Once a year, the American Visionary Art Museum hosts a 15-mile race of human-powered sculptures across Baltimore's streets, the harbor, sand, and mud. People build enormous, beautiful, barely-functional machines and pedal them through all of it. I pilot a team. Here is what that is actually like.
The first thing to understand is that winning is almost beside the point. There is a trophy for first place, sure. But the most coveted award is the Mediocre prize, given to the team that finishes dead in the middle. Think about what kind of event has to exist for "gloriously average" to be the honor everyone wants. That is the spirit of the whole thing.
The build is half the race
Months before race day, you are in someone's garage or driveway, turning a pile of bike parts and plywood and pool noodles into a machine that has to do something no sensible vehicle should: float, climb, roll, and survive a mud pit, all powered by human legs. It will break. You will fix it. It will break again. By the time you reach the starting line you are less a team and more a small, sleep-deprived family that has collectively decided this is worth it.
You are not really racing the other teams. You are racing the very real possibility that your art machine falls apart in the harbor.
Race day
Then it is loud and chaotic and joyful and the whole city seems to turn out to watch a giant pink whatever-you-built lurch down the road. The harbor crossing is the part everyone holds their breath for: that is where the engineering meets the water and you find out whether your months of work float or famously do not. Both outcomes get cheered. That is Baltimore for you.
Why I do it
Because it is the most Baltimore thing I know. It takes art seriously enough to spend months on it, and takes itself unseriously enough to celebrate finishing in the middle. It is creative and communal and a little bit insane, and it asks everyone watching to root for human effort in its most absurd, most beautiful form. I will be in the harbor again next year, hoping to float.
This is the Baltimore I show up for.
The races, the parades, the whole man-about-town life lives on the rest of the site.
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