How to Avoid Being Bike-Jacked

Introduction

About a month ago, an email went around my cycling team about a bike-jacking on Wildcat Canyon Road up in the Berkeley hills: two men ran a guy off the road with their car, then stole his bike at knifepoint. (The Nextdoor report is here.) A week later, another report came in, this one from Strava and also reported in Berkeleyside, about two more cyclists being robbed of their bike, this time at gunpoint. Also mentioned were two other tales of cyclists escaping apparent robbery attempts. And just last week I came across yet another report of a cyclist being robbed at gunpoint, this time of his mountain bike.

I have continued to ride throughout this crime spree, and now, as a service to my fellow Bay Area cyclists and anyone anywhere who faces this threat, I offer my strategies for protecting yourself and—more importantly—your bike.

A few details 

I’ve pored over the articles for as much information as possible, but there are a lot of gaps. The first guy, we’re told, “had been run off the road about halfway between El Toyonol [sic] and Inspiration Point, by two men in a grey VW or Toyota sedan – ‘looked like primer’. He surrendered his bike when threatened with a knife. One of the men left with the car and the second rode the bike, both toward Berkeley. He was not clear on the description of the two men saying he was mostly focused on the knife.” Other than his bike being a “Trek Madrone” [sic] there’s not much more info.

Right off the bat, I’m pretty frustrated. I mean, “VW or Toyota”—what the hell is that? Any normal male above the age of ten should be able to tell the make, model, and year (give or take) of just about any car. But this guy? Let’s face it, VWs and Toyotas don’t look very much alike, whereas Toyotas and Hondas are practically identical. Consider the following exhibits:

Obviously, the car could have just as easily been a Honda, and by extension a Lexus or Acura. So all we really know about the vehicle is that it’s not a Prius and not an SUV. Gee, thanks. (Actually, a Prius would be the perfect getaway vehicle around here because it would be so inconspicuous. But an eco-friendly villain? I can’t see it happening.)

Perhaps more annoying than the victim’s poor observational skills is the typical prevalence of stupid comments below the news story. Lots of politically charged stuff in there about “PC politics,” “defunding the police,” etc. One guy wrote, “Race of criminals; suppressed. Type of bikes; secret.” What does he mean “suppressed”? By whom? There’s a difference between neglecting (or failing to notice) this or that detail vs. it being kept from us as though by conspiracy. And really, the type of bike is irrelevant. Am I safer because I ride a Giant, when the criminals are apparently targeting Treks? Uh huh.

I would argue that the thieves’ race (though it was brought up by four commenters in the first Berkeleyside article) is also irrelevant. We cyclists want info that will help us keep an eye out for the perps during our rides. This is why knowing it was, say, a mid-‘80s VW Jetta would be really useful. But suppose, for the sake of argument, the perps were white guys. Does this mean I need to peer into every car I see and try to make sure the driver isn’t white? Pffff.

There’s also the probability that multiple, independent criminals are involved. Copycat thieves, if you will. Which brings me to my perp-agnostic strategies.

Strategy 1 - Choose different routes

The hardest thing to figure out with these reports is whether the victim was riding uphill or down. This makes a big difference. Consider the guy run off the road on Wildcat Canyon. If he was climbing, he’d have been a sitting duck for the thieves; that climb (from San Pablo Dam Road to Inspiration Point) takes me like 13 minutes (and chances are I go faster than a bike-jacking victim plucked at random). But the descent is under six minutes, so a thief would have to be pretty lucky to happen upon me (unless he’s sitting in wait—but his VW or Toyota or whatever the hell it is better be pretty fast to catch up from a dead stop on that twisty road). So I’ve stopped climbing Wildcat (but I’ll still descend it). Instead, I can go up El Toyonal and Lomas Cantadas and then down South Park Drive . (Lomas is closed to through traffic except bikes; South Park is closed to cars during the pandemic.)

Other thefts and attempts were on Grizzly Peak Blvd, most of which isn’t that great a road anyway. The residential section is dangerous because the locals tend to drive poorly; e.g., pulling out of their driveways without looking , or worse. (Click here for a particularly egregious example.) This stupid street is easily avoided if you go up South Park, and if you don’t want that steep a climb but want to reach destinations south, you could ride through Berkeley and go up Tunnel Road to Skyline. So far those roads haven’t been a target.

