The Best Volunteer Experience: The Vancouver Marathon Bike Escort Team

I'm so glad I joined the bike escort team, it is so much fun!

There were totally 10 evening practices before the event day. We usually ride for 21KM along downtown, Gastown, Chinatown, Stanley park and English Bay, then have pizza dinner together. It is a miracle that we did not encounter any rain in all the practices, it is quite unusually for the April.

It is very comfortable to riding with a group of cyclists in the evening after a whole day's work. But my personal riding experience is not great. Well, it is all my fault, I ride as slow as an escargot, and I could not remember the roads. It is so embarrassing I always be the 2nd last cyclist in the riding with a sweep cyclist behind me. I had worried about I would be kicked out of the team for my slowness, but to my surprise, I did not get any complaints, all I got are encourages. Later, in the race day, I realized although my speed(~15km/h) is lower than most cyclists, but it is good enough for lead runners.

Pizza dinner is a more fun part. Captain Brian always does his fashion show to amuse us. He has volunteered for the Vancouver Marathon for more than 10 years, so he has 10+ different volunteer T-shirts to show off. I'm so happy that I got a purple year 2000 volunteer T-shirt from him for encouraging me to recover from my bike accident. Now I could pretend that I had volunteered for the year 2000 Vancouver Marathon, LOL.

Well, I have to say, I did not enjoy the first dinner. Everyone knows the uncomfortable feeling of sitting in a group of strangers, but a more awful feeling is this group of strangers know each other except me! I unfortunately chose a wrong table, the other 2 table mates know each other pretty well and I could barely understand what they were talking about... I felt so awful until the captain came to talk to me. I felt so thankful for him as he saved my whole evening. See, how important it is to be a host. Later, I got better luck with the dinners, I met many interesting people, and had lots of fun conversations together. It added so much highlights to my dull life!

On the event day, I got up at 4:30 AM, and ride my bike to the race place, as there are no bus/skytrain available at that moment. It almost kills me, as I have never been a morning person. But it is really worthy that, it is such a good feeling of riding on the closed road with runners under the sunshine. According to 2 teammates, they actually watched the runner's running very carefully and enjoyed watching the perfect muscles and movements. It's a pity that I didn't notice that part, there are always too many runners together with my target runner, I didn't got a good view. :(

The most impressive part of the race is actually about the last runner. She looks not like a runner, I mean, slightly overweight. But she did finished the full marathon with the time of 7 hours and 1 minute. In the last 1 km, we surrounded her, and escorted her in her speed. 2 bikes at her left and 2 bikes at her right, all other bikes are in one row behind her, and we all ring our bells. I wish I could found the picture and put it here.

It's only 11 months left. (Greg, I know the copyright of this sentence belongs to you. )

P.S. There are 2 related links:
Details about the racing day
Video about our team, could you find me from the video?