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FACTOR
Perseverance and a female perspective uncovers the path of enlightenment BY KIM CROSS
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Lisa Lieb. Durango, Colorado. Photo Kevin Lange
LAST YEAR BROUGHT A PIVOTAL MOMENT-in my mountain-biking career. It wasn’t winning a race, or learning to wheelie, or finally conquering my crash-induced fear of laying down the bike in a corner, or starting my own womens’ clinics. All those moments were great, but this was much bigger: I taught my mother how to mountain bike. “I love it,” she told me as she bought her first bike, a high-end full-suspension beauty with respectable components. “I feel like a whole new world has opened up.” Mom is 71. This may be my greatest feat on two wheels. Because Mom’s previous bike was a beach cruiser with a basket for her miniature Yorkie. Because when you’ve been schooled in the University of Hard Rocks—school colors: black and blue—the lessons you’ve learned are the last things you’d want to inflict on your mother. That is, if you love her. If you’re going to be a mountain biker, scars, broken bones and weeping wounds are just part
Previous spread: Darcy Turenne, Mike Hopkins. Whistler, British Columbia. Photo: Jordan Manley Candace Shadley. Whistler, British Columbia. Photo: Anne Keller
of the deal, right? That’s what I believed, accepted as fact. Until last year, when I learned, through a series of epiphanies, that it doesn’t have to be so. There is a gentler way. And it involves not learning from a dude.
YOUR WOMAN DOESN’T NEED MORE SCARS THAN YOU More than a decade ago, I entered the world of mountain biking the way many women do—on the wheel of a guy. The date who is now my husband, nicknamed ‘Fast Eddie’ by the pals who kill themselves trying to hold his wheel, said the thing that so many women hear before their first mountain bike ride: “You’re athletic. You’ll be fine. Just follow me.” I told him that I thought my tire was flat, because the bike felt kind of squishy. “Those are shocks,” he said. Maybe five rides later, on a borrowed bike, I entered a 24-hour race—that I had no business doing—to impress my new boyfriend, the race director. It ended badly, yet sweetly, in the 11th hour, with 21 stitches, a drainage tube in my elbow and Fast Eddie’s first “I love you,” whispered over a satellitephone call between Mount Tamalpais and the Marin County Hospital emergency room. A plastic surgeon was called in to pick gravel out of flesh that would never again have full sensation, and I knew that if I survived another date with this guy, at least I could one-up him with a gnarlier scar. The Epic Crash should have been an obvious foreshadowing. And yet, within my next 10 rides, I was still surprised to find myself bleeding on Moab’s Slickrock Trail, in shiny new clipless pedals— Eddie’s gift for the occasion. The blood? From repeated cuts on my right calf where—Insult, meet Injury—the chainring sliced into it every time I forgot to unclip. It took two whole hours to ride the
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1.4-mile practice loop, because I invested considerable time in throwing my bike down on calcified dunes, stomping off in tears and saying very unladylike things. It was two full years before I went on a ride on which I didn’t bleed or cry. I accepted, grudgingly, the fear, the injury, the utter trauma of it all, as the nature of the sport. No pain, no elevation gain. For the record, I am no shrinking violet. I have competed in 10 sports, nationally in four. I have endured thousands of spectacular crashes learning how to land a flip on a water ski. But the athletic abilities that made me a natural at other sports seemed absolutely useless in this one. Because more than my lack of technical skills, my biggest problems were all in my head. After five or six years of chasing Fast Eddie—whose confidence in my abilities grossly exceeded them—I acquired enough skill to ride alone without feeling like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I thought I had arrived.
