7/7/2023 0 Comments Wilcox time out for womenI love racing, but if I do only that, then it starts feeling hollow, the experience isn't rich enough, because you're not sharing it with others, you don't see the spark, and other people where they’re excited to do their own thing. And that makes it so much more inspiring for me. Now, I feel like there's just so much more sharing and there are communities, invitations, you can go on rides, you can meet people, you come up with new ideas, you create more than just your own trip. That's also how I got into cycling, too - bike touring - and you do feel lonely out there, if you're doing it alone, and you don't have a community. LW: I think it is changing, I think the sport of bikepacking is growing in so much more of a heartfelt way, where it's not just showing up to the start line on your own and being self-supported, but also more women creating events or opportunities to encourage more women to just participate in any way, for it to be social, for it to be fun, for it to not always be a competition. ML: Do you think things are changing for women and girls in cycling? So that's what really keeps me going, doing it year after year. In the beginning, some of them really struggled to ride two miles, and then in the end, they do this huge ride, and they're just so blown away by their own achievement, and how much fun they had. Taking on a challenge for the first time is so cool to see. It just takes consistent riding and building confidence. So then it was a question of: how do we build up to do that with 12-year old girls who’ve never ridden more than 10k, and they have to ride 100 by the end? But the amazing thing is kids can do so much, so it really doesn't take that long. I thought, let's end there, and then worked backwards. We knew we were going to ride from Anchorage, the biggest city in Alaska out to the wilderness, and I knew this really cool Forest Service cabin that backs into a glacier down a 12-mile mountain bike path. We thought, "How cool would it be to do a girls’ programme?", and then dialled in from what we wish we had done when we were young, because I didn't start riding until I was 20. I actually came up with the idea with a good friend of mine, Cait Rodriguez, while we were bike touring together in Mexico.
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