ride, Wordin was in Spokane, Wash., for the U. S. Olympic Trials, cruising with the best in the nation. He returned to Los Angeles after failing to make the team, and a day later was at CSUN for the Tuesday ride.

He was joined by approximately 40 riders, almost all of whom are competitive at some level.

“It’s a pretty good mix of guys,” said Wordin, 25, of Woodland Hills. “It’s all different levels. We have the Sunday drivers, the road racers, the mountain bikers who are cross-training, the whole gamut.”

Often, as many as 100 participate in the ride, believed to be the largest of its kind in the L. A. area.

“There used to be a big group that rode out of Griffith Park,” said Tom Sadowski of Thousand Oaks, a regular on the CSUN route. “But it got all fouled up--they got into trouble with complaints and the police.”

The CSUN group includes riders from the Valley-based Rainbow Sports Club and others from the L. A. Racing Team, although riders are careful to point out that the group has no official affiliation or sponsor. After trailing the cyclists for a few miles, one begins to understand why.

At precisely 5:30, the assemblage--each rider clad in the latest in cycling wear and toting the newest in state-of-the-art equipment--heads north through the campus before turning west on Plummer Avenue.

Before the group exits the campus, it runs one stop sign and visibly angers the driver of a Volkswagen convertible, who waited impatiently while 40 cyclists, with Italian words scrawled on every appendage, cruised through a marked intersection at 30 m.p.h.

“That’s the first one we run,” Wordin said, laughing.

It’s not the last. As the group heads toward the West Valley, the leaders of the pack are careful to obey traffic laws. Once they reach the foothills, however, momentum takes over and rational judgment ends.

At several places along the run, the colors of the traffic lights are sort of, well, rounded off. For instance, at least 25 riders in the lead group raced through the intersection at Ventura Blvd. and De Soto Avenue at 35-40 m.p.h.

The light was as red as the faces of the rush-hour motorists who were forced to wait.

“I yell at a lot of our guys for stuff like that,” said Sadowski, 20, one of two riders who stopped at the light.

“Someday it’ll happen,” he said with a sigh, “and that will be it.”

It , Sadowski said, is a fatal or serious collision between a car and a cyclist.

“Maybe it’ll be good to caution some of the riders not to run the lights,” Sadowski said. “Some are taking big chances. It’s rush hour, there are lots of cars out there, and somebody is going to get killed.

“Some of them take it too seriously. I take my racing seriously. But to worry about beating these other guys and running red lights to do it is crazy.”

The last mile of the loop, which ends at Pierce College, is an all-out sprint, reaching speeds in excess of 40 m.p.h. Although not considered a race by all, the ride often becomes competitive.

There are several red-flag areas on the route, where the group seems determined on cruising for a bruising. The kamikaze cyclists were counted running 13 stop signs and two red lights during the Aug. 9 ride.

“I think there are a couple of places out there that are accidents waiting to happen,” said Wordin, who dubbed the intersection at Dumetz and Canoga “suicide corner” because motorists can’t see the cyclists until after the bikers enter the intersection--a four-way stop which the riders ignore at approximately 30 m.p.h.

“I’m surprised nobody’s gone down there yet,” he said. “The trees and the hill block the view. That’s a death waiting to happen.”

Of course, the dangers to which the cyclists are exposed aren’t purely self-generated. Dara Rogers, one of the route’s few women regulars and the only female to participate on this ride, recently took a spill.

A month ago, Rogers hit an oily spot in the road and, along with three other riders, went down in a heap.

“It was a 180-degree right turn,” said Rogers, 25, of Granada Hills. “A couple of guys went down in front of me and then I went with them. It wasn’t that bad, considering. I had a helmet on--but the guy behind me didn’t and split his head open.”

Two other riders went down on another occasion after locking wheels at the intersection of De Soto and Victory. Only the street median saved them from a worse fate.

“If they hadn’t hit that divider, they probably would have slammed into a van that was sitting there waiting for the light to change,” Wordin said.

The other guys in helmets--motorcycle cops--are not amused by the group’s laissez faire attitude regarding traffic rules. Last year, Wordin said a cyclist on his way to CSUN spotted a group of three LAPD motorcycles and two squad cars waiting at an intersection.

“We don’t know for sure that they were hiding out and waiting for us,” Wordin said. “But we had to figure they were out to stop the ride. So we changed the loop and circumvented the intersection.”

