COMMUNITY & CULTURE
A Spicy Thursday in the Bay
Studio Picante connected UCI Gran Fondo Brazil with San Francisco’s cycling community for a challenge organized alongside Thursdays.
It started with a simple idea: show up every Thursday morning and ride. For four weeks, around 60 cyclists took on the Thursdays March Challenge, through early alarms, hard efforts, a clock change, and plenty of reasons to stay in bed. Instead, the crew kept coming back.
That consistency is at the heart of Thursdays, a San Francisco cycling collective that grew from friends meeting for early morning rides into a community built around training hard, riding together, and having a good time doing it. The March Challenge turned that weekly ritual into a friendly competition, with riders collecting results throughout the month and First Endurance supporting the overall challenge.
For one of those mornings, Studio Picante added a little extra spice. The UCI Gran Fondo Brazil joined the challenge with special prizes connecting the streets and climbs of San Francisco with a start line thousands of miles away in Timbó, Santa Catarina.
The racing delivered its own story. Haley Hagerström finished as the fastest woman, while Ivan Linser and Erik Levinsohn could not be separated at the top, both stopping the clock at exactly 22:15. Rather than breaking the tie, an additional entry was added so both riders could make the trip to Brazil. Haley earned her place as well, turning one special prize into three opportunities to line up at the UCI Gran Fondo Brazil.
There was plenty happening beyond the stopwatch. At the top of the climb, Pas Normal Studios welcomed riders with coffee, giving everyone a chance to catch their breath, regroup, and enjoy the view before getting back on the bikes. The small moments between efforts were as much a part of the morning as the racing itself.
The celebration continued at Pixlcat Coffee, where bikes gathered around the outdoor deck and coffee and their outstanding mochis were waiting. Helmets came off, stories started circulating, and the competitive energy of the morning gave way to the familiar post-ride ritual of hanging out with the people you had just been suffering alongside.
It was also at Pixlcat that another ticket to the 2026 UCI Gran Fondo Brazil came down to pure luck. Joseph Broughner won the raffle, giving one more rider the chance to take an ordinary Thursday in San Francisco all the way to a start line in southern Brazil. Official UCI jerseys and other prizes rounded out a morning with plenty to celebrate.
What made the challenge memorable was not only the results or the prizes. It was four weeks of people setting alarms, getting on their bikes, pushing one another, and coming back the following Thursday to do it again. The UCI connection simply gave that local ritual an unexpected international destination.
The activation was produced by Studio Picante, organized by Thursdays, and sponsored by Riders Sports, bringing together a global cycling series and a community that already lives the culture every week. The rest belonged to the riders.
Photos courtesy of Thursdays, Gary Pesola, Evan Lih, and Marino Morillo.
See you on the road.
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