The Fast and Fabulous Cycling Club:  2007

Fast and Fab, New York’s LGBT bike club, holds weekly rides along with various social events, including a monthly dinner hosted by members at their favorite restaurants.  You can get the ride and social listings here on our website, or by subscribing to the Front Runners New York newsletter, which carries a brief version of our calendar.  We’re a committee of FRNY and participate in many Front Runner social, athletic and volunteer events.

Once you show up for a club event and it’s clear you are a real person and not a spammer, you qualify for access to our Yahoo groups site, which lets you post rides and see rides or other events scheduled by other members.  Communication among members largely takes place by e-mail, so it pays to have internet access.

The rides vary widely in pace, distance, skill level, etc., so it’s a good idea to get in touch with the ride leader and figure out if it’s the ride you want to be on; there are also sometimes last-minute changes.  We have a fairly even distribution between men and women, and the vast majority of our riders are not competitive.  The only way to know whether we’re a good fit for you is to do some rides, which cost nothing and require only a heads-up to the leader.  And if you really and truly fall outside any of our ride categories, we’ll do our best to match you up with someone in the club who rides as fast or slow, for as few miles or as many, as you do.

We’ve adopted the New York Cycle Club ride classification, which uses a letter and number:  A is fast with few stops, B is intermediate and C is fab with lots of stops; the number is average pace in mph over level ground.  What “fast” and “intermediate” and “fab” mean are up to the ride leader, another good reason to RSVP.  Riders on a B15 ride, a fairly common listing, should expect occasional stops to regroup and a moderate pace of about 15 mph or less.  Helmets are always required, and the distances in the ride listings are always round trip. 

Fast & Fab cyclists take part in most of the organized rides in the New York City area, such as the Five Boro Bike Tour, the Montauk Century, the Bloomin’ Metric, the Pumpkin Patch Pedal and many others. If you’re planning to do one of those rides, give us a shout and we may be able to match you with other LGBT riders. 

The club also does a number of out-of-town trips, including the New Hope Ride, usually Memorial Day weekend; a road trip to the Boston to Provincetown Ride in June; a three-day ride to Northampton, Mass., in July; usually a camping trip; and several trips to triathlons, in coordination with the New York Tritons, the city’s LGBT triathlon club.  We also do monthly mountain biking, especially now that Manhattan has a legal mountain biking trail in Highbridge Park.  And lately we've begun supplying cyclists to the New York City Marathon to escort the wheelchair marathoners, and volunteers to the New York City Parks Department's Teach a Child to Ride events held during Bike Month every May.