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Of Iron Horses and Kicking Fillies

Biking as a (40-something) woman

By Katharine Niles

Found in: | Outside | Biking | Road Biking |

Not so long ago, my editor and I had a conversation about my occasional rants regarding the hyper-masculine, conquest-oriented culture promulgated in much writing about the outdoors. This is perhaps best exemplified by Outside Magazine, of which I am the first to admit has some great writing but is always done with a heavy twist of testosterone. My editor, a male, said he saw my point, but instead of always assuming that everyone was a testosterone junkie, why not allow for the possibility of joy? To climb a peak or run a Hardrock 100, after all, might be emotionally akin, he said, to "a colt kicking up its legs."

This stopped me. A colt kicking up its legs? The sour-puss in me wanted to say, "Well, dudes, just do it responsibly." But the real me? The small little kid voice inside? She was jealous as hell. I wanted to kick up my legs like a filly come spring, damn it. But as a woman - and a middling-aged woman at that - what did that mean? I hadn't seen too many articles out there exactly telling me.

I spent all of last year luxuriously unemployed and writing another novel. I write best in the mornings and I knew come noon I'd better get out of the house or excessive navel gazing would set in. So I discovered spin classes at my local rec center. This in turn led to a re-awakening of body and soul - in eighth grade my bike had been my first ticket to freedom and mobility, and by the time I was a senior in college I had hooked up with some serious pedalers for longer rides. I'd tricked out my 1976 blue Motobecane with a triple crank and Shimano gears, and though it was a heavy beast, it got me a lot of places.

As this delight trickled into my consciousness while spinning, I confessed something to myself: I wanted to ride in the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic. This is a nearly 50-mile venture from Durango to Silverton occurring every Memorial Day weekend for the past 37 years. Yes indeed, I wanted to do something stereotypically Durangoan - gear-headed, hyper-athletic, sublimely ridiculous. So I signed up for Iron Horse training, which started in December with special spin classes and free talks given by doctors, physical therapists, pro bikers and the like. In April, we would begin outdoor rides, building our endurance with successively harder rides in order to handle the elevation gain involved in hauling oneself up to a querulous old mining town nestled in the sagging pit of an extinct volcano. Such is Silverton.

In my spin classes, I quickly befriended women my age. While spin had its share of first-rate riders, it also had me and Ingrid and Lauren and a host of others who wanted to climb to Silverton too. We learned how to stretch. We did core-building exercises and were encouraged to do more Pilates outside of class. We bought heart monitors and bike cleats and, come late March, purchased or updated bicycles in droves.

I am still paying off my bike, because the first thing I realized in looking at the bottom of the line model was that I was too old for it. It had no carbon forks, no gel packs easing the impact of bumps in the seat post. Its brakes were OK but not great. No, this was a Rest of My Life Purchase. The Only Bike I'd Ride until arthritis or some other denizen of old age did me in. At 46, I was planning on riding a good 30 more years. In which case, stiff frames and crappy brakes were not going to cut it.

I was also not cut out for the "women's fit" models with foreshortened horizontal reach between seat and handlebars. I am long-waisted, reasonably big-boned, and 5'8''. So I left the bike shop with a sleek silver and maroon men's Specialized Sequoia Elite, and thought, spin and all, that my first group ride would be glorious.

Hah. Little did I, or my cohort of women friends, know. The colt-kickers reared their legs again, and in my resentment I thought them ugly. The Durango Wheel Club members tore up a local county road so fast none of us saw them. Yet in my junior high heart, the one that had come of age under Title IX but didn't have very many models beyond NFL football and male hiking partners who routinely suggested we were on "Missions from God," I thought They Were It and therefore I was a failure. Totally. We all had dreams of being in the middle of the pack, at least, but soon realized this road business was harder than it looked and that we were, uh, 40 or so, and that on that day anyway, we'd have to swallow our pride and take up the rear.

I nearly quit at that point. To hell with gonzo bikers. To hell with Silverton. Who was I kidding anyway? But a different wisdom seeped in, personified by an impish 50-something breast cancer survivor who always, joyfully, rode sweep behind all of us and didn't give a damn how slow she was. She became my hero. She was on no Mission from God. She was on a Mission for the Goddess, and I soon figured out I best bow to her No. 1 lesson, and that was to learn how to kick up my legs on my own terms.

It would probably mystify some men - and those women who have blessedly escaped this - as to why it takes many women so long to understand what those terms are. One of the first wails to hit me in my jealousy at my editor's coltish propensities was this: "Yeah, but Jan, no one ever told you not to trust your own body!" No one raped you, told you that you were fat, laughed at your breast size, or based your training regimes on studies done entirely on men. So all of us had to figure out how to do this as women.

