It’s just riding a bike

When I started posting on instagram about riding bikes, of course I wanted to look cool and aesthetic and strong/skilled/fast/bad ass.

But I’m not a ~pretty~ girl, I don’t live where there are sick bike parks and I spread myself too thin to own an expensive bike with which to pose, my long locks flowing out from under a full face in my cool-girl kit. I’m also not patient enough, nor do I have the time, to perfect a feature or get a line just right before I share it in a perfectly-filmed reel, posted at the right time, with all the right hashtags. I definitely don’t have the freshest kit, or newest, techiest components, or even the appetite for those things. Too-cool kit, top-spec components and having every feature dialled for the ’gram might be it for some, but it ain’t it for me.

I got into biking when I was transitioning from student to law grad to lawyer, already into my 30s. (I don’t talk a lot about my work on the internet for a bunch of reasons but it’s stressful, challenging and sometimes just plain sucks – a bunch of A-types in an adversarial system, ‘fighting’ for a cause with/for somebody else’s money? You do the math). Of course it helped that my then-boyfriend was super into bikes, and I was super into him, and started going to races with him, road tripping and talking about nothing and everything, listening to music, cracking each other up, being in love with life and possibility and each other (and spoiler alert: he’s now my husband). Then I got a bike and dabbled in racing, held some races, chased sponsorships and ambassador deals and even made the videos in the kit doing the features with the hashtags. And some of that resonated, some of it helped me find the limits of myself and what I want and some of it showed me parts of myself and others that didn’t resonate and which I let go.

Now I just love bikes because it feels so innocent to pedal up a hill and so fun to zoom back down it. I love the banter, ranting or self-reflection when grinding up a fire road climb and the rush of dropping in, when everything else falls away and it’s you, the bike and the hill. And I love sharing it because I want to look back on my grid (the modern photo album) and see a life lived, because I want people to know there is no need to be the best at a thing, to do it the fastest, or to know everything about the thing.

I just want to carve out and hold space for the people like me – who are getting outside, trying new stuff, getting sweaty, giggling down mountains and enjoying doing it. It’s not sheep stations or brain surgery, it’s riding a bike and for me, that’s enough.