THE SKILL SHE NEEDS MOST IS CONFIDENCE Fast-forward to Waco, Texas, more than a decade after the Epic Crash. I am here getting schooled by Shonny Vanlandingham in a big grassy field. One of the winningest racers—male or female—in the history of mountain biking is explaining to me and a few dozen chamois-clad ladies the first drill. It’s a race. Our starting line is marked by a giant oak, and when Shonny gives the signal, we clip into our pedals and take off—as slowly as we can. Last one to cross the finish line wins. One dab and you’re out. Laughter ensues, a few of us topple, and the winner, braking and balancing over wagging handlebars, is crowned. The ice is broken, our muscles are warm, and we’ve just received
a primer on track stands. This is all part of Ride Cameron Park, a free women’s clinic started by former cross-country pro Kim Jennings. We’re a motley crew—from newbies in running shoes to adventure racers in shredded Lycra—but we have one thing in common: We’re chicks. We learn to hop logs, duck under a limbo, ride a small teeter-totter and slalom through cones—all in the unintimidating environment of a big, soft, grassy field. Our instructors coach us with gentle feedback. Shonny explains the subtleties of a pedal-induced wheelie, and a skill that I didn’t even know existed—the frontwheel lift—is now within reach. We break for lunch, and then hit the trails. After a morning of cornering around cones in the grass, I finally trust the bike enough to lay it on edge in an off-camber turn, something I have not had the courage to do since I slid out on a high-speed descent so many years ago. bikemag.com
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That’s when it hits me: Women think—and ride—differently from men. Things like choosing a line, using speed to clear an obstacle and lifting the front wheel are so intuitive to Fast Eddie that it never occurred to him to explain them to me. My tendency to overanalyze obstacles and my caution in attacking them are the very things that got me hurt. What’s more, following the wheel of a female pro over logs and wheel-biting rock gardens makes me think, “If she can do it, maybe I can too.”
WHAT WORKS FOR YOU DOESN’T NECESSARILY WORK FOR HER The drills-in-a-field model is not new. The Trek Dirt Series has been doing women’s clinics on the West Coast for 12 years, with more than 7,500 participants. This year’s roster shows 18 clinics in seven U.S. states and Canadian provinces. Founder Candace Shadley has created a brilliant empire out of common sense: teaching basic skills in a beginner-friendly environment. “It’s a low-risk, high-reward scenario,” Shadley says. “I can teach someone in one hour a skill that took me a whole season to learn.” This is a forehead-smacking revelation to me, a serious departure from the way I learned, killing myself to keep up with Fast Eddie. I can only imagine the epidermis I might have saved by learning on grass, not slickrock. He made the classic mistake of the Well-Meaning Dude (WMD): taking for granted the skills he learned decades ago, not realizing that his slickrock dream ride would become my recurring red-hued nightmare. “Guys can overestimate the skill set, and how fun something is,” says five-time national crosscountry champion Georgia Gould. When she was learning, her boyfriend would wait for her at the top of a hill and holler things meant to be helpful—usually with opposite effect. She’s now a member of the LUNA Pro Mountain Bike Team and was selected for the U.S. Olympic mountain-bike team headed to London, but she still walks technical spots on her first lap of a pre-ride. “Guys will say, ‘If you’re not crashing, you’re not getting faster.’ That’s such bullshit.” Consider the front-wheel lift. This is a move so intuitive for most men that it never occurs to them to explain it to the women they are earnestly trying to teach. That is, until those women crash on a log, stomp off in blood and tears, and swear never again to get on a mountain bike. Or if they do, they have learned not to trust him when he says, “Honey, you can do this. Just ride over it. It’s easy.” A front-wheel lift is as natural to most women as salsa dancing is to most men. “Ten years ago, when I started coaching, I coached five pro women. Not one of them knew how to do a front-wheel lift,” says highly decorated downhiller Leigh Donovan. “Men can muscle through it. Women don’t have that advantage.” Even guys who know how to break it down often miss crucial differences between the sexes: strength and center of gravity. Men take their upper-body mass for granted; they use it to load and rebound the shock or muscle up the wheel—or both. Women carry their strength and center of gravity farther south—in our legs and hips. The pedal-induced wheelie works better for us, because it doesn’t take a lick of upper-body strength. But that takes technique and leverage that isn’t intuitive, plus a level of finesse that plenty of guys get by without, or struggle to articulate. “I’m married to one of the best downhillers in the world, and he doesn’t teach me shit,” says instructor Lindsey Voreis, of husband Kirt. “Guys use brute strength. For women, that doesn’t work. Women use finesse.”
