Sherman Davis, 46, has come a long way since New Year’s 2017 when he resolved to drink nothing but water.
That decision led him and his wife, Angela, to stop eating out and to start walking more often. Now, they’re each about 60 pounds lighter and planning to do a sprint triathlon — a race with a run, swim and bicycle ride — next year. But there was a problem.
“We’ve never rode bikes other than as kids,” Davis said. Even when they did ride, it wasn’t to train for a triathlon.
Then they discovered the Vancouver Bicycle Club and its program, Road Cycling 101: Stress-free Skills & Safety Series, offering a number of rides designed for people just starting out.
Whoever coined the phrase “it’s like riding a bike” to reference a skill that is never lost once learned, probably didn’t anticipate bikes to evolve as dramatically as they have in recent years. More than just knowing how to balance, steer and stop, cyclists now have to weigh the merits of cadence, the risks of cross-chaining or riding clipless versus flat pedals.
Yet for people wanting to get into cycling as a new hobby or a new means of transportation, those are considerations that can be pretty daunting to tackle alone.
Road Cycling 101 helps guide people through those challenges. It’s a series of rides aimed at helping novice adults improve their street cycling skills and confidence by riding slowly in a group setting with experienced coaches.
The program aims to meet people where they’re at and help them get to where they want to be — whether it’s riding in a triathlon or biking while running errands around town. Each ride educates participants on a host of biking issues from helmet fit, the rules of the road, group ride etiquette and more. The rides are free and may be attended on a drop-in basis. All that’s required is a helmet and a bike.
So far, each ride has attracted some retirees, but mostly adults — middle-aged and older –who are getting into a new hobby and trying to meet some new people along the way.
The Davises are the kind of people that club member and Cycling 101 organizer Jan Verrinder anticipated when she revived the club’s introductory rides. After mulling over the rides for a long time, it was a phone call from a beginner to the club that inspired her to finally do it.
“By and large — some are retired — but most of these people are coming after a full day of work and they’re coming to do something most of them say they were fairly intimidated to do — and they’re overcoming that. And I’m always thrilled to see a real life human being overcoming (a challenge),” Verrinder said. It’s like reading a good book of someone overcoming something.”
The rides start at 5:30 p.m. on Mondays in the McLoughlin Middle School parking lot. After a quick introduction and skills review, the group rides anywhere from 5 to 10 miles at a pace between 8 and 12 mph through Vancouver’s flatter neighborhoods.
Carol Evans said that’s what she was looking for after taking a fairly long hiatus from riding. She hadn’t ridden her bike in close to three years after having a substantial shoulder surgery, but she wanted to get back into exercising without having to feel like she was training for a race.
“I just thought, in this class, I’m going to find what I was looking for: like-minded people that didn’t necessarily want to go ride 50 miles in three hours or two hours, but just wanted to go out and enjoy riding,” she said. So far, that’s exactly what’s she’s discovered, plus she feels like she can give back a little by working with riders with less experience.
Although she’s comfortable enough to join the club on longer rides, she continues to go back for the Monday rides because of the people she meets. But to make things a little more interesting, she rides to and from McLoughlin to her home in east Camas.
Evans and the Davises all said the class and other rides with the club have taught them how to handle themselves on the roadway, when to burn energy and when to conserve it and how to make the best use of their bikes’ gearing.
“One of the impressive things with the club that blew me away is I’d ride with someone who’s 72 years old and they were way better than I was,” Sherman Davis said. “Then you’d get someone who’s a little heavier than I am and she’d outpace me. It’d tell me there’s skill sets there. They’d make me look like I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Verrinder anticipated running Road Cycling 101 would be more of a labor than a love, but thus far the opposite has proven true; watching people get so excited about learning to ride is a fun thing to see. But in future rides, she hopes to meet more people who want to embrace bikes as a way to get around rather than just a way to stay out of the gym.
“For some reason, it doesn’t seem to occur to people to take the bike to the grocery store rather than the car,” she said. “I’m hoping to teach people it’s so darn easy to make a doctor’s appointment or a meeting on a bike.”
