Ways to get your girlfriend riding a bike?

The title should actually be, ways to ensure that your girlfriend will never ever ever get on a bike ever again. The following is from personal first hand experience, both from what I've seen and what I've heard, what's been said to me and what's been said to others. It is not a criticism - think of it instead as a little bit of insight into the way the female mind works. Well, actually, it's the way my mind works, but I know from speaking to at least one other bike riding of the female shape that the below holds true for them too. And so, with an attempt at minimal ranting and irritation, here follows some bits of advice:

• I don't care about the details of what I am riding. Your girlfriend may be different and may be naturally mechanically minded. I am not. Lots of other women are not. LBS's are full, I suspect, of bikes belonging to similar people to me. I am aware of how to maintain my bike. I am smart enough to tell you what is wrong with my bike and the symptoms of the wrongness. I am not interested enough in cogs, cassettes and allan keys to ascertain the cause of the problem. I will nod nicely when you tell me said cause, but it will be more in the vein of 'thank god someone in this household knows what they're doing' rather than 'cool, next time I can fix it myself'. I will fight over constructing flat packed furniture, I assert my right to have my own screwdriver which you will never touch, but bikes are different and complicated and I just can't get my head around them. Mea culpa.
• My bike is my bike. Deriding my choice of decals, colour schemes or the hours agonising over which colour of bottle holder will irritate me. Riding a bike is by necessity a muddy/dusty and dirty uncolourful experience some days. Let me have some small joy in customising my bike so it's mine.
• If you actually get a girl to put her leg over a saddle, choose the bike attached to that saddle with care. Taking her to a trail centre and hiring an already ridden to death with no care at all mountain bike which is probably the wrong size and shape and which no amount of tweaking is going to fix is not going to help. She will come out of the experience with a bad back, cramping feet and excessive irritation at the fact that you seem to control your beautifully set up bike effortlessly, whilst she has been wrestling with a pig for the last 2 hours. If you can, borrow another girls bike. Some of us are nice like that. Failing that, ask a local bike shop if you can demo a nice bike - as a result of their care and attention in a few days time she might well be returning to buy that demo bike from them and you get a girlfriend/wife who's at least had a taste of what riding a properly set up bike is going to be like.
• Don't fuss. Stop it. She might be a little nervous (I actually think probably quite a lot nervous) as she is stepping into your territory. Your world. You are comfortable in it, with its politics,  community, terminology and etiquette. She is not. Don't overwhelm her with it all at once. Tell her the basics, practice standing up on the pedals in the car park, explain feathering brakes, get her to go around and around and around in circles switching up and down gears until she is comfy with what lever causes which effect. Take the time in the car park to familiarise and you wont be returning to that same car park with a limping swearing girlfriend vowing never to get on a stupid  bike ever again.
• Be patient. Endlessly. I really do mean this. This isn't a lifelong request, you're allowed to lose your rag at us 4 rides in when we accidentally switch up a gear before a steep incline and fall sideways. That's okay. It is absolutely not okay on our first ride when we are focusing on 17 different things and had a mild flap and got it wrong. Pick us up, dust us down, wrap any wounds gently, give hugs, don't make a fuss and walk us to the top of the incline and pack us off again. Oh, and when we do it right next time, mark it. Note it and celebrate it. It's small fry when you're used to ripping around berms at 15mph, it's not small fry to us.
• We didn't spend childhoods on Grifters, nine times out of ten. Nor are we familiar with bikes with pegs sticking out of the back wheel. It's not as natural as breathing to us and we don't have the background you do. Mention it more than 5 times on the first ride out and we're going to start muttering under our breathes about 'we all have to start somewhere'. We do. Have to start somewhere. This is the start, don't make it the end with careless chatter which might seem innocuous to you but will come across as a bit soul destroying for the person next to you trying their damned hardest to keep up with your perfectly tones calves.
• Don't leap in head first. Red routes, if you've only just got on a bike for the first time in 10-15 years are not the best introduction to bike handling in a safe and comfortable environment. Take the hit and ride a Green. Maybe even a Blue if fitness isn't an issue. Scotlands Blue routes are about the best in the country for introducing someone to the joys of mountain biking without terrifying them out of their tiny little minds. It's about the speed of incoming obstacles, it's about putting someone off with information overload, it's about putting someone off by sending them over the handlbars when they panic on their first berm. Your first ride stays with you for a long time if you fall in love with mountain biking, it needs to be memorable for all the right reasons and not the wrong ones.
• Leave your mates at home. No, seriously. You might not know you're doing that competitive thing, racing each other, firing off into the distance, chatting about places your girlfriend didn't go with you to or stag nights or whatever. But you are. Trust me, you are. Leave them at home, and turn your first ride out with your girlfriend into something special. Something memorable. Point out the smell of the pine needles baking in the sun. Point out the bird calls, and the sound as a powerful bird flaps its winds on takeoff. If it's the right thing to do, take a camera or binoculars. Keep an eye out for squirrels, take time out on a quiet bit of the trail and get her to close her eyes and tell you what she hears. Find the things which will bring her back, whether it's the lack of mobile phone signal, the camraderie, the friendliness, the views or the silence. Biking is not all about aggression, sometimes it's about the space inbetween.
• Treat the obstacles as problem solving. Ask her to solve it. Find a big berm, get her to watch you ride it. Do it again and ask her what she's noticed you're doing. Then explain the technique in detal, catching anything she's missed, and ride it again. Then ask her to ride it. Then again. And again. Repetition leads to familiarity and takes the sting out of the unknown. Don't be patronising about it, don't make her feel like you're doing her a favour, instead you're communicating the skill to do something you love doing that makes you buzz and fly, passing it on to someone else who will feel exactly the same way once they've conquered it too.
• Do not make her feel like she's the B team. She's not. She's hopefully the most important person in your life and you're sharing one of the most important things you do in yours, with her. That's not B team, that's A team. Don't suggest she rides the Blue on her own while you disapear onto the Red. This is not the time for that. If you want your girlfriend to come riding with you, it's going to take time, and a weekly commitment and some effort. Suggesting she rides on her own is going to turn the whole experience into one of isolation, not teamwork. She will feel demoralised because she will feel like teaching her is too much trouble and you'd rather be off having fun blatting down the trails with your mates and that she is in the way. She wont come again, I can guarantee that.
• Send her on a skills course if she comes back to the car park with a grin on her face. In the same way you would probably not teach her to drive from never driven before to taking her test, this is the same. There are things you cannot show her, things that will be easier understood from someone who does nothing but teach people to ride all day. A specific Womans course will.....help. I don't want to go into the arguments here, but see the point above about taking her out with your mates on her first ride. It wont end well. Give her a space to learn in where she can make mistakes comfortably, where she knows she is in safe hands, where the terrain will be explained and patience will be endless. Give her the experience of riding with people of exactly the same level as her. There is absolutely nothing like it for building confidence and giving you a feeling of belonging to a group of people who love mountain biking for all the same reasons you do.

