Catching the bug!

So I used to hate cycling. Despised it in fact. So it’s kinda ironic that I now love it to the point of having a cycling clothing company, riding my bike 6-7 days a week, having 2 rooms of my house solely dedicated to bikes and even having a bike tattoo. So I guess that brings me to the point, how I got into cycling if I really did hate it that much.

Well, in NZ for Friday afternoon sport every term you’d pick something different – summer or winter sport. I’d always danced so I never got into netball, rugby etc. When I was in Form 2 when I was 12 (that’s Year 7 in Australia) there was a new option to do Velodrome cycling (on an outdoor wooden 250m track). I told my friends we should do it, it’ll be really funny to ride around on those old fashioned bikes at the steep circle thing. We’d probably have to shimmy to the middle on our bums down the bank, how else would you get to the middle!?

So we went along and tried out on the old fashioned bikes with no gears that you couldn’t stop pedaling on. I should note here the reason I hated bikes and cycling. my childhood involved me having to ride my bike everywhere – from family bike rides to to and from school form a very young age, rain hail or shine. I guess I was conditioned for the sport because we did a ‘flying lap’ which technically was more a hands on the tops of the bars wobbling ride around the côte d'azur type of lap. I guess I must have done a ‘good’ time and I got asked if I wanted to come down and try it out on Sunday properly at the club training day. I learned that Sunday that you could in fact get new ‘old fashioned bikes’ and that mountain bikes weren’t the replacement of road bikes. You could get really flash track and road bikes and that a lot of people actually ride bikes as a sport. I remember being really scared to ride up on black line halfway up the track, it took me ages and the help of another rider. But once I got up high, past the black line and onto the blue I rode around for ages going faster and faster, even when I was so puffed out, I kept going. I still remember that feeling.

And the rest is history.