Bear in mind, I don’t always feel like climbing Lomas, in which case I stay on El Toyonal. The section east of Lomas, which connects to Wildcat Canyon Road, is closed to cars. I do have to then ride up the top half of Wildcat, but I can do that in under six minutes—a risk I’m generally willing to take. More on this later.

(Am I doing a disservice to my fellow cyclists by giving away these secret routes to prospective thieves? No. First of all, there’s nothing they can do about these roads being closed. Second, thieves don’t read this blog. If they did, they wouldn’t be thieves … they’d be procrastinating grad students, retirees, and/or my mom.)

Strategy 2 - Evasive action

If you’re descending and somebody tries to pull alongside to run you off the road, you could try to outmaneuver them. For example, you could take the left lane. The evil driver would have to have balls like King Kong to follow you over there. After all, if you encountered an oncoming car, you could ditch off the left side and probably not crash—but the would-be thief would be out of luck. Of course this technique has the moral flaw of putting an innocent motorist or cyclist (i.e., the one possibly coming the other way) in danger. So I don’t really recommend it.

Now, if you’re climbing, and really paying attention, you could probably stop quickly enough to avoid being run off the road. Then you could pop your feet out of the pedals and roll backward, paddling with your feet, long enough turn your bike around, clip back in, and flee downhill.

When I climb Wildcat from El Toyonal to the summit, I figure that if I do encounter a thief, and can manage to turn around, I could be back at El Toyonal and the safety of its gate in under three minutes, worst case. That’s not so long to hold off a deranged motorist. And the gate really would save me … it’s not like one of those matchstick ones the bad guys plow through on TV.

Strategy 3 - the “human shield”

I’ve only used this technique by accident. I was descending Wildcat and caught up to another cyclist. I didn’t want to pass (because it’s hard to give the guy the requisite six feet of COVID clearance, so passing would be rude). I hung back 100 feet or so, and in the process realized that if a would-be thief were lying in wait ahead, he’d get the guy ahead of me, and I could turn around and flee. (Er, turn around and get help—that’s what I meant.) And if a motorist started trying to catch me from behind, I could just sprint a bit, pass the other cyclist, and let him be the victim. (While I went for help, of course.) Employing this strategy while riding up a hill would require more patience, but could be done. A downside to this scheme is that you’d have to wait at the top or bottom of the climb for a suitable human shield to show up.

A variation on this would be “humans shield” whereby you ride in a large group. (History has shown that two riders isn’t enough.) Of course, everyone in your group would have to be vaccinated first … but we’re getting there.

Strategy 4 - the “I’m-with-Grandma”

This is a variation on the human shield, with the human being in a car. I discovered this by accident too, when I got stuck behind an elderly, slow driver on the way down Wildcat. Again, a thief sitting in wait ahead would rule me out because there wouldn’t be enough space between me and Grandma’s car to move in. And if a thief came from behind, I could sprint around Grandma … the thief probably wouldn’t dare follow.

Strategy 5 - Capitulate

Of course you could just willingly comply and cooperate with the thief. After all, it’s just a bike, right? And isn’t every cyclist always looking for an excuse to buy a new ride? Consider the following exhibit, a chat I had with a friend recently over the absurd price of new chainrings and even replacing a simple bolt:

(Harrison, in this context, is my late father.)

The are problems with this strategy, though. As far as I can tell, homeowners’ and auto insurance don’t cover this kind of theft—and proper racing bikes are expensive. On top of that, I don’t trust criminals to be reasonable just because I’m cooperating. They’re loose cannons, right? Finally, I don’t trust myself to follow through and be docile. When I think of how angry I got when some shitbird stole the handlebars off my commuter bike, I sense I’d be ready for hand-to-hand combat if someone went for my entire bike. As a kid I used to get in a fair number of fistfights, and a weird, crude part of me misses them. Which brings me to the next strategy.

Strategy 6 - the Walt Longmire

I was unarmed—who brings a Colt M1911 on a bike ride?—so I decided to hand over my bike, even though the guy only had a knife. But knowing he’d try to escape on my bike, I opened the rear quick release as I rolled it to him. I’d taken off my helmet to try to draw his eyes away from my tampering, but he didn’t fall for it. “What did you do?” he asked, looking down. I saw my opportunity and swung my helmet as hard as I could up into his face. As he recoiled, I threw my entire bulk at him, pinning him to the ground under the bike. I wrested the knife from his hand and was about to pummel his face when his accomplice yelled, “Think again, asshole!”

