Los Angeles Wheelmen: Cycling Southern California since 1945

The Los Angeles Wheelmen is a club for cyclists who want to ride faster and farther and with less effort or to enjoy more rides at their chosen level with their cycling friends. Some of us are leisurely riders who look forward to the weekly 15-or-so-mile round trips to the coffee shop. Some of us are top-tube-thin racers who tear up the roads on SOTA bikes that weigh a feather and cost a bundle or riders who try to churn out a century on every Sunday route. (They make the rest of us look good.) Most of us are somewhere in-between.

Wheelmen ride to ride more. We ride to enjoy city scenery (There’s the Great Wall of L.A.!) urban greenery, rustic canyons and blue waters. We know when to share the roads and when to assert our rights to the roads. We know how to keep ourselves and each other safe. The club encourages improvement. Newer riders discover once-dreaded hills and canyon roads become flatter and shorter. Long-distance riders learn the head-games of cycling — that a double-century is far different from riding a century then turning around and riding it again. We challenge and encourage everyone, and we reward our best riders.

We ride to catch up with friends. We ride and talk – sometimes technical bike shop-talk, but also about vacations on and off bikes, politics, books, sports, movies, TV, technology, food, you-name-it – including where we’ll eat lunch.

We socialize off-bike. We greet each January with a catered dinner that exceeds the cost of membership. We celebrate new officers in March with free lunch for all. We celebrate the summer with watermelon and ice cream, and we celebrate holidays by getting riders out of the house and onto the roads.

To keep our club in high gear, we rely on volunteers who are generous with their time and talents. Everyone has a permanent invitation to help. Some of our longest-time members and most active volunteers are riders emeritus. No job is too big if lots of people pitch in, and every job and task has value — from running the Grand Tour (120 volunteers support 500 cyclists) and our other signature rides to filling pages of The Gooseneck with inspirational stories such as My Last Big Ride to nominating nonprofits as worthy recipients of our annual donation dollars to keeping the website current to replying to emails from inquiring strangers to….and the list goes on and on so the Los Angeles Wheelmen can too.

Join us!