Preparing the Herd

It's great to have friends in the right places.

I have four pals who happen to be expert bike mechanics (three of whom are professionals), and I asked them to help us go through our Riding For Focus Specialized hardtails on Tuesday night. We were joined by six middle school students as we prepared the bikes for the fast-approaching riding season. Our newly created repair space with five stations was abuzz with activity as we tightened headsets, trued wheels, adjusted cable tensions, lubed chains and inflated tires.

The bikes are holding up well, so we were able to blast through them pretty quickly. Lee Huston, the owner of our fantastic retail partner shop, Center Street Cycles, was great to have on hand since he built the bikes. Lee is a standout teacher, patient, clear and a humble mechanical genius. We also had Matt Viara and Mark Wheeler from Bath Cycle and Ski and Tom Mills, the husband of my Riding For Focus teaching partner, PE teacher Barb Mills.

Looking around the room at any given moment kids could be seen listening to instructions, working bolts with wrenches, wiping bikes down with "simple green," twisting barrel adjusters to dial in the shifting, and feeling for loose spokes. Oh, and also eating the pizza generously provided by the BMS Student Council.

This was the first ever bike repair session at BMS, and hopefully the start of something big. We worked on our Specialized Pitches this time, but I'm looking ahead to having kids work on their own bikes eventually. I am grateful to live in a community where so many caring adults are willing to give back and teach kids how to work on bikes. Stay tuned!

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And so it begins!

The mornings have been cool and crisp as we kicked off Riding For Focus this week. Fall is in the air, and we have twenty-one rosy cheeked middle schoolers eagerly hauling their bikes "hand over hand" from the storage area to the bike corral each morning. They are motivated to get out riding as quickly as possible, so they manage to be focused and efficient, even at 7:00 am. So far we have been going through the curriculum lesson by lesson, checking off skills as we see them demonstrated. Fitting and checking your bike before riding, fitting your helmet properly, how to start, how to stop, how to shift gears, how to maintain a consistent pedaling cadence. It's brilliant to have kickstands on these bikes so we can create a mobile bike corral wherever we go. Getting kids in close, momentarily asking them to separate themselves from the distraction of those shiny new bicycles, and then releasing them back to their rides after instruction creates the space for clear deli

Putting it All Together

Today was one of those special days when so much seemed to come together. We are in the middle of week #5 of this spring's Riding For Focus session, and we have worked hard on learning about many aspects of cycling. But we have also pushed outside the set curriculum. We have: Ventured onto trails to learn mountain biking techniques Ridden with bike-commuters during Bike to Work Week Cleared trails Shaped and rock-picked the pumptrack Learned basic field repairs Become acquainted with the local trail system Made new friends Today I took my eighth graders out onto a section of the Whiskeag Trail known to the mountain bike community as "Gnarcore." It's an appropriate name for this steep jumble of roots, rocks and skinny bridges. I was sure to bring my Wilderness First Responder first aid kit, and I required kids to drop their seats to the frames. I also spotted them on tricky sections and even had them walk the bikes in the most high-consequence spo

Motivation

Riding bikes at school is so much fun that kids will go to great lengths to get to do it. We are into week #3 and attendance for Riding For Focus has been close to 100%. Anecdotal reports from teachers and parents are that kids are generally calmer, happier and more focused since they began riding. While these aren't scientific findings, they are still worth paying attention to. Over the weekend a friend shared an article with me about youth programs in Iceland. The country had terrible problems with alcohol abuse and disengagement among their teenagers in the late 1990's. Introducing consistent after-school activities over the last two decades that got kids moving, interacting with each other, having fun, exploring their interests and challenging themselves turned the culture around. Today, Iceland has cut their rate of teenage alcohol abuse by 75% and improved the emotional state of their kids as well. In a similar way, Riding For Focus has been a lifeline for some of o

R4F (Riding for Focus)

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