I looked over to see the endless, stainless barrel of a Colt .357 pointed at my face… All I could think was that this was the last thing I would see. Time froze then, and it was as if the air had died…” Suddenly a giant cyclist came barreling down toward us doing at least thirty, stuck out a knee and an elbow, and nailed the gunman, sending him sprawling across the asphalt. I jumped to my feet, seized the dropped sidearm even before it stopped skittering across the road, and had the perp covered within seconds. Henry Standing Bear downshifted, turned around, and rode back up in time to yank the other thief from the ground and put him in a hammerlock before he could do anything.

The big Indian said calmly, “The thieves clearly did not realize you were riding with a friend. It is a good thing you dropped me before beginning your descent of Wildcat.”

(Note: the italicized text above is taken verbatim from Death Without Company by Craig Johnson, Penguin Books, 2006, page 245. Used without permission.)

Strategy 7 - Ride in the morning

There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you: I don’t rely on clever routes alone to avoid bike-jackers. I also ride bloody early in the morning—as in, before dawn. Why am I confident in this strategy? Well, so far the documented thefts have occurred between 11:00 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. And think about it: thieves are never morning persons. If they were morning persons, they’d have fricking jobs and wouldn’t have to rob people!

So you may be wondering how this is working out for me. So far, it’s great! For one thing, it’s a lot quieter and more peaceful … just me and the turkeys and an occasional jogger. That photo at the top of this post is the view of Mount Diablo from Wildcat Canyon Road, snapped during one of these morning rides.

On a recent outing, I didn’t encounter my first car until almost half an hour in, when a douchebag in a big Benz blew by me, coming way closer to me than necessary—practically grazing me—and going waaaaay over the speed limit. He wasn’t trying to rob me, though—he turned in to the parking lot at Inspiration Point. Why the rush? I’m guessing he wanted to get to his favorite meadow in time to do his sun salutation just as the sun came up over the horizon. What a git.

(Ironically enough, his unsafe pass occurred within twenty feet of this sign:

So you see, he was a scofflaw; just not a bike thief.)

Minutes later, I encountered another vehicle, suspiciously parked at the side of Wildcat Canyon Road, on the stretch where the first cyclist was robbed. But the vehicle was a Honda Element: way too conspicuous, not to mention nerdy, for thieves … it is beneath their criminal dignity. Meanwhile, the aroma of burning ganja emanating from the vehicle was strong enough to put me at ease. Even if the driver tried to rob me, I’d just have to stall him for a bit and he’d forget what he was doing and wander off.

After that, there were a few cars on San Pablo Dam Road but that’s a major commuter thoroughfare (with the traffic in the opposite direction, happily enough). Next up was El Toyonal, which is a beast of a climb but zero mugging risk … even the most boneheaded thief knows almost nobody rides here. You could wait half a day for a victim to happen along.

Not feeling like tackling Lomas Cantadas, I took the El Toyonal cut-through to Wildcat. It’s as peaceful a road as you could want:

Probably the riskiest part of my ride was heading up the top half of Wildcat towards Inspiration Point. That vulnerable bit of the route is why I ride so early. As it turned out, the only other car that passed me was a Tesla. I wasn’t bothered in the slightest, because Tesla owners are more the type to commit white collar crime.

Note that if you adopt the early morning strategy, it’ll get easier as summer approaches and the days got longer. Here’s a handy chart showing civil twilight times for this area:

This morning, civil twilight started at 5:56 a.m. I was on the road at 6:04, plenty early enough to get 20 miles in and still show up to work (at home, of course) by 8:00.

But what if you want to do a much longer ride, like the 70-mile round trip to the Mount Diablo summit? That brings me to my last anti-mugging strategy.

Strategy 8 - Slip between the horns

The other weekend, I wanted to ride Mount Diablo, but wouldn’t make it back to the Berkeley hills until early afternoon. The obvious solution to this problem would be to ride home over El Toyonal and Lomas Cantadas. But I don’t have nearly the fitness to do that … I missed a lot of riding last year due to injury, and I knew I’d be pretty well shattered by the Diablo summit, over thirty miles from home. The alternative would be crawling home over Wildcat in the afternoon, clearly a risky behavior. As I silently pondered the matter, my wife said, “Hey, how about I go shopping in Walnut Creek and meet you for lunch? You could throw a change of clothes in the car and drive home with me.”

