Here Susan and I are working on fixing knee and elbow pads for our beginning riding students. Part of teaching riding is maintaining the fleet of bicycles as well as the equipment. Luckily, we work well together and have some fun in the process.
One of the things I do is teach beginners to ride bicycles. The students are mostly adults who, for a variety of reasons, never learned to ride a bicycle. I work with a Susan who has taught over 2000 people over the course of twenty years. It is amazing and humbling work in many ways.
It has made me think about riding differently in that I have had to articulate what, at this point in my life, comes naturally. It is a complex maneuver to start riding a bicycle from a stopped position. Not only do you have to push a pedal down but you have to kick off with the other foot and hold the handle bars steady. This is not an easy task for a new learner, especially if it is an uphill start.
Probably my most important task in teaching a new bicycle rider is to encourage and coach. Usually, there are reasons why an adult didn’t learn and often this is accompanied by fear. So, I do a lot of cheering and singing and yelling, “way to go!” I also teach students how to balance on a bicycle, use their pedals, change gears, stand up, look around, remove one hand from the bars, and hold their line.
I do more advanced teaching of pace-line skills with a women’s ride I help lead, but it is the beginners who are the most rewarding. Often they feel like learning to ride changes their life. They feel accomplished and many times they have overcome fear and embarrassment to do so. I am blessed to be able to share this process with them.
