A Bike Ride At Last!

Aaaaaaat laaaaaast! A bike ride day haaaas come alooong....

Starting this weekend, the weather in Jackson Hole suddenly realized it was, you know, almost April, and warmed the hell up. As you'll see in the picture, that doesn't mean all the snow magically disappeared. That stuff's been building since October. But on pavement, it's mostly dry and snow-free.

I had a spare few hours Saturday afternoon, so I decided with the day looking so gorgeous, it was high time Little Red and I took a spin. So we did, dangit.

The trails (and in fact, most of the land in general) in the Bridger-Teton National Forest is still covered in snow and closed for wildlife-related reasons. However, I didn't mind that too much, since I had no idea whether skiing on the weekends would do much for keeping my legs in mountain bike shape. Instead, I took a few laps of the bike paths in and around Jackson. I've written them up before - I went from the Garamon Trail to Highway 22 and out to the Bird on Highway 89 - but after the winter they felt brand new.

Several months outside in the cold hasn't hurt Little Red at all,

thank God, which meant I could keep going without waiting until I had the funds for a spring tune-up.

My poor legs - and more notably, my poor ass - were a little less ready to go. The good news was that I took a few hills that frustrated me pretty good when I first bought Little Red with no need to stop and walk the bike. The bad news was that apparently ski runs aren't the best ever preparation for two hours of the pedaling motion. My lower body in general was less than pleased by the time I packed it in.

At least even the tougher mountain bikers among my friends talk about "getting the legs back" during the summer, so I can be like the cool kids if it comes up.

And I would put up with an awful lot of muscular complaining just to be outside in the sunshine again. Even before the trees get their leaves back and things start blooming, there really aren't too many places a pretty as Jackson Hole. If nothing else, the random reminders that hey - there are Tetons in these here parts - would be reason enough to venture out and get back in summer shape.

Ladybiking Love: Places With Racial Diversity Edition

Yes, yes, I realize that it's officially no longer Women's History Month, but I found the subject for this post while it still was. 

 As such, I hereby retire from women's history as it relates to bikes with this post about women's present as it relates to bikes. Not sure if I'll entirely surrender my feminist soapbox, but I promise it's in at least temporary storage.

 As I noted in one of my previous posts, biking is slowly moving away from its 1980s and 1990s past as a white guy thing. My last post focused largely on the gender switch, but Veronica O. Davis, a woman recently interviewed in Bicycling Magazine, is focusing on both gender and race with her D.C.-based group, Black Women Bike D.C.

Photo of Black Women Bike D.C. circa August 2012. Find the original on veronicao.com

One thing she said in the interview linked above really struck me, especially after noting the way people can be hesitant to enter a sport where no one seems to look like you.

"Everyone comes for different reasons, and it’s about something for everyone, and making people feel comfortable. So if someone says I only want to go to the end of my block, that’s all right, we’re going to celebrate you. If you said I’ll do a century, guess what, we’re going to celebrate you too. A woman in our group, she’s biking around Japan right now—we’re celebrating her. It’s really just about celebrating people getting on a bike."

Yes, that does seem like a lot of celebrating and perhaps an overly saccaharine women's daytime television vein of discussion. But then she goes on to say this:

"A bike is always there. There’s a sense of freedom—I’m not confined to a specific route. If I want to stop and smell the trees I can stop and smell the trees. If I want to go fast, I can go fast. So it’s about empowering women to have that sense of freedom and not being stuck on someone else’s schedule or agenda"

It's definitely easy to forget in Jackson Hole that it can be really limiting to consider white skin the default condition for people as a whole - partly because this is about as white a community as I've ever known. Think about it - if I describe to you "a person doing something," what color is the person you're picturing? If you're on a marketing team, a planning board, a bike shop staff, you can end up leaving a lot of people out of the world you're planning for that way.

If everyone can't look at biking and see enough people like them doing it to feel like it's totally normal, that's a problem. That's kind of why bikes were such a big deal for women in general, and why they're still a big deal for pretty much everyone who isn't a white guy. The more parts of life where you don't see a wide variety of people participating, the easier it is to see all but the most common participants as "extra," or "peripheral" instead of, you know, "people." Biking is awesome, and it shows everyone that all the things it represents - physical fitness, green transportation, looking kinda goofy in spandex - reach a wider community than you might think.

Major kudos to Ms Davis for showing black women that a bike doesn't know what color you are - if you can make the thing move, you can have the same freedom she does, or that I do. It's really great, and all anyone has to do to figure that out is find a way to feel comfortable trying it.

That being said, bikes may not know what color you are, but their riders sure do. If your biking community is only full of people who look like you and ride like you, maybe you need to look around your whole community and see who isn't riding, and think about why. Because I guaran-damn-tee you, biking isn't mostly done by white people because white people are just more naturally gifted at it than everyone else. Men don't still have a slim majority of bikers because women just don't like bikes. If either of those is your hypothesis, you need a new one, stat.