Events: The Perimeter Ride
(2020) Social media is unequivocally driven by likes, and one person who won’t like this article is a cyclist named Dan Rappaport. On one of the numerous peaceful days at the creakybottombracket.com office we were abundant with free time. As all internet experiences go, we clicked here, there, and suddenly found everywhere. It started as an educational web search to find the northern line of Bucks County. Who knew it would lead to a website spreadsheet full of fun information.
We have guessed what the next thing in cycling will be. We’ve suggested Formula One like electronic shifting as well as water crossings eclipsing gravel. Those far-fetched ideas are niche-y. But we all live somewhere. Most of us probably live in a county. That county has to have boundaries. Where there are boundaries, oftentimes there are roads. From our experience, County Line Road is a pretty good guess as to where you are.
On that extremely quiet, vacant-schedule day we were wondering the distance around Bucks County, or the perimeter. While the numbers didn’t come immediately, mostly on account of roads that are not county line roads, we came across a website that did the work for us. Not only did it do the work for us, but it told us if anyone has ridden the perimeter of Bucks County and - what’s more - it told us the cyclist’s name and the time taken. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves here.
A perimeter ride is any ride around the outermost boundary. Here we are talking about the accessible county perimeter. Our investigation revealed that Bucks County is an accessible 131 miles (211 kilometers) around, a decent day in the saddle. But the perimeter world records listed on the website consider bigger pictures. There are names, times, and distances of riders who have circled states in the United States, or have gone bigger by circling an entire country. In case you are wondering, the United States record holder, Richard J. DeBernardis covered the outside 12,092 miles in 180 days. Our home state of Pennsylvania’s leader covered 1,200 miles in 48 days. According to the site, Michael Ridgeway owns those numbers and he certainly would have had to roll along Bucks County’s River Road for a short stretch. (There is also the Pennsylvania Perimeter Ride Against Cancer, a cycling fund-raiser event.)
This leads us back to the person named Dan Rappaport. Mr Rappaport’s name dominates the leaderboards of surrounding counties. Actually there are few names on the long list of potential perimeter rides. While ballsy, a Bucks County Perimeter Ride might be the juice needed to get out for a long day. What’s worse for Mr Rappaport is the fact that, should we need to warm up for this attempt in a more rural, shorter county, say, Hunterdon County, NJ, at 113 miles, he also owns that record. He also stands atop the leaderboard for circling the state of Delaware. Publishing these findings might see a faster circumnavigation of these areas.
Whether or not the information is up-to-date on the site, a good ol’ Perimeter Ride is an interesting event to consider within the next year. Our question involves taking the canal path instead of River Road, which has a tendency to be dangerous. The canal path is a truer Bucks County experience since it is closer to the Delaware River in most places than River Road. Since the site links rides to hand-drawn maps and exactly zero Strava rides, a new leader may have circled the area faster. At the end of the day it comes down to accessibility. Most of us live in a county we’d like to see the boundaries of, it’s something we’d like to do, even if some of the cyclists on the website lists might not like being dethroned.
