On a sweltering Saturday earlier this month, sweat stinging my eyes and dripping from the tip of my nose, I pedaled as hard as I could down Second Street in Minneapolis’s North Loop. I felt fast as I turned my bike onto Fifth Avenue toward Modist Brewing Co.—but had I been fast enough?
A small crowd was sitting on the brewery’s loading dock when I skittered up and slammed my brakes. From a feedbag on my handlebars, I pulled out all of the objects I knew they’d ask for. A crayon. A lottery ticket. A sheet of purple paper, printed with an illustrated list of local bike shops, beaches, and other landmarks. And a small, handwritten note, sealed in a yellow envelope.
“Got anything else for us?” a voice from the loading dock inquired.
Oh, right. I dug into my backpack and pulled out a compostable clamshell, opening it to reveal a single slice of chocolate cake.
And that was it. I had checked off all the stops. I had filled out my manifest. I had held onto my cake. I had finished my very first alleycat. And not just any alleycat, but Babes in Bikeland, the storied alleycat that returned to the Twin Cities this July for the first time since 2016.
Alleycats, which have their roots in the bicycle messenger community, are unsanctioned urban bike races that send riders all over the city. The format can differ slightly depending on the race, but typically riders must visit a series of checkpoints as quickly as possible. Sometimes you get the list of stops, or the manifest, up front; others, you learn the location of the following stop only when you reach the one in front of you.
Often there are little tasks riders must complete—for example, picking up a piece of cake at The Briar and bringing it to the finish. The route? Well, that’s up to you. In an alleycat, you go your own way, using your familiarity with the city to determine the quickest route possible.
The Twin Cities has a significant alleycat history. When Outside Magazine’s Stephen Regenold wrote this guide for beginners (which you’d better believe I revisited several times as a beginner myself) he drew on his experience riding dozens of alleycats in Minneapolis, including events in the long-running No Name series. Maybe you’re familiar with Stupor Bowl, the annual winter alleycat that takes place during Super Bowl weekend each year.
But Babes in Bikeland was a little bit different—during its 10-year run between 2007 and 2016, it became the longest-running alleycat for gender-expansive, femme, trans, and women (FTW) riders in the country.
It returned this year, on July 11, with a few new organizers, a lot of new racers, and the same spirit: getting as many FTW riders as possible to race bikes.
Chelsea Strate first got involved in Minneapolis’s cycling community in the late aughts, which she pinpoints as kind of the “heyday” of the city’s cycling scene. There was a popular message board at the time, MPLS Bike Love, where riders would connect with one another and organize group rides and races.
“One of the things that I had experienced quite a lot was showing up to these urban races, these alleycats, and being one of very few other women,” Strate says.
Many of her friends in the community shared that feeling, and they wondered how to get more FTWs and girls involved. What about, just by way of example, an all-woman alleycat?
Strate wasn’t on the organizing team that first year. “I loved racing, and I wanted to experience the first all-women’s alleycat that first year as a racer,” she laughs. She was one of roughly 70 cyclists who rode in Babes in Bikeland’s inaugural year. By year two, she’d let her friends convince her to help organize; the number of participating riders nearly doubled to more than 120.
“Some of the stuff that we thought about was: What were the barriers to getting more women, FTWs, nonbinary folks, out on bikes? What were the boundaries there?” Strate says.
Finances can of course be a barrier, so organizers always kept the entry fee low. The mileage can be intimidating, so they maxed out the distance at “a really big day, but an attainable day, for a new rider” that was still long enough to challenge more experienced racers. And for a while, because organizers had noticed a tendency among FTWs to volunteer rather than riding the alleycat, they wouldn’t let them.
“I think Babes grew, not just in numbers, but grew as an identity and grew into what it was,” says Kat Hovland, who came on to help organize Babes during its fifth year. “The whole concept is making space for ourselves, because there wasn’t space for us at these other alleycats.”
And as a result, the number of participants continued to climb: 162 riders in 2009, 228 riders in 2010. Babes in Bikeland 10 was a huge one—nearly 700 riders turned in manifests before dancing the night away during an afterparty at First Ave.
But after that 2016 alleycat, due to a number of factors (organizing a race like this, especially on the scale of Babes in Bikeland 10, is a lot of work), organizers took a pause.
Over the years, Babes took on an almost mythic quality in the cycling scene. “You’d hear whisperings, or little passing talk in the community of FTWs being like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna bring back Babes,’ or ‘We need to bring back Babes,’” organizer Tiana Johnson says.
Finally, this year, Johnson, Elena Alsides-Haynes, and Hovland—all of whom, by way of disclaimer, I’m friendly with in some capacity thanks to our shared love of bikes—worked to bring Babes back for real.
Why now? Well, like all the best things in life, the reason is “a little bit spite,” Johnson says.
Alsides-Haynes and Johnson had periodically mused about bringing Babes back over the years—they’d raced it themselves, they’d organized other alleycats—but nothing concrete ever materialized.
That is, until this year’s Stupor Bowl, when the two saw a zine going around that talked about the “quiet era” of Minneapolis racing in the mid 2010s. There were races happening, Johnson notes, it’s just that a lot of them, like Babes in Bikeland and Cirque du SoGay, were more specifically for FTW or queer riders. That lit a fire under Johnson and Alsides-Haynes, who started planning Babes in Bikeland 11 shortly after.
