Matt Sanchez represented Denver at the North American Cycle Courier Championships in Mexico City last fall.Matt Sanchez got the call to deliver a cake to a hospital to celebrate the birth of a baby. When he arrived at the bakery, it was clear the bakers had no idea that the elaborate cake they'd put so much time into would be transported by a bike messenger. For his part, Sanchez had no idea the cake would be so big...or expensive.
After being laid off briefly during the pandemic — when few people were working in downtown offices and everything that could be sent digitally was — Mena is just grateful he’s able to work as a courier. There's still a place for messengers, he says...just a smaller place than before. Before switching to Denver Boulder Couriers, Cass would transport forty or fifty prescriptions a day during the pandemic. Mena still does a lot of medical work. He takes prescription orders to pharmacies and transports scans and blood samples from one medical professional to another; sometimes he even takes bills from Denver Health to people’s homes. Before the pandemic, about 20 percent of his work was medical; today it's about 90 percent, he says.
The big prize, though, was enjoying the camaraderie in an industry that few people realize still exists.“I know virtually everyone on the streets here, and I know people who used to be on the streets,” Sanchez says. “I mean, you don't see fishermen traveling from all over North America to have a skills competition in one city and have this built-in community. But you do with bike messengers. I could show up to any city and find a friend of a friend, and before you know it, I'm taken in.
“I'll go in a big loop,” he says, usually starting his day at the post office downtown. “If I have stuff that's just central downtown, I knock that out and then I have to go to Uptown and knock that out, and then I have to go to, like, Glendale or South Colorado Boulevard, stuff like that. … I'm always working in some sort of a route situation where I'm not going here and then, ‘Oh shit!’ I have to go way back down there.”“It's almost like a flow state,” Sanchez says.
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