There is no guarantee with all this. You might do all these things perfectly and she still might not like getting muddy/dusty. She might not like the flies and the midges. She might not like the feeling of being utterly crap at something to start with, or the feeling of people 40 years older than her whizzing past. Only you know what's important to your other half and the best way to sell it, whether it's the peace and quiet, the problem solving, the fitness increasing, the muscle definition, the views or the wildlife. If none of that is an incentive, if none of that makes her heart sing, then nothing will make her want to get on a bike and you're on a loser. But if it works, if she catches the freedom and the flying, then you will have a companion who, possibly, will be the one dragging you out in the mud and rain with a damn big grin on her face. She might even beat you to the bottom.

Mental self

In discussions with someone a few weeks ago, who asked me to sell biking to them, I realised that things like stress relief and a sense of empowerment are not high on the list of others priorities, because they are not me, and do not have the background which I have.

Today I had a little bit of an epiphany. I am not the woman who tentatively climbed on a bike 2.5 years ago at Center Parcs. I am not even the woman I was at Christmas this year. For a start, I am finally comfortable with calling myself a woman, though I still prefer the term girl because I am not married and am not a mother and for some stupid reason those two things are closely tied. But somewhere along the way, I have grown up.

I have always been a little bit shy. Well, actually, scrap that, lets be honest here, I have been a really quite a lot shy for a very long time. I have also, mostly, been timid, never voiced opinions because I never had them because I always hovered in the middle, never spoken up when I knew absolutely something was wrong or someone had come to the wrong conclusion, and certainly never sung my own praises. I was a girl born to a man who made no secret of his wish for a boy, but I also was a girl who was rigorously and repeatedly told children should be seen and not heard.

I think I forgot somewhere that children grow up. I forgot that we are not eternally children and that at some point, some indefinable point, it is okay as a woman, as a person, as an intelligent person, to be seen and be heard. I have spent my life thus far carefully crafting the art of keeping below the parapet. I believe, quite honestly, I did a damn fine job.

What a thing to be proud of. The ability to be invisible.

So here's the thing. I ride my bike for many reasons and fitness and losing weight is perhaps the obvious one when you see me out on a trail. But you will also see a really bloody big grin. So the bit at the top of the hill when I'm panting and recovering might be a bad time, but mostly that grin is there. It comes from a lot of things. Some of these things are specific to being female, I think, though I might be wrong and if I am, please do tell me, it's important this I think if I ever come to be sitting in front of a group of teenage girls explaining how mountain biking changed my sense of self so dramatically.

Girls don't get muddy. They wear dresses and play with Barbies. This wasn't my experience but only because I had a mother who hill walked for many years and understood. For others, this is their experience. Girls don't do mechanics. Don't fettle. Don't go fast. Don't do Maths, don't do Science, don't geek......endless don'ts. If you are unfortunate, for example, to have parents who only ever focus on what it is not possible to do, it can be very difficult to understand the space where the thing is that you are allowed to do.

