I biked 30 miles to play late night hockey in Everett, then biked another 30 home

The author as a young Affton American.

As a kid growing up in the suburbs of St. Louis, I was obsessed with hockey. One of my earliest hockey memories was watching Brett Hull score 50 goals in 50 games when I was five years old. I spent so much time on inline skates in my driveway or nearby church parking lots that a wheel on my Roller Blades fell off and I broke my finger in the fall. I also played ice hockey from kindergarten through high school. And when I was inside, I played NHL '95 on my SEGA. But then I went to college in small city that didn't have a rink, and then I moved around a bit before landing in Seattle with no car, very little money and very little storage space. For 13 years, hockey was just this thing I did when I was younger.

But then I became a dad and bought an electric cargo bike to haul the kid around. During those long days at home with an infant, I found myself needing to find excuses to get me out of the house and get my body moving. I needed something that had nothing to do with my work or being a dad or worrying about all those other adult responsibilities. I was watching a Blues game with the kid sleeping on my shoulder when I realized that with the cargo bike I could probably bike with my gear to hockey rinks. My parents shipped my old high school hockey gear to Seattle, and I signed up to play in a local beer league (though I don't think they want us to call it that). It's a no-hitting adult league now called that Kraken Hockey League, though I joined before the city had a team and before the rink at Northgate was built. I went to an evaluation skate, got drafted" onto a team and have playing with them ever since. Aside from breaking another finger, it's been great. It's a scheduled, post-kid-bedtime physical activity where I get to lose myself for an hour and a half and then have a relaxing late night bike ride home.

Most of our games are at rinks in Mountlake Terrace, Lynnwood and Northgate with the odd Kent and Everett games mixed in. I bike to nearly every game at the first three rinks, and I have biked to Kent Valley Ice Center twice. But Everett has always been the rink where I either borrow a car or carpool with a teammate. When people see me outside a rink with my gear and sticks on the bike, they always ask me, Do you bike to every game?" And I used to answer, Well, I've biked to every rink except Everett." But not anymore.

Wednesday evening as my spouse and kid were starting the bedtime routine, I packed my gear onto the bike, plugged in both batteries, and embarked on the 30-mile journey along the Interurban North bike route from Seattle to Everett. Not only was this my first time biking all my hockey gear such a distance, but it was also the first time in many years that I have ridden the Interurban North beyond Lynnwood. It's a great route even though it is incomplete. There are a handful of significant detours due to missing freeway crossings, but the signage is usually easy to follow. I only got turned around a couple times, but each time it because apparent quickly that I was headed the wrong way. Google's bike directions, which seem to get worse and worse, did not always do a good job of following the official route, but the physical signage along the route was trustworthy. If you ride this, trust the signs over Google.

The ride there was happily uneventful, though I expended more energy than necessary by keeping the power setting on the bike low because I was worried about having enough battery power to get home later that night. It turns out, I did not need to do this. The Tern GSD had more than enough range to use the higher power settings for the whole 60-mile round trip, especially since I brought the charger so I could plug in the batteries while I was on the ice.

I really could have used some extra leg power and energy for the game, too. There were only three of us on defense, so our shifts ended up being about 50% longer than usual. Hockey is a brutally exhausting sport, and somewhere in the middle of the second period I cracked. I had run out of calories to burn, and my legs just didn't have it in them to recover during the short breaks on the bench. By the end of the game, I was barely hanging on out there. Biking two and a half hours (and perhaps not eating enough food) before skating extra-long shifts was too much. As I slowly took off my gear in the locker room afterwards, my legs feeling like jello, it dawned on me that I still had 30 miles of biking before I could get home and go to sleep. It was 12:30 a.m. by the time I was back on the bike. I had already eaten all my emergency fruit snacks. Time to start pedaling.

The good news was that though my legs were tired, none of my joints were sore. I can get knee pain sometimes when cycling long distances, but my knees were behaving. More good news was that my bike's computer estimated I could keep the e-assist motor in turbo" and make it home with juice to spare. So I did that. But even with the assist, it still takes energy and stamina to pedal. On top of it all, my back was sore and my butt was sore and my core was exhausted. I wasn't completely sure I was going to make it, but I didn't have any other easy choices. I'm also extremely stubborn and more than a little bit foolish. So I pushed on, blasting old Sonic Youth albums on the bluetooth speaker to keep my energy up.

