They say this Alabama city is the second-worst in the U.S. for cyclists. What do they know?

Welcome to life in Mobile, Alabama, the second-worst large city in the nation for bicyclists, according to some lawncare folks.

Monday, May 29: Memorial Day, a chance for a nice holiday ride. A diverse group of around 20 people have answered the call, showing up at Causey Middle School for a 7 a.m. departure. Causey is on the fringes of west Mobile and west Mobile traffic, so in short order the group is on an 18-mile run southward toward Bayou La Batre. The pace isn’t crazy – 18 mph, give or take – and riding in a big group like this reduces the effort so that the purely recreational riders can hang with the athletes. The vibe is relaxed. People chat, enjoy the surroundings. We pass new subdivisions and green farm fields. We cross under I-10 and over U.S. 90, way out in St. Elmo.

At the first rest stop, everybody decides to keep going on the optional loop through the Bayou and along Shell Belt Road. We cross the drawbridge, ride past a docked fleet of brightly painted shrimp boats, past fragrant seafood processing operations, along the shoreline of the Mississippi Sound with Dauphin Island visible in the hazy distance. After another break, riders head north back to Causey. The faster folks ramp it up and break off; the slower riders regroup at their own pace.

Little by little, the day gets hotter. More traffic is stirring now, in the final mile or two back to the school. The riders have covered 48 miles and it’s not nearly even lunchtime yet, with hours and hours of holiday left to enjoy. They’re going to feel a lot less guilty about the barbecue they’re going to eat later. Life is good.

May 31: Or so we think. That was Monday. On Wednesday the fine folks at LawnStarter let the world know that if you’re a bicyclist in Mobile, life sucks.

Here’s how this works: A company interested in getting some exposure ranks a bunch of cities for best-this or worst-that. News outlets in those cities make hay with the results, and the company gets mentioned in the coverage. Journalists’ inboxes are filled with these things, and you just have to take them on their merits. Some are sheer garbage, some offer a different way of seeing the place where you live.

And sometimes you can’t help but take them personally. For June 3, World Bicycle Day, the folks at LawnStarter ranked 2023′s Best Biking Cities in the U.S., out of the 200 biggest cities in the U.S. The Top 10 Best included some of the nation’s biggest cities – San Francisco, New York, Portland, Boston, Chicago – and none in the South.

Mobile came in at No. 199, just a whisker above bottom-of-the-barrel Jackson, Miss. Montgomery also made the bottom 10, coming in at No. 195. Birmingham dropped its kickstand at a dismal No. 177, Huntsville at a mediocre No. 128.

Turns out the problem here is the methodology. The wizards at LawnStarter could have based their rankings on sensible factors, such as: The number of popular routes with waterfront views, the chance of seeing an alligator, the ease of getting from Midtown to Downtown or the number of rides that start and finish at Callaghan’s Irish Social Club.

But no. Their metrics includes esoteric stuff like the number of dedicated bike trails, the availability of bike-share and bike-rental services, the climate, the number of cycling clubs and the number of cycling races and events.

OK, I get it. I’ve lived in Berlin, Germany, a city whose post-WWII infrastructure includes an incredible network of lanes and signals for private vehicles, buses, bikes and pedestrians. I felt safer riding across a city of 4 million than my Alabama hometown of 30,000.

And I’ve visited Knoxville, where a network of greenways provides access to much of the city, including a beltline along the river and corridors to many public parks. Mobile has a greenway plan, but things are going slowly.

Yeah, we could be better. But second-worst? Hey, we’ve got a lot to offer. We’ve got the Delta Bike Project, a great resource for cyclists on a budget. We’ve got a few dedicated bike lanes, and little by little they’re starting to add up. (You can now ride the entire Hank Aaron Loop around downtown on a path!) We’ve got a corridor from downtown to the Dog River Bridge that’s so popular you’re pretty much guaranteed to see other riders any day of the week.

We’ve got a Facebook page (Mobilians on Bikes) that serves as an entry point for people trying to figure out who’s riding where and when. It’s a little informal. No one’s in charge. Quit worrying about the pace. Just show up for a ride and ask around. People will be glad to see you.

Thursday, June 1: A dozen or so riders gather near Iron Hand Brewing at 6:15. If this was Tuesday and we were leaving from Callaghan’s, we’d head north up Conception Street Road to Africatown Boulevard, pause on Telegraph Road to regroup at the yellow submarine. (Not a metaphor or a Beatle-inspired business. This is a port city. It’s an actual yellow submarine.) Then we’d continue south through and past downtown to a turnaround in the Brookley aeroplex.

But this is Thursday, so it’s a slightly different variation of the down-the-bay route: We do a fast cruise south out of downtown, over the bridge at the container terminal, through Brookley and around Perimeter Road, onto the recreational path that runs along the south side of the airfield, then we charge down Bayfront Road to McNally Park. From the point at the park we’ve got a view of the impending sunset, and the sailboats out for the Thursday night races.

Then it’s back the way we came, pushing harder, the fast folks going faster, the slower folks pacing themselves.

Why? For the exercise, but that’s only part of it. Look, you probably rode a bike when you were a kid. You probably found that a certain feeling of freedom came with it. The thing is, it never quit feeling that way. You just quit doing it.

We zoom back toward downtown as the light fades, and sometimes the headwind we had on the way down turns into a tailwind on the way back, and that’s a blast. Those are good nights. Really, they’re all good nights, even the nights when you seem to have a headwind both ways.

Or are they? Who’s to say? It’s not like we’re a lawn-care company with a sideline in insightful analytics such as “2023′s Best Cities for Naked Gardening.” (Birmingham, Huntsville, Mobile and Montgomery all ranked much better in that one, believe it or not.)

But as far as we know, we’re having a great time. Maybe we’re just too dumb to know better. Rank that, if you can.