Confidence & Cycling

Cycling has done so much for me. I know that it is not available to every person because it is at times cost-prohibitive (that is where organizations like The Bikery come in) and different bodies and abilities need different types of bikes (that is where organizations like Outdoors for All come in). I feel fortunate to be able to afford a bike and have the ability to ride my bike all over the place. Cycling has always made me feel free and independent. As a kid I wanted to ride my bike to school so badly, but my parents would not let me because they were scared of traffic on our winding suburban streets. Then, when I was 11, I was careening down our driveway to get momentum so I could make it up the hill at the bottom. I rode straight into the front hubcap of a moving minivan. The hubcap popped off and I went flying out in front of the car, scraping my knees and elbows on the asphalt. It was not the driver’s fault, but she was understandably rattled. My parents made me go over to her house and deliver an apology. This incident did not help my case for riding to school, but I was still allowed to ride to my friends’ houses on the weekends.

In college my roommate was a bike mechanic, and he built me a fleet of bikes for me at wholesale price. I rode those bikes all over town and never thought about needing a car, I could do anything on my bike. There is nothing quite like racing through empty streets with a group of your friends, from one party to another, or piling towels and hummus into a bike basket to spend the afternoon at the creek. Some of my favorite moments happened on bikes, and bikes have brought me together with some of my oldest and dearest friends.

Tessa Hulls describes the freedom that cycling gave to femme, trans and women-identified people throughout the 19th and 20th centuries in her really incredible lecture Women, Trans, and Femme Riders in Early Cycling History. Hulls’ lecture acknowledges the extreme freedom that bicycles provided to people who had less access to capital for a car or horse-drawn carriage. Misogynistic campaigns against women on bikes were actively introduced to mainstream media to discourage the use of bicycles for recreation and transportation. Bikes were a literal threat to patriarchal power over the feminine body — they sat between a person’s legs and allowed them to use their own strength to move around. People that are not cis men are often given a lot of instructions, boundaries, and templates for how, why, and when to use their bodies and how their bodies should look. A U.S. culture built on violence and restriction against these types of bodies does not help the case. It can be truly scary to ride a bike on your own if this type of violence is on your mind.

In my experience, fear has been foundational to feeling confident in something new. If something scares me, and I can move through the anxiety of failure, I will feel confident and accomplished in the notion that at least I tried. In conquering fear we can choose to do something over and over until it is monotonous and does not scare us, or we can choose to never engage with it again. Both choices create freedom, and I feel this freedom on my bike. I have been knocked down and have experienced different challenges. However, bike touring amplified my confidence and resilience by giving me a new pursuit at which to fail, to try again, and to learn from my mistakes. Finding supportive people that also love cycling has given me even more confidence — the confidence to keep failing and pushing myself to try new things. I commend anyone that has moved through their fear and anxiety to try something new, and to continue living their lives in spite of all the things that may be designed to hold you back. I hope you find that thing that makes you scared in that very particularly exciting way.