All about bicycling

As the CN&R editors were brainstorming story ideas for this year’s Bike Issue, we found ourselves reminiscing about our first bicycles and remembering how magical and empowering they were.

We had so much fun talking about them that we decided to ask several people in the cycling community to tell us about their first bikes. Their answers are dispersed among the feature stories in this special section.

That first bicycle was a ticket to freedom. It allowed us to go farther and to go faster, expanding our world and heightening our sense of independence. Suddenly, like the adults in our lives, we had wheels! We could go places!

There was another thing about bicycles that fascinated us: They had their own dynamic, one in which the rules of walking and running no longer applied: Stay still and you fall over. Keep moving and you stay up. Lean into the turns. Change gears as circumstances require.

We learned terms like centrifugal force and gyroscopic balance and counterbalancing that applied to what we knew in our bodies about riding bikes, and we felt we had entered another universe, as we did when we first learned to walk or, later, to swim.

The next time you’re on your bike, remember how it felt the first time you rode, how thrilling it was, how delightful. In the meantime, enjoy our fifth annual Bike Issue.