Riding to Los Angeles from San Francisco all at once wasn’t even our idea.

Our friend Pat came up with it off the dome sometime the year before. Pat couldn’t make it on the ride, but the idea stuck.

Planning for the ride started months out, first pinning down the best way to get to LA (Santa Monica seemed like a good enough endpoint). Was it better to ride longer, or climb more? Should we stick to the coast and stay on the 1, or venture inland? We landed a route that was as flat and short (and safe) as possible, leave in mid-June (long days), stay close to the coast, cut over the mountains into Santa Barbara, and rip down the coast again to finish the ride— 424.2 miles and over 24,000 feet of climbing.

Recruiting people to do a 400+ mile non-stop ride was about as hard as it sounds like it would be.

In the early stages of planning, we only had two committed. We felt we needed to find a few more wheels—but not too many more. Adding people to a ride like this is helpful for working together and keeping morale up. But when someone (inevitably) starts to feel like ass, needs to slow down to catch up on food, needs to fix a flat, over 424.2 miles those little moments add up. You get to a point where it becomes more people, more problems.

We started floating the idea of riding SF to LA past people we thought might be interested. Lots of “no way”’s with the occasional “maybe, I’ll think about it.” Not wanting to get caught out in the Middle of Nowhere Califonia Coast with someone who was thinking of hitting the bail button before we even took the first pedal stroke, we decided that if we had to convince you to come on the ride, you were probably not the right fit.

You had to join the team. You had to be fucking stoked from the gun.

In the end, we had the perfect crew of four— 3 seemed like too few and 5 was probably too many. Odd numbers a spooky anyway.

With everyone on board—no worrying about backing out, outside of a catastrophic systems failure— we could start to ask ourselves the real questions: What kit do I pack? How much food do I bring? What’s my bike set up? How the hell am I going to keep all my shit charged? When should we leave, and what time of day? How long is this ride even going to take?

Now, instead of finding a detailed packing list of all the amazing things we brought with us so we would be super prepared in any situation that might arise in riding nonstop over multiple days, our packing list was a bit shorter.

No regular clothes or shoes (we mailed those down the week before). Shit tons of gels and drink mix (GU Liquid Energy, Skratch Superfuel— please sponsor us we eat so much of your stuff). Bare essentials on tools. A space blanket for if we take a nap. Lights, batteries. Done.

We’re not trying to carry the kitchen sink down to LA, come on.

For some reason, we decided that noon on a Friday was a good time to start the ride.

Looking back on it, it didn’t make a ton of sense. In our minds, we wanted to get to LA before sunrise of not the next day but the day after (before Sunday morning), because we needed to be back in Oakland for work on Monday. Yeah, see? Shit for sense. But anyway, we left at noon on a Friday. Not a lot of pomp and circumstance, just a couple of photos, and we’re off.

Heading out from Embarcadero in San Francisco, we wove our way through the city to the coast and started south. This was all riding we’d done before in some shape or form and it passed by pretty quickly. Spirits were high, Superfuel was flowing. Within no time we were through Santa Cruz and on our way to Monterey.

If you haven’t ridden from San Francisco to Monterey on the 1, would highly recommend— world-fucking-class.

For some of you reading this, you already know it. The Northern California coast is one of the most stunning damn places just simply to be, let alone ride your bike. Highway 1, for how long it is, never has a dull moment. The cliffs, the rocks, the waves, the ocean smell, the winding roads. A cyclist's dream. *chef’s kiss*

Okay, let’s get back to it. After stopping for some dinner (don’t get Round Table pizza on a ride, it scarred our insides and our souls forever), we pushed into Big Sur and into the (first) night.

Shit gets remote reallllll quick down there, especially at night.

We knew going into it that the stretch between Monterey and Morro Bay/SLO was going to be the most remote and probably some of the toughest hours on the bike. There’s nothing out there for hours— no stores, no houses, no road street lights, no nothing. Holy shit, It gets so damn dark out there. It’s wild how the darkness can eat up your lights, where nothing exists in front of you beyond the 15-foot radius from your light. Ultra-heightened senses, trying to see any extra fraction of the road, looking out for fallen rocks, navigating winding descents. It was a unique kind of high— induced by a steady drip of adrenaline and onsetting fatigue.

Those hours seemed to go on forever during the ride, but have melted into a dark glob of experiences indistinguishable from each other in retrospect. Shit was wild.

Something that does stick out of that glob though, is the moon on the water. It was almost a full moon, which seemed to do nothing in terms of illuminating the road in front of us, but created the most beautiful changing scene every time we’d crest a hill. It was the only thing marking change or progress during that time. The ocean-now-light show would open up in front of us as we spiraled down winding roads and up the next climb.

