The breakfast ride meets in the alley behind the Salvagetti Bicycle Workshop in downtown Denver, Colorado, at 8 am every Sunday morning. It's a mixed bag of bike commuters, roadies, former roadies, hipsters, retirees, writers, and mountain bikers aged 6 to 80, and there are more Levi's than Lycra to be seen. They'll be lucky to get in seven miles of riding by noon.
"The phrase we use is that ‘It's way more breakfast than ride,'" says shop owner Scott Taylor, 31, who founded the business four years ago with a rebuilt Trek and the invented Salvagetti name on the downtube.
The group - nearly always composed of at least a dozen riders, even on the coldest winter days - starts the ride around 8:30 and sets a pace of about 9 mph on its way to one of four or five regular breakfast restaurants. Taylor says he always lets the group pick the restaurant, because he can never decide. The usual choices include WaterCourse Foods, the vegetarian restaurant; Snooze, the gourmet pancake specialist; Gaia, the tiny bistro where the group always has to sit on the patio to have enough room; Lucile's, the Creole restaurant; and lately, Mona's, the breakfast-and-lunch place that just opened a new location a little closer to the shop.
In two and a half years, Taylor has only missed three rides. Recent winter rides have drawn 25 cyclists, carefully navigating the snow and ice, and Taylor says even the worst conditions only trim the ride down to six or eight. A snowy Easter Sunday in 2007 drew three: Taylor, one regular shop customer, and longtime cycling writer Maynard Hershon, one of the ride's biggest fans.
Hershon says he first discovered Salvagetti through an Internet ad. At the first Breakfast Ride he attended, he and his girlfriend Tamar Miller figured the weather was too nasty for anyone to ride a bike.
"We took a light rail train to the nearest station and walked to the store," Hershon says. "Scott loaned us bikes - silly bikes, nothing like our fussed-over 18-speed road racers. Tamar couldn't pedal sitting down on hers. We laughed as we rode them, had a wonderful breakfast at WaterCourse and met a half a dozen people we still hang out with. That was 16 months ago. We seldom miss a ride."
After breakfast, the group rides to Metropolis, a coffee shop across the street from Salvagetti's former cramped digs. Some riders stick around until Taylor opens the shop at noon, but most don't.
Taylor said he shared the secret of the Breakfast Ride at a recent bicycle business conference, and it shocked most of the other shop owners there. "It was really funny to see people's reaction because a lot of them sat there and asked, ‘How do you make money off that?'" he says. "Because with most shop rides, you open up the store and you sell tubes and tires and stuff. And the Breakfast Ride's not for the shop. It's for me, you know? It's for my brain and for kind of a reset button. Bikes can become not fun when you're selling them."
Nick Nunns, a 24-year-old electrical engineer and year-round bike commuter, rode on his first Breakfast Ride shortly after moving to Denver from Boston in July 2006. Since then, he says, he's missed no more than five rides, and it's helped him build a social network.
"If I didn't go to that ride in the first place, I wouldn't have any friends at all," Nunns says. "It's better than church."
Although the 8 am Sunday start time conflicts with both those who attend Sunday morning religious services and those who like late Saturday night parties, Taylor says the Breakfast Ride is a community of its own.
"A lot of people have asked me why I'm not going to church," Taylor says. "But I am in church. I'm just schmoozing with my like-minded people."
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