I'm 33. It's taken this long to find something which gives me something that you can't buy off a shelf in a neat little package of bows and pink ribbon. It's called empowerment. It's called believing in yourself. It's called self confidence, self esteem, self belief and self knowledge. Riding my bike has ramped up all those things to a level where finally I do have an opinion. because I am confident in having one. I do speak up and challenge others preconceptions and sometimes misconceptions. I sit and discuss and listen and query still, but I also form a result of all that input and am not afraid to write down the outcome, not afraid to commit myself to something any more. How on earth could you ever be afraid of something as simple as having an opinion when you're riding your bike down 1.5 feet drop offs? Perspective is a beautiful thing, and biking has given it back to me. How on earth could you ever be afraid of public speaking when you've zoomed along a track covered in roots dodging off in all directions? How can you be worried about whether you've worn the right shoes, when you've fought your way through a rainstorm and a headwind and arrived back at the car park safe and sound through nothing but sheer determination to maintain body heat?

Riding my bike has given me a reasonably safe space to play. I can push boundaries, bit by little bit and explore the edges of my fitness and skill level and with a bit of care and some nouse, never come a cropper. I can make decisions faster than I ever thought possible. I can fly, sometimes. It's just not possible to remain timid and shy and unsure of yourself after doing all those things, it really isn't.

So I think this is the point. The point where I am no longer allowed to refer to myself as shy, or timid, or lacking in self belief or confidence or knowledge. I know myself. I know who I am. I know this more surely than I have ever done and whilst things will continue to improve, I think this is the point where I draw a line under all the things I have been told  I couldn't be, but I now am.

I am becoming everything I always wanted to be but never thought I could. And biking? Biking gave me wings, and now it's time to fly. Time, perhaps, to pass it on, however that may transpire. Time to share the magic with other people, time to explain, time to be honest, time to open up a little.Time to just be me. The parapet has been firebombed, frankly, and I don't think there's any going back now.

Playing in the sand

I'm a bit of a geek. So I'm going to use a geek analogy to explain why towpaths have their place in my little biking world, and why I'll tolerate others disdain and admit to it in public.

Geeks tend to use sandpit environments to test things out. These environments can be training copies of databases used to train new users on, they can be staging platforms used to roll out a big change to some software before it goes live, they can be exact replicas of the live software, or they can be vague approximations of them. You get the idea. A safe space to rollout some complicated changes in an environment where, if something goes wrong, things can be rolled back and taken out of the system, without affecting end users who cannot afford the interuption and downtime.

Towpaths are where I learnt to do a number of things on my bike. Not falling into the canal is the obvious one. When I first started riding my bike, I was so wobbly that I couldn't look behind me without veering off in a different direction. You don't tend to need to look behind you when riding on a towpath - it's the obstacles in front of your wheel such as dog droppings and children running around randomly which are more of a danger. Not being able to look behind you on a road, to check whether a car is coming before making a right turn, is a slightly more lethal issue.

They're also where I learnt to ride my tyres down singletrack twice the width of my tyre. They're where I've set myself my own little goals, when the path has left the tarmac behind and become a mass of dried in ruts, where I've tried repeatedly to keep my tyres in the rut and not wander out of them. The penalty for wandering out of it is nothing more than a slighty back wheel skitter, on that towpath. The punishment on a log path the same width would likely be a little more severe.

I also learnt to manual and deal with small step ups. There's a motorway  bridge near the start of where we join it, with some big concrete two by fours spanning the path. There's no avoiding them. So instead of getting off and walking, I tried approaching them in different ways, with no danger of injury, testing different weight balances, testing how much downforce to create, working out how comfortable I was approaching them at slow and high speeds, and gradually getting to the point where getting over them didn't warrant a second thought. Far better to play around there, where the path widens to the allow for the motorway bridge above, then to block a red trail or a local bridleway practising the same thing over and over again and getting in everyones way.

Where I'm going with this, you see, is that towpaths have their place, and they are my sandpit. The first thing I did when I got my new bike was take it for a blast down the towpath. We know it well enough now to know where the dogwalkers and canalboat owners loiter and park, and where they don't. We know which bits its safe to slam along, and which bits are suited to more of a gentle pootle. We know where the mile of compressions is and are using it to learn how not to peddle, instead using the ground beneath us to conserve momentum and deliver us happily to the aforementioned motorway bridge.

If I rode nothing but towpaths, I would be a 2 dimensional rider who didn't step outside of comfort zone.....perhaps. Or perhaps I would be a commuter, using my bike as transport instead of merely a toy. A towpath ride is what you choose to make of it - a safe passageway from point A to point B, or a series of challenges both physical and the ones you create, a sequence of tests and obstacles which are as difficult or as easy as you make them.

Towpaths are my sandpit. They're where I go to play, in safety, where I go to learn the limits of my bike, where I've learnt all the skills which I am now, with hesitancy and tentativeness, taking out into the big wide world and using on our local bridleways. I am less afraid now, of those bridleways, because I am assured that I can deal with what that track might throw at me. I am more familiar with my bike because I have played and pushed and befriended it.

Don't knock the towpaths. They are exactly what you make of them. Just mind the midgies.