Sleeping on the ground for an hour in a state park at 2 in the morning isn’t as bad as it sounds.

Some of us fell asleep immediately, and some of us didn’t sleep at all (remember the adrenaline?). Just closing your eyes felt good though— get any break from the barrage of phenomena slamming into your oculars for the past 12 hours. It gets cold down on that part of the coast, even during the summer, and every layer we’d brought was getting a workout.

It was like something out of a movie when the sun started to rise as we were getting to Morro Bay. We’d run out of water over an hour before, and the idea of food that wasn’t gel (sorry GU, we still love you) was a borderline magnetic force pulling us in. After a caloric reset that was an actual spiritual experience, we pushed on to SLO— our mental and metric halfway point.

Being 230 miles into a ride and knowing you have 200 more to go puts you in a strange mental space. You want to engage with the reality of your situation, that you have 12 hours of riding ahead of you, but that’s a pretty dangerous slice of reality to visit. Instead, you move your thoughts into a sort of liminal space where your attention is held by the immediate needs— your nutrition, how your body is feeling, the directions, the road right in front of you— and avoid thinking about the actual ride.

The miles won’t go by any faster thinking about how many you have left.

After SLO we started inland towards Santa Barbara and the terrain changed dramatically. All at once, it got drier and hotter, and the road pitched up— it was a jarring change. These miles were a series of remote farm roads with little sun coverage and fewer places to stop for food and water. The climb into SB was fucking tough, but the idea of being basically done with the elevation of the ride was amazing. It didn’t feel like it, but we had just pushed through 100 miles of the most elevation change on the ride. We only needed to push the pedals and Santa Monica would eventually appear in front of us, right? Easy. And then came the second night.

What do you do when you’re out there like we were and you start to feel fucked?

There’s really no way someone is coming to get you. You could wait, but for what— to be un-fucked? That sounds worse than riding. This is where traditional fitness is more or less out the door and you’re riding on something else. It’s an oddly empowering feeling, knowing that there’s another layer to your riding, a different fitness. It’s something you can train, but the instances you have to get into that zone are pretty rare— it takes a special set of circumstances to even know it exists.

It only comes into play when you’re really fucked and there’s no way out from your being fucked except to keep going.

Riding through the night is one thing. Riding through the second is another.

As surreal as the hours of riding were through Big Sur, the hours between Santa Barbara and Santa Monica were just regular-real. We’d stopped for food in SB which gave us a boost, but the fatigue was truly setting in— mentally and physically. Trying to remain tough-as-nails, ignoring the reality of our situation and just turning the cranks was getting harder and harder to do. Lights were running out of batteries with no places open to stop and charge. Nutrition just wasn’t sitting right in our stomachs.

There were moments though, tiny ones that seemed to fit between the gaps of the blinking rear light in front of you, that the coast would give back.

There are not many chances one gets to ride on Highway 1 through Malibu at 2 am. It’s so big. On a road that is usually full of cars, we took up two whole lanes. Being closer to the water than we were on the cliffs of Big Sur, there were times when you could hear the rush of the waves as the night ticked by. It’s something we’ll probably never experience again.

Rolling into Santa Monica was like Christmas morning. We took a picture at the pier, but we were too tired to check if it was even good. Riding to our Airbnb, the morning glow starting to wash over the streets, there was a catharsis like no other. We finally noticed the ringing in our ears from two days of wind rushing past them. Our throats were sore from yelling over that wind. Our legs were past the point of tired, it was hard to tell what they would feel like the next morning. Sleep was pretty much the only thing on everyone's mind.

However, we all had to work the next day. So we took a nap for about an hour, hopped in our rental car, and drove back to The Bay.

These long-as-shit rides are rollercoasters. You’re going to feel amazing at times, and there are going to be low points. It feels like we focus on those low points when telling the story because that’s what everyone wants to hear; “how fucked was it” makes for better TV. But in all honesty, this was the experience of a lifetime.

To bike a large part of the California coast all at once with some of your best friends is something we’ll carry with us for the rest of our lives.

We hope this retrospection not only shows the challenges but gives a glimpse into our experience of the natural beauty of the world through cycling and what can be accomplished as a cycling team outside of “traditional” feats.

As for the FKT (Fastest Known Time), well, there really isn’t a record we could find of this ride ever being done all at once on a conventional pedal bike. There’s a record of someone doing the distance on a recumbent with an aero shell in 18 hours in 1991, which is fucking impressive. However, we’d like to think that what we did was a bit different and falls into what you might call an “egalitarian FKT.”

One Way Ticket was 424.2 miles, 26:49:13 hours riding, 41:07:26 hours total: the fastest-know-time for an unsupported ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. See the full ride data here.

❤️🎟️

-AFAIC