Genius! She had seemingly recognized my false dichotomy (the fallacy that Lomas and Wildcat were my only options) and deftly slipped between the horns of the dilemma. Actually, her plan had nothing to do with the local crime spree, which (thankfully) I don’t reckon she thinks much about. It was just a novel idea of how to spend the afternoon.

It worked out perfectly: I destroyed myself on the mountain, coasted down the other side, found the car, changed, and twenty minutes later I was inhaling yucca fries, a Cuban sandwich, and a pint of IPA, with my bike safely locked up in the back of the car. This became the first point-to-point training ride of the year, with a sprinkling of net elevation gain to boot ... and exactly zero bike thieves. NOOICE!

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Ode to Lomas Cantadas

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language.

Introduction

Years ago, I posted here my Ode to South Park, about one of my favorite cycling climbs.  Ever since, I’ve had this nagging feeling of something left undone:  an ode to another climb, that’s my very favorite.  So, here it is.  (Photos included here are of my daughter, who first rode Lomas Cantadas a couple of years ago.)

The Poem

Ode to Lomas Cantadas

El Toyonal is a beast of an uphill;

Pedaling here is a bit self-defeating.                                      2

Lomas Cantadas will sweeten your beating:

Insult to injury, sweet overkill!

Most riders wisely take Wildcat Canyon.

Half the uphill, after all—and you’re tired!                          6

Wisdom, alas, is a flaw when you’re mired

In glory, in notions of being a man.

  Sometimes caprice is much better than ease:

  Radical freedom is here to be seized!                                10

Footnotes & Commentary

Title:  Lomas Cantadas

What does “Lomas Cantadas” mean?  That’s a bit tricky.  Google translate says “sung hills.”  Hills that have been celebrated in song?  Perhaps.  But the spelling of “Cantadas” isn’t consistent.  Google Maps says “Cantadas,” but the street sign says “Contadas,” which would be “Counted Hills.”  Aren’t all hills counted, or at least eligible to be counted, making this modifier pretty much meaningless?

Among my riding pals, I’m always the one pushing to do this climb.  In fact, I tend to try to foist it on everybody I ever ride with.  Occasionally, someone will ask me what the name means, and I tell them, “Lomas means hills, and Cantadas is actually an acronym for ‘Can’t A Dana Albert Suffer?’”

Line 1:  El Toyonal

Okay, I admit this is a confusing start to the poem.  Why do I mention this other road?  Well, the only way to get to Lomas Cantadas is from El Toyonal.  But it’s possible to ride up El Toyonal without continuing on to Lomas; you can bail out and cut over to Wildcat Canyon and save yourself a lot of suffering.

Line 2:  self-defeating

Defeating yourself is really the point here.  An East Bay Velo Club teammate of mine, Muzzy, who is kind of the Obi Wan Kenobi of our club, says that the course doesn’t make the race—the racers do.  That is, any course can be hard if your competition is tough.  But for those of us who don’t race anymore, and do a lot of riding alone, motivation can be a problem.  That’s where it’s nice to have a gradient so severe that you couldn’t loaf if you wanted to.  You yourself become the foe who must be defeated.

Line 3:  sweeten the beating

A jolly good beating is one of the great joys of cycling (and similar athletic disciplines, I’d imagine).  The long term rewards (e.g., stress release, fitness, the freedom to eat whatever you want whenever you want in whatever quantities you want without getting a big gut like E.T.) are well and good, as is the worthy knackered feeling you get in your legs after a ride.  But on top of all that, the immediate, in-the-moment, muscle-searing, chest-heaving discomfort of extreme exertion can provide a strange kind of tactile pleasure, if you do this often enough to acquire a taste for it.  There’s a purity to athletic struggle, a distillation and concentration of what it means to be alive in your body, and it can be habit-forming.

Line 4:  insult to injury

The injury mentioned here is metaphorical; of course I’m not advocating going out and harming yourself.  But the insult is literal:  I find it impossible to tackle a climb like this—averaging over 10% with pitches of 15-20%—without feeling sheepishly insufficient to the task.  On top of that, I doubt I’m alone among cyclists in instinctively comparing one’s current effort to one’s past best, which so often recedes ever further into history.  For ageing bikers like me, this can be disheartening or even humiliating.  So we disparage ourselves.  We can’t help it. 

