International Women's Day: How riding is empowering thousands of Aussie women

When Jordana Blackman was 25, after recovering from melanoma cancer, she decided to take part in a cycling challenge to raise funds for the Peter MacCallum Cancer foundation, where she had received treatment.

There was only one obstacle in her way – she couldn’t ride a bike.

So she started from scratch. First she had to get a bike – a challenge in itself.

How would she buy a bike? What kind of bike did she want? What even were gears?

“It was all so overwhelming, but I’d set myself this great goal and that’s what drove me through. But it was the level of assumed knowledge in the industry about what gear to buy and how to ride, and the whole journey really made me think I can't be the only one experiencing this,” Blackman said reflecting on the experience more than a decade ago.

Once she had a bike, staying upright presented a new set of challenges.

“I fell a lot. I spent a lot of time going round and round in circles on an outdoor velodrome. I suppose I just taught myself little skills sessions too.

“There was a lot of difficulty which I think I would have preferred to do with a close-knit female community. I guess I'm trying to provide what I wish I’d had.”

Her personal experience inspired Blackman to help empower other women to ride a bike who may have been in a similar situation.

A few years later, after moving from Melbourne to Brisbane with her husband, she founded Chicks Who Ride Bikes, a cycling community bringing together all types of women on all types of bikes.

“I really wanted to set up, have my own friends, have my own community that wasn't just work and the people that my husband knows,” she said.

“What started out as something just for me to have a few bike buddies quickly grew into a like-minded community.

“It really was a community of women who just wanted to get out there and do stuff by ourselves. There were only a dozen of us at the beginning in 2014 and now there's almost 4000, I think, in south east Queensland.”

CONNECTING WOMEN ACROSS AUSTRALIA

More recently Chicks Who Ride Bikes developed an app for women to connect with others in their local area – like matchmaking but for riders.

Riders can put in their level of experience, their interests outside of riding, what they enjoy about riding, and it will connect them with other riders in their area.

“It really started because we get asked dozens of times a week, ‘Do you know anyone in X, Y, Z area’, or ‘do you know any groups that would be suitable for a beginner level?’

“So I think it was born out of, wouldn't it be great if there was kind of like a matchmaking type of situation.”

Chicks Who Ride Bikes also has a small group of volunteers who run group rides and partners with coaches to deliver skills sessions. They also provide information about riding and bikes on its website.

“We generally partner with organizations that deliver rides and help them to increase female participation in those rides. So a great example is the Brisbane to Gold Coast ride. That's a 100km one-day event. It's really well organized and it's a great opportunity, but they had really poor female participation. So what we do is build up to that distance with riders.”

BACK TO BASICS

For Blackman, Chicks Who Ride Bikes is all about inclusion and having a safe and supportive environment for women whether they are a mountain biker, roadie, gravel rider or commuter, if they are just getting started like she once was, or have been riding for years.

“I've never been a super competitive person, and so I didn't really feel like the traditional club model was for me.

“This really afforded a chance to get together for the purposes of just going out for a ride with no training for a race or anything like that. And I think that vibed with people and especially women 35 to 55.”

It’s also about education and breaking down barriers that make women feel like they are stupid for asking questions about bikes.

“What we do as well is go right back to level one.

“I think breaking down information without making women feel stupid for asking is really a focus for us. And it's breaking it right down to this is what you call this and this is why it's important this is how it works.”

YOU ARE NOT ALONE

There are thousands of women across Australia who have stories just like Blackman.

When Cathy Peel joined her first women’s-only riding class, she was so nervous she threw up beforehand.

The group session was meant to start at 2pm but she waited in the car until 2:05pm to ensure she didn’t have to talk to anyone.

Twelve months earlier, in her 40s and years since she had ridden, she decided to give it a go.

She bought a new bike and tried riding with her husband but “it was a catastrophe” she said.

She hated it so much, she put the new bike under the house and didn’t want to ride again.

It was almost a year later when her husband mentioned there was a women’s-only skills session being run at the cycling club in Brisbane he was part of.

“I was so frightened to go. But sometimes you have to go and be brave by yourself and I find it’s easier to be brave with other women.”

It was there she met her “cycling best friend”, and as the pair grew confident on the bike they went on their first ride together.

“The first time we rode 15km it took us an hour and 15 minutes but we cried we were so proud of ourselves,” she said.

That was more than eight years ago, and a lot has changed over that time for Cathy who is now a group leader with Chicks Who Ride Bikes.

She is divorced, has five bikes, has had cancer, ridden in countries across the world and got herself a few hundred new friends in the cycling community.

Having started in one of the beginner groups, she is now teaching other women the ins and outs of riding and bikes.

“Joining Chicks Who Ride Bikes gave me confidence I didn’t have, I was newly single, in my 40s, living independently for the first time and I made all these new friends who liked me for me,” she said.

And when she got cancer, more than 250 of those friends pitched-in to buy her an e-bike so she could still ride when she was undergoing treatment if she felt up to it.

“I put the bike at the end of my bed when I was undergoing chemotherapy. I would look at it and think I’ve got to ride that bike because people bought it for me.

“Every time I ride it, it reminds me I’m more loved than I know. I cry it every time I ride it.”

RIDING: ‘THE GREAT EQUALIZER’

Forging friendships and bonds was something Blackman was proud to enable in the Chicks Who Ride Bikes community.

“It’s a great equalizer. I'm 37, one of my best friends on and off the bike is 63. I love the fact that we connected through bikes and we actually have so much in common, and we probably wouldn't have met if it wasn't for bikes.”

The act of riding side-by-side with someone, or in a group, or working together, made cycling the ideal vehicle for women to make meaningful connections, Blackman said.

“You're literally and metaphorically moving in the same direction. You're kind of working together. And I think that is important to generating some of these relationships and conversations.”

Generally speaking, Blackman said, there was - particularly for women aged 45 to 60 - a sense of guilt around doing something for themselves, and that they often put others’ needs before their own.

But she said that tide was turning and women, through cycling, were starting to put themselves first.

“It's the determination to stick with something. It's figuring out what to do when something goes wrong. There's all these situations that apply to real life and you learn these skills in a group environment and go, ‘yeah, I've got confidence that I can figure this out.’

“It’s almost like the bike is secondary to the realization that I need something for me.”

It was also important for future generations of female riders to see women on the road, on the trails or on the bike paths, she said.

“When women cycle, the kids cycle. If mum rides, it becomes a part of the fabric of the family.”

Read more about International Women's Day here