The DNA of BIB remained very much the same this year; Alsides-Haynes says they “very intentionally” made it as welcoming to as many different riders as possible. They offered three ride distances: a 10–12 mile “family plan” route for adults with kids, a 20-ish mile “party pace” route for first-time riders or less-experienced alleycat racers, and “the main event,” a 25–35 mile route for those who wanted to go the distance. E-bikes were allowed, though not eligible for a podium, in every category except the main event. The entrance fee was just $20, and anyone who couldn’t pay it just had to email and say as much to get in.
“Our goal was really to make sure that it was accessible to a wide group of people, not just the people that we see at alleycats every time,” Alsides-Haynes says.
Hovland notes that in its early days, Babes in Bikeland was like a lot of other alleycats, where there was lots of drinking and other… shenanigans. “We had to do a lot of work to be like, ‘OK, what does it actually mean to make a safe space for us?’” she says. That includes extensive volunteer training, and “setting the tone” with volunteers regarding what the event is about and the expectations for rider experience.
And it worked. A total of 316 riders registered to ride Babes in Bikeland this year, though the number who actually raced day of was probably closer to 275 or 300.
Babes in Bikeland 11 organizers are still learning. Johnson has spent a good chunk of the week and a half since the race sifting through manifests and putting everyone’s finishing times into an accessible Google spreadsheet; they simply hadn’t anticipated that riders would want to see the full results until people started asking for it. Over on the Babes in Bikeland Instagram, she’s doing the tedious work of tracking down every racer—which Sarah is this? Does this unnamed manifest look like yours?—to fill in the holes in the results.
It’s all a part of making non-cis-male racers feel like they’re wanted, like they’re welcomed, like their experience and their feedback matters.
“It’s the most amazing feeling to know that you helped create joy in someone’s day and in someone’s year,” Hovland says. “I feel a very strong responsibility for their experience, and if they have a bad experience, I contributed to that.”
While they were planning Babes in Bikeland 11, organizers heard from a lot of cyclists about how necessary it was, how grateful people were that it was coming back. But they never could have anticipated the full force of that enthusiasm, or the energy during race day. Riders from Chicago, Colorado, and New York have been reaching out to say they were bowled over by the size of the race, the intensity of the excitement.
“The response we have gotten … we have gotten emails, we have gotten messages, we’ve gotten personal [feedback] through friends being like, ‘Oh my god, my partner had an amazing time, she won’t stop talking about it,” Johnson says. That’s been incredibly validating to organizers, as has this stat: “We had 40–50 rookies, which is rad,” Johnson adds. “There were so many people that were like, ‘This is my first race, I’ve never done anything like this.”
Strate rode Babes in Bikeland 11 with a friend who’d never experienced an alleycat before, and there was something cool in getting to see a race she cherishes and knows so well through another person’s eyes. She remembers that first race in 2007, and many of the ones that followed, so vividly even to this day.
“For one, I’m in disbelief that the first one was 20 years ago. I’m not that old!” she laughs.
I did not necessarily plan to write about my experience with Babes in Bikeland this year. I went into the race thinking that there was probably a story to be told here: “Local FTW-focused alleycat returns after a decade-long hiatus, draws huge crowds, is a great time.”
Then a funny thing happened: I won. I was the first person participating in the newbie-friendly party pace division to fork over my manifest (and my lottery ticket, and my cake). And, proud as I was to stand on top of the podium for one of the events as a rookie rider, I felt it would be weird and boastful to write about the experience.
Still, I found myself thinking about Babes long after the race was over. A kind of joyful hangover lingered. Almost two full weeks later, I’m still glowing from the race, and I know I’m not the only one, because I’ve seen other riders posting about their experiences online for days after—sharing photos and memories, expressing their appreciation that the alleycat returned.
About a week after the race, Johnson sent me a message asking if I might consider writing about the experience for Racket. And while I hemmed and hawed for a little bit, I knew I wanted to.
“You were exactly, unintentionally, what I wanted to happen,” Johnson laughs—a first-time racer surprising themselves and everyone else by speeding through the stops and taking a place on the podium. “I hope it showed you that you are capable, and you belong here, and maybe it sparked something inside you. Maybe it didn’t! Either way, you went out and tried something new, and that’s all I could have hoped for.”
This is a really special race; the vibes were high from the time I sat down with my manifest to plan a route with friends all the way through the afterparty at Modist. In my memory, every single volunteer at every single checkpoint was grinning, laughing, and turning the affair into a small party. Maybe my memory is fried from the fact that it was, like, 94 degrees out in the shade. But it really did seem that way.
If Babes in Bikeland returns in 2027—this year’s organizers seem to want it to, and I hope for the sake of the entire local cycling community that it does—maybe you’ll think about racing your first alleycat. I promise: Everyone wants you to.
“Something that we’ve always done pretty much every year is to have a really significant prize for first rookie, because yeah, it’s a lot to sign up for something that you’ve never done before. And you can really surprise yourself with how capable you are,” Hovland says.
That little yellow envelope I mentioned earlier? At Angry Catfish’s checkpoint, riders had to write a short love letter to cycling. As I gripped the pen in my sweaty palm, I thought about how bikes have changed my life in so many ways: introduced me to lifelong friends, improved my mental health and self-esteem, pushed me to try new and scary things. In many ways, Babes in Bikeland brought all of those positive changes together.
“You made me me,” I quickly scrawled, stuffing the paper inside its envelope.
At least, I think that’s what I wrote. It was really hot out, you guys.