The Interurban North bike route mostly follows the former route of the electric passenger rail line between Everett and Seattle (1910-1939). You know that sculpture in Fremont with the people and the human-faced dog waiting at a platform? This is the train they're waiting for. And if you have never noticed before that the dog has a human face, I'm very sorry for ruining your life. Once you see it, it's all you can see. I am a monster for writing this paragraph. This is the punishment you get for reading this far into a meandering essay about biking to hockey.

The majority of the ride is on sections of trail built on top of the old railroad bed. It's also a somewhat unusual corridor because much of it is owned by the electric utilities. Over the years, several sections have been built over by housing or retail developments, freeways, or freeway ramps. Municipalities along with King and Snohomish Counties have been trying for decades to piece it back together, but the long sections of trail that do exist are a real joy. Yes, you spend a lot of the time with I-5 roaring nearby, but the trail is usually surrounded by trees and feels almost like a secret pathway. Most of the on-street sections are either on very calm side streets with low traffic, have bike lanes, or have a widened sidewalk that serves as a trail. There are some unfriendly sections, such as the section near NE 205th Street near the county line (the North Sound Bicycle Advocates are working on it!), but the only truly awful on-street riding was the Maple Road bridge over I-5 in Lynnwood, which has only tiny shoulders next to sidewalks far too skinny to ride a bike (there's even a sign at the start of the bridge saying bikes are not allowed on the sidewalks). It's the only part of the entire ride where I would be afraid to bring a child along.

The Maple Road bridge over I-5. This thing needs safe walking and biking space. Maybe they can extend one of the useless non-ADA sidewalks to create one usable and accessible walking and biking path?

There are some projects in the works to make the route a little better, though I can't find any active projects to improve the Maple Road problem (please let me know in the comments if I'm missing something). Snohomish County currently has a survey going about a project to improve walking and biking conditions south of Everett that is worth filling out. Snohomish County is also scheduled to build out a trail connection from 160th Street SW to 167th Place SW next year, a section that currently only has skinny paint-only bike lanes.

About an hour into my ride home it was 1:30 a.m. and I had barely seen anyone else. I was beyond hungry and feeling ridiculous for not bringing more food with me. I had planned on stopping at a fast food spot on the way, but I hadn't seen any. I was beginning to worry everything would be closed so late on a Wednesday night deep in the suburbs. The trail turned away from the woods and led me to a street, another one of those on-street detours before getting back to the trail. And that's when I saw it. It was hard to believe it was real. A 24-hour Subway shop? I had no idea such a thing even existed. But there it was, and it was beautiful.

I ordered an Italian footlong and sat down at a table. I had been riding on adrenaline and Sonic Youth for a while by that point, and I finally realized how exhausted I was when I sat down and waited for my sandwich. My legs barely had any strength left. I scarfed the thing when it was ready and instantly felt so much better. The guy working solo that night was impressively patient as drunk people kept stumbling in from the bar a few doors down. He didn't get upset or flustered at all when he had to repeat himself over and over just to get people to give their sandwich orders. He just let it take as long as it needed to take and got people fed. He held the city of Lynnwood together that night.

I can't even tell you what ingredients were in the sandwich I ate because I didn't care to look as I devoured it. However, I felt the energy move through my body and restore at least a little strength in my legs. I still had about an hour and a half to go, but now I knew I was going to make it. I queued up Teen Age Riot and hit play, then continued biking south.

It's time to go 'round
A one-man showdown, teach us how to fail
We're off the streets now
And back on the road, on the riot trail

The rest of the ride was tiring, but went by as smoothly as it could. It's funny how being familiar with a route makes it seem shorter. Like, I got to Mountlake Terrace and thought, Oh good, I'm almost home,' even though I knew I still had nearly an hour to go. But at least I knew all the hills and turns and bumps from there on out.

I rolled up to my home at 3 a.m. Plopping down on the couch felt glorious. I had done something ambitious on a whim, and I had made mistakes and taken unnecessary risks. It was the kind of adventure I don't get to have since becoming a parent, always planning everything out to make sure everyone is taken care of at all times. I did something foolish, and I loved it.