YOU SOMETIMES MAKE HER NERVOUS
Christine Dern. Alta, Utah. Photo: Steve Lloyd
“Who wants to learn how to fall off her bike?” an instructor asks a group of beginner women at Ray’s Indoor Mountain-Bike Park in Milwaukee. It’s Ray’s annual Women’s Weekend, held in an indoor wonderland that looks like an MC Escher sketch of a Dr. Seuss world. As the women look on nervously, the instructor pedals into a horseshoe-shaped crash pad, brakes and topples gracefully over to the side. Everyone laughs. The air relaxes. This is a key skill that some clinics overlook—falling. In every sport, the pivotal skill that marks the threshold between good and great, between fear and confidence, is the ability to fall without getting hurt. Before you learn how, falling is terrifying. Our fear of it stiffens the upper body, which makes the handlebars wag, which leads to crashes and other nasty things. It is also something that most women would not try in front of a group of anyone but other women. Which is why, for one glorious day a year, Ray’s is a no-man land. On this day, Ray Petro, the founder of the country’s first indoor mountain-bike park, kicks out all the men. He flies in female pros and treats his lady patrons to the equivalent of a spa day for those of us who prefer pedals to pedicures: free food, great swag and a testosterone-free environment conducive to the learning of gnarly skills. Admission is free, lowering the barriers of entry to a no-excuses level. I’ve never seen so many fat-tire femmes in one place. They’re riding teeter-totters and skinnies with the unflappable confidence that comes either with skills or body armor. They’re lapping a pump track bikemag.com
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in a blur of ponytails. And they’re catching serious air on jumps bigger than an SUV. Ray could probably charge admission for guys to come and watch, but spends all day turning them away. At the center of it all is downhill goddess Leigh Donovan, the ringleader. A shero with nine U.S. National Mountain Bike Championships, a World Cup win, a World Championship and a spot on the pages of the 1998 Sports Illustrated ‘Swimsuit Issue’, Leigh is that mystical blend of serious and sexy. She is also living proof that being one fast mother is not mutually exclusive with being a good mother. Her daughter Grace, who can ride a skinny at 6 years of age, has come along from California with her mom and dad. Leigh is part of a cadre of female pros who love helping amateur women progress in a maledominated sport. Most of them cut their teeth riding and racing with men. That taught them to be fast, tough and smart. They also discovered, along the way, a few things that they didn’t learn from the guys. “It’s different because women understand the fear-factor, the intimidation, the weaknesses,” Leigh says. But what we lack in strength, we make up for with technique and the ability to communicate the subtle nuances of a complex movement. I discover this on my quest for not-so-big air. After a dozen attempts at the rhythm jump line, I’m still losing my pedals and on the fine line between flying and falling with style. So as I stalk Tammy Donahugh, the raven-haired angel of freeride, I ask her, with undisguised desperation, to teach me how to stick to these pesky flats. She explains it’s not about sticking to the pedals, or clawing the bike off the ground, which is how my guy friends described it to me. “It’s about compressing the bike so that it floats up beneath you.” In other words, it’s about pushing, not pulling. And that ‘clawing’ bit I’ve been obsessing about? “It’s the position your feet naturally take when you jump—off the floor, or on a bike,” Tammy says. It’s so counter intuitively brilliant, yet so simple, that my head nearly explodes. I try it, and the pedals rise under my feet. It doesn’t feel as effortless as the pros make it look, but I feel a lot less like I’m wrestling a bike off the ground and more like I’m actually jumping. Now in its 6th year at Ray’s Cleveland park, the Women’s Weekend was such a hit that Ray brought it to the newer Milwaukee park last year. And if this year’s attendance is any indication—155 women from 12 states, double that of last year—it’s clearly addressing a need. Before the day ends, I have summoned the courage—along with a can of Bud—to huck myself into the foam pit. I catch two, maybe three feet of air. It’s well shy of ‘rad’ but I will never forget that moment, suspended between ramp and pit. And I’m thinking the same thing women around me keep saying: “If guys had been here, I never would have tried that.”
