RESULTS: Monster Track 2006

March 4, 2005

Monster Track 7 began at the top of Marcus Garvey Park on 120th & 5th. 100 steps up from street level, the park gives you a great panoramic view of New York City from East Harlem. It also made the abundant cold breeze of March 4th feel a hell of a lot colder while standing around for an hour waiting for a race to start. And it's also a bitch to get down from there when your bike is locked on the street below. This is how we do Le Mans style starts in New York fuckin' City! We make you run down the side of a mountain! We make you scramble with 150 other people in hard soled bike shoes down concrete stairs! We make you leap over walls onto giant boulders 6 feet below and continue running down uneven terrain, like you were doing some sick kind of cyclocross adventure race! We watch from the bottom of the hill as you spill over dirt, stone, fences, gates, and stairs, shoving eachother out of the way to frantically unlock your bike because this is Monster Track, bro, and you don't accept any imitations!

If you survived the start of the race and weren't completely exhausted from all that running, you still had 20 miles ahead of you. The first 5 of which were 100 blocks straight down 5th avenue - past Central Park, The Met, Rockefeller Center, 42nd St, The Empire State Building - on a clear Saturday afternoon, this entire stretch is filled with tourists, buses, and taxis. Treacherous. Add 150 alleycatters into that mix, and you've got a hell of a ride. People went careening off cars left & right. With such a concentration of bikes, accidents were bound to happen. And they happened quite a bit. (Before I smashed into the back of a bus on 68th St., I saw at least three other guys go down. Fortunatetly, no one was hurt badly).

The first checkpoint at the Flatiron Building on 23rd & 5th eventually got shut down by the cops, but not before most of the racers got through. Once you got past there, the rest of the course was up to you. Do you go East to Thompkins Square? Or do you go West to Robert F. Wagner Park in Lower Manhattan and hit Thompkins Square on the way to the Williamsburg bridge, the way Felipe (3rd place) did?

Whichever way you went, it wasn't as simple as 100 blocks down 5th Avenue. Thompkins Square is easy to get to, but after that, you were off the grid. And worse, going through Chinatown. Things are dense there. More buses, more people. After Chinatown, you were downtown. As far as you could go downtown. Bikers were flying in every direction - cutting across, cutting through, cutting back. Either they were ahead of you or behind you - it was hard to tell. All you had to do was get out of Manhattan - over the Williamsburg bridge - then to King Kog. And then backtrack to Rockstar Bar, where the winners were already celebrating, and your broken ass was collapsing at the door just to hand your manifest in. You saw Todd there, who won "Best Crash" for destroying a car with his bike (and body), then getting back up to finish the race in 21st place. You saw Dan Gonzales, who rode a flat from 42nd St. to Thompkins Square before borrowing Brad Baker's bike to ride to the finish, where he came in 15th place. You saw Jumbo, who came all the way from Copenhagen, who broke a crank off his bike in Manhattan and rode with one leg over the bridge to finish in 11th place. And of course, you saw Alfred Bobe, who repeated his 2005 Monster Track win, with Australia's Andy White redeeming his 2nd place DQ from 2005 and "The King" Felipe coming in 3rd.

Monster Track Race video. Shot by Ken Stanek with Chicago Fred's helmet cam & editing.

Skids competition

A very cool panorama of the starting line

MrRed's Flickr page

Trudy's Flickr page

ChicagoDream's Flickr page

King Kog, Madison Sq. Park, Rocky's

Boston photos from 23rd St. & Rocky's