I’m going to deviate a bit this week from the normal design or client related stuff. Talking bikes again. But today’s topic will be about learning to ride a bike and teaching somebody to do it.

My mom says I learned to ride a bike around 5 or 6 years old. I can’t remember so I’ll have to take her word for it. I do know, however, that since then bikes have always been a big part of my life. Now, with a soon to be 4 year old daughter, one of the many parenting questions flying around the house has been when and how to teach her to ride a bike. I noticed a couple of months ago that the tricycle just wasn’t doing it for her anymore. Her knees were cramped and she was spinning hard to keep up with me walking on our 5 block trip to the elementary school playground she loves. My wife is mostly indifferent when it comes to biking (although she does love to cruise town on her vintage Hercules townie). I am kind of the “bike freak” and she would probably like it if I stopped talking bikes altogether. That, of course, won’t happen. So the decision was pretty much left up to me when it came to Noa and her biking future. The consensus on the internet seemed to be that most kids learn to ride a bike sans training wheels around 5 or 6 years old. But this is Durango and we’re a biking town. So what to do? I had a decision to make. Get her a “big girl” bike with training wheels, get her a balance bike or try to bypass the training wheels and “tweener” stage completely and just go straight to her riding a two-wheeled, pedal bike.

Noa has always been very athletic. She learned to walk at about 9 months and has been running laps around the house ever since. From time to time we’ll even run together down to a park. Last week on a trip to Denver, we went on a hike with friends and she jogged the fist 2 miles of a three mile hike. She probably would have gone the whole three miles, but she found a good sized rock in the middle of the trail, tripped and gashed her knee pretty good, so the last mile was spent on my shoulders (Disclaimer: I feel compelled to tell people as we jog past them or when I tell stories like these that running is her chose and she loves it. I assure you, it is not some crazy form of child abuse). So with everything taken into consideration, I chose option 3: bypass the training wheels and just go for it. The others seemed a short transition to the third anyway and training wheels seem to breed complacency and attachment issues. So we went for it. I found her a sweet little bike (pink of course) and we were off.

The first day we went to the neighborhood middle school and we let her ride on the running track (a little softer surface). My back killed me after that day as I had to bend way down and hold onto the seat for max support while running around the track with her. Later training sessions took place on the quiet street across from the house. Over the course of a week I slowly pulled back on any support I was giving her. On about day four I would let go for short spans and only put a light hand on her shoulder if needed. Now a little over seven days of afternoon learning sessions and she is off and riding on her own. She still has trouble getting started and she can occasionally get a little “squirrelly” but she has proven to be a fast learner. One of the greatest noises I’ve ever heard her make is her nervous, elated laugh when she is riding on her own. I think one of my proudest father moments to date came the other day when, after riding around the block on her own she looked up at me, pointed to the mountain bike park area I go ride after work and said, “Daddy, when can I go riding with you up there?” Soon, baby girl 🙂