Katrina Strand. Pemberton, British Columbia. Photo: Reuben Krabbe
YOUR NAME ISN’T SHAUMS The first time I meet master coach Shaums March, I’m in a compromising position. I look like a bear in a circus trick, my back wheel balanced on a wheel-high box, my front wheel down on the grass. Steadied by a spotter on either side, I’ve got my butt in the air, hanging so far off the back that my saddle is up in my abs. It ain’t pretty, but this is my next big revelation. “This is how much your bike can move beneath you,” says Shaums, the guy on my right. A light goes on. Only when posing as a stinkbug on wheels do I finally grasp the concept of bike-body separation. It’s like that old fortune-cookie proverb: Tell me, I forget; show me, I remember; involve me, I understand. March is evidence that there is a place for men—certain men, of a rare and special breed—at a women’s clinic. A former gravity pro with two UCI Master’s world titles to his name, he has serious skills. But more importantly in this estrogen-rich environment, he has an endearing blend of confidence and charm, and an acute ability to stay on the right side of the line between encouraging and patronizing. He can tell us what we’re doing wrong without pissing us off. March is the head coach here at the Midwest Women’s Mountain Bike Clinic, an annual event that has drawn hundreds of women from 20 states. I’m here as a volunteer, but mostly to learn from Tania Juillerat, an obsessively organized event director who runs first-class clinics that everyone raves about. She magnanimously allowed me to come and study her clinic as a model for my own.
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A mother of two, Tania started the event in 2005 after breaking her finger and busting her knee on her very first mountain bike ride. After more semitraumatic rides with boys, she heard about a clinic taught by the Dirty Divas, a women’s cycling group in Cincinnati. “I learned more in one day of riding than I had in all of my rides with the guys, combined.” Her event has evolved through the years into a structured multi-day event with separate clinics for women, men and kids, taught exclusively by graduates of the International Mountain Bike Instructor Certification (IMIC) program, a coaching methodology developed by March. When I cold-called Tania a few months before starting my own clinic, she generously schooled me on everything from event insurance to instructorto-student ratios. Then she let me come and play understudy at her clinic. “I know you’re here to steal all my secrets,” she said with a wink and a rib-jab. I nodded. “I only steal from the best.” And steal I did: From the structured itinerary to her clever details, I shamelessly modeled my future clinic after hers, forever grateful that she sees imitation as the truest form of flattery. The best thing I stole, though, was Shaums March— who would later certify my own team of instructors.
MOJO IS INFECTIOUS It’s a steamy summer day in Oak Mountain State Park, a singletrack haven near Birmingham, Alabama, and Marla Streb is demonstrating a nose wheelie before a wide-eyed crowd of Dixie chicks. A former U.S. National Downhill Champion and X-Games winner, Marla may now be a mother of two, but she’s still a card-carrying badass. Her Facebook page has a pic ture of her riding a wheelie in the jungle of Costa Rica—barefoot and nine-months pregnant. Marla’s here to lead our two-day women’s mountain-bike camp, which has drawn from the woodwork of eight neighboring states 60 women, ages 7 to 70. Some are veteran cross-country racers. Others don’t own a bike. None have ever met the likes of Marla, for whom shattering gender stereotypes comes as naturally as bombing down teeth-rattling trails at speeds only known by the fearless and the foolish. She would probably intimidate the hell out of us if it weren’t for her mellow disposition and irreverent humor. A cloud of collective mojo brews like the perfect storm. The beginners are evolving from scared to comfortable. The intermediates are graduating to confident. And the skilled, who probably wondered if they’d learn anything at all, are hanging on Marla’s every word. “Guys only explain how,” Marla says. “Women really like to know why. I try to show how and why.” What we take away from the clinic goes far beyond skills. Sure, we learn to change tires, diagnose a concussion, irrigate a wound with a hydration pack, and convert a bike with a broken derailleur into a singlespeed. More significantly, we effectively step away from our kids and jobs and bills and re-
Katie Holden. Whistler, British Columbia. Photo: John Wellburn
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awaken the girl inside. We drink and laugh and dance in the rain and swing from the rafters like primates. One beginner has so much fun learning to jump that she doesn’t notice, until a week later, that she happened to break her arm. The women naturally coalesce into groups of similar riding ability and sensibility. True friendships form. In some, there is a subtle yet monumental shift. A door opens. A world they could not relate to before is suddenly theirs to claim. They start thinking of themselves as ‘real’ mountain bikers. Their lives are forever changed. And one of them is my mother.
