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It’s spring, let’s do something stupid.
That was the rallying call for the Ladds 500 when the bike relay began in 2016 and it remains so today. The stupid thing: ride around Ladd Circle Park & Rose Gardens 500 times, a feat that pencils out to about 100 miles—a century ride, in bike speak—in teams, switching bikes at least 10 times. It’s like a carbon-neutral Indy 500, but put on by punks and bike messengers, traveling through one of Portland’s most stately eastside neighborhoods on a roundabout where eight streets converge. At least nobody ever gets lost on this group ride.
“Ladds started as just a dumb idea that somehow managed to capture the zeitgeist,” relay founder David Barstow Robinson says.
The Ladds 500 returns to the park this Saturday, April 12. The annual exercise in irreverence has become the unofficial kickoff of bike season and has even inspired a copycat event in Vancouver, B.C.
One big change is on the horizon for the 2025 ride this weekend is that, for the first time ever, riders will not have to share the road with cars. Portland Bureau of Transportation will close the street to motor vehicles for the event, which is technically run as a parade. That has to do with the group’s other tagline, “it’s not a race, it’s a relay.” That’s both for fun and insurance purposes: it turns out it’s a lot easier to insure a parade-style relay event than it is a race.
The relay is the brainchild of Robinson, who gathered with some buddies in a booth at Dots Café on Southeast Clinton Street nine years ago to pitch them an idea. Robinson and his friends were involved in the ultra-endurance bike packing scene at the time, meaning they rode super long distances, self-supported. (Robinson pedaled across the entire United States in 32 days on the Trans Am Bike Race in 2017, and traversed Australia the next year.) Ladds Addition has always been “a secret way to do a long ride” in town because of its unique layout of diamonds and roundabouts: What if there was a century ride in town but it never left the neighborhood?
He wrote up some basic rules (faster traffic to the outer edges of the circle; cheating is tolerated if it’s funny) and chose a Saturday in mid-April. Nearly a decade later, he remains as dedicated to the ride as ever, buoyed by the community and seeing people’s sense of accomplishment from riding farther than they thought they ever could.
“My sneaking suspicion is that the 500 is a trojan horse for sneaking little morsels of good into the world under a deep layer of sardonic irreverence,” Robinson says.
Eric Iverson was in that booth at Dots and has participated in every Ladds 500 since. His team is called “Grilled By Bike” and specializes in grilling burgers and hotdogs on a camping stove in a cargo bike during the ride. Plus costumes, of course. The team holds Ladds 500’s grill bike record, though nobody has ever challenged the team, nor does Iverson remember the exact record. (Maybe eight hours?)
Iverson hasn’t finished the ride in a good five years but says it’s still the pinnacle of his biking season.
“The Ladds 500 is why I love Portland so much,” Iverson says. “It brings together people from all ages and backgrounds and the mission is fun.”
GO: Ladds 500, Ladd Circle Park & Rose Gardens, Southeast 16th Avenue and Harrison Street. ladds500.com. 10 am-5 pm Saturday, April 12. Free.