Case in point:  I haven’t trained hard in six months and am at least ten pounds heavier than usual.  I’ve been afraid to ride Lomas this year, but yesterday I finally bit the bullet (despite being totally fried from four days of riding in a row).  My time (including El Toyonal) was 22:27, whereas my personal best was 16:47, set about two years ago.  So I’m almost 30% slower now, a difference which manifests as a grotesquely slow cadence and a lot of weaving back and forth like a paperboy.  I didn’t just feel slightly off my game yesterday morning; I felt borderline incompetent.  The insults I hurl at myself in such cases are nonverbal, but nonetheless vicious and cutting.  And yet, even as I lament my poor form, I enjoy the satisfaction of doing something about it.  

Line 4:  sweet overkill

You could accuse me of being redundant, with “sweeten” in the third line and “sweet” in the fourth.  But “sweet” as an adjective has taken on so many meanings in modern vernacular, I’d argue it has almost nothing to do with the verb “sweeten.”  You might tell somebody he has a sweet bike, but if you asked a bike shop guy, “How can I sweeten my bike?” he’d find your usage highly nonstandard.

Line 5:  Wildcat Canyon

East Bay cyclists do all kinds of short rides in the Berkeley hills, but our longer rides invariably take us across these hills to destinations east, such as Mount Diablo.  Our last obstacle to getting home from these adventures is crossing back over this ridge of hills.  Wildcat Canyon Road is the logical choice, as it’s a pretty mellow climb and usually you’ve done plenty of suffering by the time you reach it.  Zoom in on the below map and you’ll see the three possible routes:  Wildcat (farthest north); El Toyonal with the cut-through to Wildcat; and El Toyonal to Lomas.  (Note the “Decision Point” callout in the lower right of the map.)

Line 6:  half the uphill

Wildcat gains only 187 meters (614 feet) at an average gradient of 5%.  Lomas, on the other hand, is essentially twice as hard, gaining 372 meters (1,221) feet over about the same distance.  In other words, it’s twice as steep, and takes you to a much higher summit than you need to reach.

The problem is, on the way to Wildcat you go right by the turnoff to El Toyonal.  To me, this is a gauntlet thrown down that cannot be ignored.  To continue straight, toward the easier climb, is to acknowledge my own laziness and/or weakness.  The turnoff taunts me, and I, in turn, taunt myself, along with anybody else who’s riding with me—unless my pals beat me to the punch.  It’s like a dare.  A double-dog-dare.  You reach the intersection and—if you ignore the sober, serious, and completely reasonable voice in your head, and listen instead to the gonzo, irrational troublemaker in your skull, or on the bike next to you, you turn left.  You know it’s a bad idea and that’s essentially why do you it.  One moment of rash decision, when you make that turn, is followed by around 20 minutes of paying dearly for it.

Lines 7-8:  mired in glory, in notions of being a man

We really are mired.  Modern men, the sensitive and enlightened kind, can tell themselves—and others—that they’re over all that macho bullshit, but they aren’t.  No, not really.  They might deceive themselves, but we all have vainglorious impulses, chronic ones, rooted in testosterone and savagery and a lust for combat (whether it’s man-vs.-man, man-vs.-nature, or man-vs.-himself).  If a male completely subjugates or denies this impulse, he will face the consequences.  Maybe that’s the root of all this emo nonsense. 

Myself, I see sport as a great way to get this stuff out of our systems in a healthy, consequence-free manner.  I suspect that the truly sexist men among us, such as the ones who belittle their female colleagues, are reacting to feelings of unresolved inadequacy, which they senselessly blame on the women who (they fear) harshly judge them.  So when I see a male cyclist taunting his pal, casting aspersions on his manhood based on whether to take the harder climb or the easier one, I call that good clean fun.

Usually, this climb isn’t one where I’ll encounter other bikers.  But occasionally I do, and once or twice a battle has occurred.  Here’s an entry from my training diary, from August 2013: 

I had a smackdown with a d’bag on a really expensive bike, clad in really expensive clothing.  He took a good while to overtake me, and then rode just ahead of me, and he fricking stunk!  I don’t mean he reeked of sweat, which is normal and understandable, but he smelled like shit!  If he’d just been faster everything would have been fine—he’d have gone on ahead and I’d be rid of him.  But it was as though it took everything he had to pass me, and now we were in lockstep.  I wasn’t going to slow down just to escape the stench, especially because my gearing is just barely low enough for this grade to begin with.  So I sat on his wheel tolerating the odor.

