Learning to ride a bike was a major feat. I had a purple two-wheeler with some rickety training wheels and I was determined to ride like the wind! The two evenings leading up to my majestic launch, my dad ran up and down the street holding the back of my bike while I pedaled, trying to get the hang of balancing and pedaling all at the same time. The third night was too many nights in a row for that, so I went out on my own and pedaled shakily one rotation at a time until I could string a few rotations together and finally got rolling.
Oh the freedom and delight! I loved riding my bike up and down our cul-de-sac, streamers whipping in the wind from my handlebars. It wasn’t long, of course, before I saw someone riding their bike with NO hands, just pedaling easily along with nary a finger anywhere near the handles. Magician!
Naturally I had to learn too. Spoiler alert: that took a little longer than learning to ride a bike the traditional way. There was a lot of trial and error, as you can imagine. A lot of skinned knees, bruises (to my legs and ego), and frustration. But the thing that cracked the code was unexpected. Probably not to a physicist, but certainly to me.
The way to move from two-handed to no-handed riding is, funny enough, to get pedaling at a steady, even slightly accelerated rate when you’re on a straight path, and then to ease your hands off the handlebars.
In a kid’s mind, you think you should be going slow so you don’t take a big spill and end up all banged up. Not so. The motion and momentum help hold the bike steady so you can remove your hands, and the bike just sort of carries itself forward without needing to steer. Without that momentum, the front wheel is much more likely to take a sharp turn, like when you stop your bike and put up the kickstand and the front wheel flops to the side and almost topples the bike.
But that’s the thing. When we’re doing something new, something big, we don’t think to just keep going at our usual pace and flow and make a small shift. We think we have to start from scratch, to go as slowly and safely as possible. Sometimes the big leap is just a matter of a small movement from what you’re already doing.
Building up that early biker confidence with ALLLLL the wheels!