What did this turn out to mean? First, it meant that different days of the month produced drastically different performances. On your period? Hmmm . . . some of us had to stay home, while others plied ourselves with ibruprofen and grunted up the hill. One friend suffered acute asthma depending on where she was at in her cycle. This got worse as she tried out a new birth control pill. Bloated? Tired? Pissed Off? Or ecstatic and ready to climb Mount Everest? It all depended on your relationship to the tides and the moon and how heavy the pull of all that was in a given month. We were all figuring out where we'd be in our cycles long before Memorial Day rolled around.

Secondly, this energy made for realizations about the Iron Horse no man would ever have. After doing our first ride up Coal Bank Pass and back - a 30-mile affair with five-and-a-half miles of 6.5 percent grade and then back down, one woman straddled her bike, snapped to and said, with the bright eyes of utter revelation, "You know what this is like? It's like having a baby. In the middle of it all, you are thinking, no way in HELL will I EVER do this again. But as soon as you're done, you think, that was GREAT!"

Exactly. I kicked up my hind legs that day, thanks to her, and I really kicked them up when I finally rode to Silverton. I couldn't do this on the day it was actually planned, as it snowed a foot up Coal Bank Pass the night before and they cancelled the whole thing. But the following Monday, on a horrific taper and jonesing with the idea that it was now or never, a bunch of us set off.

I smoked. I mean, I just smoked. The trainers had known what they were doing. I was primed, pumped, on a good day in my cycle, and halfway there before I knew it. We'd arranged a drop of food and water at Durango Mountain Resort, and again at Coal Bank, but we needn't have bothered. The Fire and Rescue Squad was out with bananas and oranges and water, so I filled bottles and inhaled a banana and flew up Coal Bank Pass. Family sag wagons and Iron Horse trainers egged us on. The atmosphere was festive; bikes abounded. My own family, in-laws in town, were to pick me up in Silverton. I expected to see them long before Coal Bank, but they did not pass me until I was going 30 mph down the other side of Coal Bank toward Molas Pass. I ate two Clif Shots with them at Andrews Lake, and hightailed it to the old coot volcanic bowl that is Silverton.

I was shooting for five hours, maybe 5:15. I did it in 4:52, and quite blame my in-laws for not making that 4:45.

The endorphin high was outrageous. I am sure I blew out my adrenals. But I learned what Jan was talking about, and that we each, in our own way, must find what makes us giddy with physical joy. I will add, though, that the community of women - and men - who came together to train made it really worth it. So you won't see me writing about my gonzo ride in Outside Magazine, and how I kicked ass all over the place. That is so not the point. The point is to give voice to a different experience, with perhaps some different values driving it. For our bodies are our home, our source of all suffering and ecstasy, and to give voice simply to the gonzos does not do the rest of us justice, nor, even, the gonzos on their bad days. For they too have to forgive themselves for being merely human - sometimes tired, and full of the pull of the moon, and tears, and tides. Yee haw.

Info Box: SO YOU THINK YOU WANT TO TRAIN ...

Iron Horse Bicycle Classic Training was started by Patti Zink, co-owner of Mountain Bike Specialists in Durango. After volunteering for the tour for a number of years, she knew it was time to ride in it but didn't trust she had the discipline to train. She and her husband Ed began the training program as a result. Training begins Dec. 1, with spin classes and information from your local bike shop, a nutritionist, a certified cycling coach, a cardiologist, and a physical therapist.

The 38th annual Iron Horse Bicycle Classic will be on May 23, 2009, with over 1,200 tour riders participating. The training is a great way to lose weight, get in shape, learn about your body, meet new people, find new heroes (including yourself!) and accomplish something really phenomenal. Online training is also available for people who don't live in Durango but want to ride.

The training will help you learn the following:

? Why base miles are so important

? How to use a heart rate monitor to help your training

? Why leg speed is important

? How to make your workouts count

? Why stretching is so important

? How to be more comfortable on your bike

? What clothing choices are appropriate

? How to eat for fitness

? What are the rules of etiquette when riding with others

? How to drop a few pounds

? How to lower your blood pressure

? How to really enjoy your ride to Silverton

To sign up or find out more, go to ironhorsetraining.com, or call Cindy Dahlberg at (970) 385-0411.

Katharine Niles is the author of the award-winning novel The Basket Maker and writes the With The Kids column.