"Up up up!" How bikes keep me grounded in the good.

I learned to bike as a kid in Chicago. My mom took the training wheels off my Toys ‘R Us kiddo rig, gave me a push, and ran me right into a parked car.

“Up up up!” she cajoled. And for some reason, I listened: I got back up and on, and kept pedaling. And pedaling. And soon, what started as a means of escaping my younger sister on trips around the block, turned into commuting to summer gigs in high school and up the cemetery hill to class at my college in Portland, OR.

And then, bikes accidentally became my career. It started when the ‘08 recession yanked any and every editorial job right out of my reach after graduating. While I waited for things to stabilize enough that I could figure out what to be when I grew up, I worked as a tour guide for a cycling operator who promised to show me the world by two wheels in the meantime.

It continued as I met new coworkers (who have since turned into lifelong friends) who introduced me to singletrack, gravel, downhill, and freeride. My bike community widened and my relationships therein deepened. I took new jobs, but they all somehow had something to do with biking, and they all continued to introduce me to more wildly wonderful folks.

Folks brave enough to “simply” be themselves when nothing feels simple about their existence. Folks who have faced absolute catastrophe and found ways to flow through. Folks who call you in instead of out. Folks who love kindly even when hate gets mean. Folks who prove that bikes have the capacity to be a powerful tool for creating change, probably because they are also a powerful tool for fostering joy.

Now, I write for Bike Mag (!), and the crank arm in my personal narrative has come full circle: I still haven’t sorted out what I want to be when I grow up, and, in fact, bikes may have ruined me into knowing now that I don’t want to. But I have found my way (on a rather circuitous ramble without any real trail map) back to this field full of stories to tell that I had all but written off, pun intended, for good.

My mom passed away ten years ago now, so I don’t get to show her this new trick I’ve learned called being fully employed and as a writer no less! And I’ve certainly had my fair share of other scrapes, bumps, bruises, and breaks of bones and hearts alike along the way. (They pile up with an all-too-ordinary frequency, don't they?) But, thanks to bikes, I have found a community that has shown me the potency of play as an antidote to what ails me.

The brilliant adrienne maree brown talks a lot about this in her work on Pleasure Activism . As she puts it, when we are happy, we are good for the world. Well,  nothing keeps me more joyful than bikes. She also reminds us that if we are to create the sort of world we want to live in, we have to be able to imagine it. Bikes, more than anything, keep me curious, creative and eager to wonder what’s possible next.

“Up up up!” It’s a cheer, an encouragement, a motivation, a fucking Hail Mary. It implies support and validation, as much as it asks for improvement, for a surpassing of personal limitations. And, in all those ways, my bike community has become my literal and figurative “Up up up!” - on and off the saddle, and I could not be more grateful.