Police have occasionally issued citations. As a member of the lead group, Wordin and approximately 10 others were cited for running a stop sign last year.

“They’ll give tickets to groups around that size,” Wordin said. “Anything bigger and it probably takes too much time.

“But we have to figure that if we were causing any real problems that they’d have shut us down by now. We’re not that hard to find.”

A member of the Los Angeles Police Dept. Valley Traffic Division said that he was not aware of any problems caused specifically by the CSUN group. Something did strike a familiar chord, however.

“I haven’t heard any complaints,” Lt. Alan Kerstein said. “But I think I got stuck behind those guys in traffic once. I just hope each one of those guys has a license on him, because they need a bike license to ride in the city of L. A. And if they’re planning on breaking the law, then they better have a driver’s license on them, too. If they don’t, they’re subject to physical arrest.”

Kerstein--who estimates 12 cyclists are killed every year in the Valley--said that although cyclists may feel safe in a group because of increased visibility, their time will come.

“They’re going to run into an energetic motor officer out there sometime,” he said. “And he’s going to pull over all 50 of them and cite them.”

Kerstein said that like motorists, cyclists typically violate a number of laws, such as riding two abreast, tailgating, speeding or running traffic lights.

“We’re not about to allow them to break the rules of the road just so they can keep their pace,” he said.

The driver of a late-model Toyota could not move. With 40 cyclists surrounding his idling car at a red light, he had no place to go. Even as the light turned green, he waited several moments for the riders to clear a path. They never did. The driver had to change lanes to pass.

These cyclists don’t often yield the right of way right away.

At one section, the route is marked with a bike path. Most of the riders chose to use the right-hand lane instead. On two-lane roads, many cyclists insisted on riding side-by-side or three abreast.

“We really don’t intentionally slow down traffic,” Wordin said. “We don’t want to clog it up.”

Last year, an impatient motorist tried to pass the group on a winding, two-lane portion of the loop, and was nearly met head-on by another car. The first auto ended up in the weeds alongside the road.

Rogers said that despite the risks of occasionally getting caught up in the mob mentality, training with the group has benefits over training alone.

“It’s safer together than alone,” said Rogers, whose brother, Thurlow, is a professional cyclist who sometimes trains with the group. “It can get scary out there by yourself because some people think they own the road. They’ll scream and honk and cut you off. With all those guys, though, it’s safer.”

Nonetheless, Wordin prefers the ride for its technical training applications.

“There are big advantages to it,” he said. “You can’t ride at 30 miles an hour by yourself for very long because of the resistance. In a group, you can hang back and draft or get out and pull if you want.”

There is also a strong sense of camaraderie. Many riders arrive at CSUN well before 5:30 to shoot the breeze. When one rider falls on the road, others stop to lend a hand. Many cyclists--like Sadowski--come from well outside the Valley to ride. Some cycle down from Sylmar, cruise the 25-mile loop, then ride home.

“All the best riders are out here,” Sadowski said. “I used to play hockey and soccer as a kid, and these guys are a much tighter group.”

Most of the riders are aggressive. Even though there are a few beginners who make the trek, they typically fall off the pace at the route’s mid-point, where several hills come into play. Machismo abounds, as does style.

Wordin rides a bike called a Land Shark. All riders wear black cycling shorts. Many wear fashionable and expensive wraparound racing sunglasses. Most ride lightweight cycles worth $1,000 or more.

Some have even earned stripes--the abrasions and contusions of hard rides and bad falls, skid marks of the skin caused by a reticence to lay down skid marks with their wheels. Once the lead pack gets moving, nobody likes to hit the brakes.

“It’s a little too breakneck for me,” said Steve Ball, the California district representative of the U. S. Cycling Federation who chooses to work out with another group. “I prefer the smaller, more coachable groups. That one is a free-for-all.”

It is the high speed that offers the attraction for some.

“When Thurlow and some of the other good riders are out there, we really get going at warp speed,” Wordin said.

Of course, warped is in the eye of the beholder. Yet, as Wordin says, the fact that there has been no police crackdown indicates few complaints have been filed.

There may be another reason.

“We have a couple of guys who ride with us that are cops,” Sadowski said, laughing. “But I can’t tell you who they are because this would probably get them in trouble.”