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Bikes for All!
First, I acknowledge George from Northampton for this post's title. I first met George when he spearheaded at attempt to have the Norwattuck Rail Trail cleared of show in the winter. Half happily, we're half way there, and the DCR now plows from Northampton to the turn off to University Drive in Amherst, even now including the bridge across the Connecticut River. Winter is a cold time for swimming. I met George again when I started helping fix up bikes in his program, Bikes for All.
A week ago I again joined the Trail Blasters junior mountain bike group for the Friday evening fest at Earl's Trails. The previous Monday had been the first of the junior cyclocross races at Look Park, also organized by Tom, the head of Trail Blasters. I'd been impressed by how the mountain bike ride had grown when I first rejoined two weeks earlier, and Tom excitedly asked me to guess how many had participated in the cross race. Given his tone, I guessed high: fifty. I was actually low. Sixty-nine kids had joined, which is so, so, so cool!
Get 'em while their young. A few years ago in a group presentation about accessibility of bicycle racing, and biking in general, the concept of drawing younger people to the sport was mentioned. I shared my own introduction to racing, mentioning, without specifics, that it had been a large part of my life. On the first days of geometry class my freshman year of highschool, a classmate I'd never met was wearing a Specialized T-shirt, so I asked him if he rode mountain bikes.
This was the fall of 1988, so most people hadn't even heard of mountain bikes. My dad and I had been riding in the woods at least five years, starting on a drop bar ten speed and a coaster brake bike with 20" wheels respectively. After one ride, my dad unearthed his boyhood Shelby Flyer, with it's balloon tires, and we started riding trails somewhat regularly. We'd always been a hiking family, and we treated biking in the woods the same way: packing a lunch in a backpack and exploring some new area all day. Luckily us, nobody even knew mountain bikes existed, so they never thought to ban them!
Like everyone else, my dad and I also didn't know mountain bikes existed. We were doing our own more insular version of what had happened in California a few years earlier. I guess it was just mountain bike time! Well, we did eventually learn, and my dad replaced his old paper boy bike with a 1985 Ridge Runner, and six months later we finally gave up on the special order of a 24" wheel bike to fit my short-for-an-eleven-year-old size, and I was stretched onto the smallest version of my dad's bike, an 18" frame. I could just touch the ground on tiptoes.
Back to the future of highschool, I was excited to discover a mountain biker my own age, and Steve and I did our first ride from his house on the other side of town that weekend. We were given a ride to the top of the hill by his parents, so maybe we were even on the cutting edge of shuttle runs! We were out for hours, and while Steve was far faster than I was, I was invited back for a second ride because I was the first person who hadn't complained when the trail turned rocky and difficult.
I'd seen bike racing on TV, but never conceived of steps on the way to professional racing careers. There were no highschool teams, so somehow pro riders magically just happened. His older brother had raced bikes, so Steve knew about local racing, ended up with a job at the local bike shop which had a race team club, and in 1990, we did our first mountain bike race together at Hurd State Park, a couple towns south of ours. There was no junior category, so we joined the senior beginners, and while I'd edged closer to Steve's speed, he was still faster. At least he was until he crashed on a little bridge at the lowest point of our single lap. Somehow I passed him and stayed in front. The next year there was a junior category at that race, and a new New England Series, which I first learned of that morning, and was leading that evening after winning my first race.
If I hadn't met Steve and his T-shirt, would I have found my way to my eventual career? Maybe, I don't know, but gosh, I sure am happy to see the sport far more accessible these days. I'm planning to head back to Earl's again this evening to join the Trail Blasters, including the third grader I've been helping with some tutoring in math. Funny, in my first stint of tutoring years ago, my start pupil was also a mountain biker. When on our first inquiry call, I explained to his mom that I had a flexible schedule for meeting because my primary job was racing a mountain bike. She replied, yes, they knew, had seen me race, and she'd explained my visit would be an hour of math, not mountain biking! Jeff became a pretty good racer on his own. Also, his algebra grade went from a D to an A, so I'll call that a win all round!
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