Outside: North American Cycle Courier Championships (NACCC)

We are molten metal pouring through the cracks of the underworld, cutting left and right, banging off of hoods, punching off mirrors, and spitting on cars. It is us versus them. And honestly, screw them. We are faster, louder, better. We are hawks of chromoly soaring down hills with our worn-down Vans stuck in our frames, our pedals careening, and our bodies merciless and free. We are walking the hills, stopping at the liquor store, racing the streets and partying all night, boxes on our backs, 12-packs on the racks, a party in Tijuana, another pissed off driver. A guy from LA gets hit in an alleycat. The driver gets out, steals his phone, punches him in the face, and races away. The racer still finishes and then parties all night. We are all in San Diego for the North American Cycle Courier Championships (NACCC). Fixed gear fear and loathing. We get tequila and Narcan in our registration bag. A number too, if you really want it, but who’s really keeping score? Hang on and grab some aspirin. It’s been a long week.

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Schedule: Group ride, track race, party. Reg party, alleycat, tracklocross, party. Early meet up. Start drinking. Ride to Tijuana. Critical Mass. Alleycat. Party. Ride home. All-day alleycat, party. Qualifying, party, night ride, party. Main event, group ride, party, ride, party, ride. Tuesday to Sunday, full gas, 14 hours, never sober, hard riding, stupid danger, and endless fun.

The great irony of this event, this head-down hedonist slog, is these professional bike messengers, who work 40 hours a week on their bike, riding through traffic with heavy shit on their backs, cutting through cars, living off burritos, they scrape together the little bits of money they can still make from the dying enterprise, fly out to San Diego, sleep on someone’s floor, and literally “simulate” their work. These are bike people to their core, obsessed with the feeling of cutting through traffic, obsessed with the liberation of the bicycle, obsessed with movement and stimulus and newness and days that bleed so long they feel like years. Tuesday? Tuesday was a lifetime ago.

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These professional bike messengers, these people ferrying dossiers and serving dickheads in high-energy cities, as part of the culture, everyone is riding a fixed gear. Because everything is more beautiful at its purest, and as if this sport wasn’t hard enough already. To these riders, the grunting up hills and barely controllable falling back down them is the rush that makes this sacrifice worth it. Messenger work has been dying off. “It had died a few times already, and then COVID really killed it,” one messenger from Portland tells me.

Fax and e-mail and Amazon and delivery vans, a rising cost of living and shrinking wages, they’ve all come for messengers, this group of gritty, urban, professional bike packers. NACCC is no longer what it used to be. Three hundred people used to race it every year. This year, just 60. But maybe now, left at the bottom of the barrel, you have the most hardcore, still too obsessed with riding the bike all day to stop clinging onto the threads of their dream job.

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“I’ve worked a lot of jobs…. kitchen stuff, construction, Americorps… always riding in the background. I was introduced to messengers in Richmond and started working in New Orleans,” Quintin says in the food line at the final party. We’re all wasted after the week; I’m hanging onto my bike to keep me standing, the neighbors are turning off the lights, and the promoter opens another case of beer. Quintin is older, gray hair and a grizzly beard, non-binary, a wrench and crank crossed in angel wings neck tattoo, riding a pink and sparkling Japanese Keirin bike.

We’re all being fed once more after this long and draining week of pedaling circles and almost killing ourselves. We’re all starving. We’re all satisfied. Quintin says they moved to New York to be in the capital of bike messenger culture. To ride through the pounding heart of urban life. Here at NACCC, New York won every race. But for Quintin, the feeling of moving through the city and never knowing what’s next, of slipping through the cracks, of freedom in chaos, it’s hooked them. Ten years later, several NACCCs, no serious crashes, they say, “I’m taking time off work to come and do fake work. And I’m going to do it until my body can’t anymore.”

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The racing is hard. Always a running start to a pile of bikes, a sprint out of the gates, and a slog to hang on as long as you can. A sweaty, crumpled piece of paper, checkpoints, a vague idea, the wrong direction on a one-way, a pissed-off driver, a child walking down the sidewalk, the race to lock your bike and do five push-ups and get a signature and figure out which one is next. It’s a rush. It’s blinding. It’s open street criterium racing with no direction, and anything goes. We ride until we’re passed out. Until all the tires are skidded into oblivion. Until all the hills have been bombed and all the prizes have been given out. And then the tequila flows. It’s incredible. How do they manage this? I wonder all week, my liver squirming, my legs exploding, my head spinning. But it’s a simple answer. These riders are professionals. They live for it. Mess life.

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We finish qualifying for the main event, and we’re lying in the shade of the parking lot. Kirby, from Indianapolis, a deliverer for Jimmy John’s. He can ride backward with no hands while smoking a spliff. He’s lying on the hot asphalt and talking to Cassius, a messenger who delivers court documents in San Francisco. Cassius will finish the weekend of racing and, on the same night, drive back to San Francisco to get to work back on time. Cassius also sprays me in the face with his water bottle when I draft him too closely in the final. Kirby talks about mess life. “When you come home late, tired as shit, and there’s no food in the house, and you’re too tired to go out.” And Cassius cuts in, “And you have no money,” And Kirby, with his Midwest accent and sweat-soaked, curly blond hair, lights up his roach, takes a drag, and laughs. “Haha! Yeah, and there’s no money. You can’t even think about that… man, those nights? That’s the worst part.”

And yet, Kirby, Crash-Derby Kirby, as his friends call him, is still sprinting back to borrow a bike when he flats in the race. He’s still out here, all the way in San Diego, to hang out with the people who get him the most. People who make endless sacrifices just so they can ride. People who live for the moment. Kats that live to chase mice down alleys. These are people constantly in flux, chasing the next job, chasing the next high that only a near-death intersection can provide. And there’s always another one just around the corner.

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Further Reading

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