A Love Letter to Female Mountain Bikers
Last night I found a Ted Talk inviting me to conceptualize myself through this question: “If you could be the woman of your dreams, who would you be?”
Before I knew I was a girl, I was just me. I climbed trees and collected dolls, tormented my younger brother by flipping him off the tire swing (and the teeter totter), brought an extra pair of clothes to school (to change out of any dresses my mom dressed me in), skied, broke my leg, did pushups, rode bikes, and explored the forests behind my house.
My elementary school summer camp was mountain bike camp. At Catamount Outdoor Family Center we spent all day, day after day, on bikes. We challenged each other in bike limbo and to be the last one balancing in place in “Dab”; rode over roots, rocks and through mud; practiced wheelies and endos; and during lunch break my friends and I rode to our favorite slab of granite where we played house.
Identity is an interesting thing. It forms organically and is dynamic -- yet gets set in concrete in reference to something else. Too many of us solidify our identities only in response to what’s around us, rather than from what lies within and is enduring. As my physical appearance made very apparent to me, (a female in male dominated sports, a professional in male dominated industries, and a multiracial human with brown skin in majority white communities), until someone points to a feature of your identity and suggests that it’s different, you just walk around the world feeling like you.
(With my monster helmet, and favorite track shirt in 3rd grade.)
Growing up in Vermont, I didn’t look like anyone I knew for most of my childhood (not to mention not looking like half of my family), but no one told me this so it didn’t register. No one ever said: you’re only supposed to be the fastest girl, not the fastest kid; you’re only supposed to set your sights in relation to other females or to others lumped into “minority” along with you.
I took my ambitious drive and applied it to everything to an extreme. By the time I was 27, I had been a mountain bike racer; alpine ski racer, traveling the world and training with the National Development System feeder of the U.S. Ski Team. I had competed on the Freeskiing World Tour, the Freeride World Tour, studied abroad, graduated college with an almost perfect GPA, been a baby faced professor at 23, received a Fulbright grant, started my own business, and developed managers and directors in Healthcare Human Resources -- all while continuing to compete on mountain bike or skis.
That may sound all fair and good to accomplish a lot in a young life if you missed the specification “to an extreme”. Yes, there are plenty of positives that I value as strengths. There is a downside however that is much more subtle, which I spotted only after the fortress I had built of iron and steel protection made it hard to find me within it. I needed stories of other women I admire, who described walking into a room or presenting ideas in a way that their boldness or intelligence did not appear threatening to others, for me to mirror back onto myself and realize “ I do that too… I’m working to make myself smaller and hidden.”
Ironically, the eternal drive to do more and always too much at one time was actually a way to stay small, to always be improving and never be enough, consistently the underdog, not comfortable standing in my success or at the top of the leaderboard.
The trajectory of my specific identity formation followed this course: it took until I was 23, after having lived in Vietnam for a year and encountered a population that did look like me, to return to the Farmer’s Market in Vermont and realize for the very first time that I was an anomaly. (You won’t realize an American accent until you go to New Zealand or Scotland and encounter that you’re the one who sounds funny). It took even longer to spot that I had treated “feminine” like a dirty word and removed it completely from my descriptions of myself. All I had seen termed feminine around me were hyper-sexualized, ditzy, “the weaker sex” variations that I didn’t relate to.
In the bike community we haven’t had the long history of the ski bunny to shake off (for those of us who don’t color inside those lines), and have formed a diverse representation of female on bike. In both sports, I find fierce females who raise each other up and are working to claim their success. It’s taken me a long time to own that I am feminine and that everything I embody integrates together into my own gorgeous version of that word. For me it looks like: fire when out of balance; with strengths of water: empathetic, wise, intuitive and reading the emotional currents of a group; driven; ambitious; successful; aggressive; long hair to my waist; a melodic voice; a body that’s most comfortable moving; caretaker; warrior with or without my ski or bike armor on (try to bundle that into one definition). To all of the female mountain bikers out there on this International Women’s Mountain Biking Day, your version of feminine looks great on you.
After 20+ years of competing on bikes and skis, and converting that athletic life into discoveries about the world, this is what I’ve come up with. It’s a love letter to my younger self and to all the girls and women who surround me:
Dear Brilliant Light,
Form your dreams and identity from the core and enduring pieces of you that YOU want to be, rather than in reaction to what you see around you.
Get comfortable being incredible at whatever you are incredible at. No need to make yourself smaller or less than (as Marianne Williamson writes, “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure”), or greater by making someone else smaller. There is a way toward a sense of self that is independent from the positive or negative fluctuations of your life.
Be your own source of validation. Don’t let attention linger too long on being liked.
Love, Me
Happy International Women’s Mountain Biking Day! Here are some of my favorite related resources in honor of this day:
Patagonia’s Becoming Ruby - Just released last week, this film features mountain biker, skier and artist Brooklyn Bell, who created her own hand-drawn hero named Ruby J. Using Ruby as a role model, Brooklyn set out to “live like her, breathe like her, be unapologetically black like her,” finding her own identity in a mix of dirt, snow, art and inclusion.
Shifting Perceptions - The women of Crankworx describe what they admire about each other and how each are progressing the sport.
Roar: How to Match your Food and Fitness to your Unique Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong, Lean Body for Life by Stacy Sims - I wish this research on female physiology existed when I was a younger athlete. It contains macronutrient and recovery specifics for females, as well as how to plan training gains around the hormonal fluctuations of your menstrual cycle.
Ryan Leech Connection online learning and community - Perfect your wheelies, manuals, jump form and more to benefit your bike handling skills out on the trail and in the air.
Training Peaks training plans for athletes - This was shared with me by Lydia Tanner, a longtime (s)hero of mine as a XC mountain bike racer, and Content Strategist at Training Peaks. Lydia also introduced me to Roar and she incorporates these concepts into coaching (lucky) young athletes and women.
Exercise on writing a letter from unconditional love to fear by Elizabeth Gilbert