I figured this guy would try to be in the lead at the place where the road splits [one route has a bit of a descent before eventually joining Lomas], so he could take the easy route and pretend he won something.  I didn’t want to give him that satisfaction so I passed him and drilled it just before the junction, where it’s is super-steep, hoping to Cancellara him.  I did get a pretty sweet gap and in the process made the halfway point in record time.  Alas, the rich & stinky d’bag ended up doing the same route I was, so I had to keep hammering.  At the really steep parts I dug extra deep and increased my lead, hoping to shatter his morale.  I managed to extend my gap to ~30 seconds by the end.  I hope he felt good and slapped-down.  Anyway, the really great part is that I have a new lifetime PR for Lomas [17:05]! 

It’s worth pointing out that solo, self-motivated trips up Lomas, after your pals have turned off, are just as common (and in my case more common) than getting shoehorned into the effort by your pals.  (I’ve done this climb well over 500 times, but only a few dozen times with teammates.  Huh, I guess this is a “counted climb.”)  Choosing Lomas is a manner of personal pride, of knowing you didn’t slink away from a challenge.  Beyond that, dudes sometimes do check up after the fact:  “So did you do Lomas on the way back from Diablo?”  The mere chance of this inquiry, and the glory of saying, “Of course” rather than, “Well, no, I kind of had to get home” is sufficient motivation, for many of us, to take on the extra suffering. 

This was even the case after a brutal group ride up Mount Hamilton a few years back, when the day’s most stalwart rider, Kromer, diverged from the group to ride the Morgan Territory Road solo, and then—on a whim—climbed Mount Diablo.  On the way home, after more than 150 miles in the saddle, he decided to take on one more challenge.  In his e-mail to the club that night he wrote, “You know what’s next. I knew you’d ask, and I knew I had to say yes. So. Lomas.”  Many of us, particularly the ones who’d cheated and took Bart home (under the Berkeley hills), had to bow down before him.

(All this male competitive stuff aside, of course I acknowledge and respect that other drives than machismo exist, and women also challenge themselves and each other.  But I only see these behaviors; I cannot experience the motivations behind them.  I’m telling my story here and cannot tell theirs.  I thrill to the yarns my teenage daughter has been writing about her high school mountain bike races, and if she ever has her own blog you can bet I’ll link to it!)

Line 10:  radical freedom

It isn’t the case that a cyclist is strictly compelled by male ego, peer pressure, or insecurity to take the harder climb.  We are fully capable of saying “screw that” and riding up Wildcat, and we often do.  But by the same token, we are not compelled by logic or fatigue to ride up Wildcat, either.  Any rationale we could apply to either decision is flimsy, and to pretend otherwise takes us toward self-deception.  We are not doomed to take one route or another in the way that a chair is doomed to be a chair.

Meanwhile, we are free to throw all rationale out the window and exercise our radical freedom by behaving perversely.  (This freedom carries responsibility, but very little is at stake here other than lactic acid buildup and residual soreness.)  Steering the bike toward El Toyonal, while thinking “This is a bad idea,” is a reckless act, and perhaps that’s the point.  Humans behave recklessly all the time, but usually it’s eating that second bag of chips or giving in to the temptation to buy something we can’t afford.  (Nike’s slogan “Just do it” is a brilliant strategy for helping make this happen.)  An extra serving of pain and struggle is a pretty minor consequence for getting out your irrational, impulsive ya-yahs.

Appendix:  Why did I write about South Park years before Lomas Cantadas?

It’s been more than four years since I wrote my Ode to South Park.  Why did that one come first, and why has it taken me so long to honor my very favorite climb?

It comes down to laziness, frankly.  As poems go, I’m most comfortable writing sonnets, as I’ve done a lot with this form and consider myself something of an authority.  Knowing what I do about the iambic pentameter featured in a sonnet, I’m well aware that the phrase “Lomas Cantadas” is fundamentally incompatible with this meter.  Consider:

I really want to ride up South Park Drive

Works great, right?  The inflection naturally falls where it needs to.  But check this out:

I want to ride up Lomas Cantadas

Everything is fine until the last word, and then the meter breaks down.  Unless you force an emphasis (inflection) on the last syllable (i.e., CANT-ah-DAS), you break the rules (which the reader grasps intuitively) of iambic pentameter. When you pronounce this word properly, within a line of iambic pentameter, you experience the poetic equivalent of being clotheslined.

Having recently reviewed a couple of my old Kroopian poems—which are based on dactylic trimeter—I was emboldened to finally tackle this ode.  In case you’re wondering, this was a lot harder than writing a sonnet.

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