IF SHE’S HAPPY, YOU’RE HAPPY The first time I met my friend Kate on the trail with her boyfriend, Scott, I started planning an intervention. She had that glassy-eyed stare I knew too well, and ripening bruises overlapping the scrapes and cuts that covered her limbs. She’d been riding a few months, and was only slightly newer than Scott, who compensated for his lack of experience with unbridled enthusiasm. In a moment of excitement that he mistook for a good idea, Scott introduced Kate to Rattlesnake Ridge, an intermediate trail she had never ridden. In her brand-new clipless pedals. In the dark. On her very first night ride. After repeated falls on rocks she couldn’t see and some crying and cussing and fighting and blaming, they hiked their bikes out. “I almost changed my Facebook relationship status to ‘It’s complicated,’” Kate says. For a lot of people, that would be all she wrote. But Kate gave it one more try. She signed up for our clinic, realized her attempts at cornering were more akin to track stands, and demoed a bike that improved her riding instantly. A few months later, I ran into her on Rattesnake Ridge, where she now leads beginners, saving them from the trauma she had experienced. She and Scott sometimes ride together, but when they don’t, Kate no longer resents his rides, because she has her own. She got her kids on bikes, and that ribbon of singletrack became her family’s common ground. Now Kate and Scott are married, riding happily ever after. As much as I preach the gospel of teaching women gently, I’ve committed nearly every sin of which I’ve just accused men. As my confidence, skills and experience increased, I forgot, just a little—but dangerously enough—what it was like to be a scared beginner. And that played a part in getting my mother-in-law seriously hurt. It happened on a family trip to Moab. More than a decade after Fast Eddie scarred me for life on the Slickrock Trail, we knew better than to start Sue out there. Sue is a spinning instructor, ultramarathoner, triathlete and adventure racer whose fitness is matched by her unfailingly sunny personality. Mountain biking is not in her repertoire. Her husband, Fast Eddie Sr., is a retired FBI SWAT team leader who has tackled 36-hour adventure races
Photo: Ryan Creary
Photo: Devon Balet
with his fellow tough-guy pals. The Eddies and I asked the Moab bike shops to point us toward a ‘beginner slickrock trail’ where we could take Sue for a three-mile test-ride that would help us determine whether she could handle The Slickrock trail. Sue told us how nervous she was about this ride. But the Eddies and I ribbed her about sandbagging, and reassured her: “You’re athletic. You’ll be fine. Just follow us.” Within a mile into the trail—which was not by any stretch beginner-friendly—we heard a nauseating crunch behind us. I turned around and saw Sue facedown on the slickrock. When she got up, she was holding her chin in her hands as blood streamed down her elbows. “I think I broke my jaw,” she said through clenched teeth, tearless and blameless and matter-of-fact. Sue’s slickrock facial broke her jaw in three places. The doctors wired it shut for six long weeks, during which she drank pureed chicken breasts and baked potatoes through a straw, and joked about her ‘crash’ diet. Not once did she ever lay blame on us, but I felt the weight of responsibility. So when my own mother, at 70, discovered a passion for mountain biking, I vowed never to push her out of her comfort zone. Instead, she rode of her own accord far beyond where I would have taken her. Riding barely a year, she hops logs and tackles technical obstacles that took me years to ride without fear. To meet other riders in her town, she co-founded a group called Trail Bike Girls. On a sandy tangle of singletrack near her home in northwest Florida, she leads beginner women several times a week, patiently waiting for them to catch up. For the first time in her life, Mom has found herself in the position of a true leader. I show her off as my greatest success, and women far more timid see her and start to question their own excuses. She is proof that it’s never too late to learn. For sale: Women’s beach cruiser, gently used, with basket and bell. Yorkie not included.
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