I’ve pondered why more members are not leading rides. My own trajectory to leading rides was slow. I joined the club and—if my recollection is accurate—I didn’t attend a club ride until maybe a year later. Part of it was time: I was in graduate school and working part time. I was also mainly into running at that point but did lots of errands in SF on my bike. But I kept getting running injuries and decided I had to get back to cycling. I can’t recall if I attended one of the monthly club meetings or a ride first. On one of my early club rides I met Ron Decamp, a member who lived in the South Bay. We talked about riding on the Midpeninsula and eventually we agreed to colead a ride since the club didn’t ride there often enough despite the area’s marvelous cycling routes. Neither of us had led a club ride before. After that first time coleading, it was easy to lead on my own even though I still didn’t lead often.

Making friends in the club led to doing more club rides and often we just got together to ride when there wasn’t a club ride (or a club ride that appealed to us). We also had the now vanished Decide & Ride: show up at McLaren Lodge on any Sunday at 10 am. Whoever came would decide where to ride. There almost always was a small group who showed up when there wasn’t another club ride. That all led to leading more rides. But I rarely led more than maybe three rides per year—usually less—unlike in recent years when I’ve led or co-led a couple per month.

We used to have monthly club meetings back then and I think they helped draw out some ride leaders. Those meetings always involved exhortations from the ride coordinator as well as a preview of next month’s rides and the slots in the calendar that needed filling. (We printed a monthly newsletter, the ChainLetter, which included the ride calendar for the month. So rides had to be gathered at least three weeks in advance.) At the meeting ride hosts would talk about their rides to encourage participation and informally members would talk about where they were interested in riding and get encouragement from others to lead a ride. Everyone was gently encouraged to lead a ride they liked and I think hesitant members got enough positive feedback at those meetings to step up and lead their ride.

Of course we no longer have regular meetings and most of our communication has shifted from in-person to the Internet. This I think makes it harder to foster ride hosting. Personal contact makes a difference in persuading members that they can lead a ride, and that other members will indeed show up. The most commonly mentioned reason not to lead a ride is “but what if no one else shows up?” and that fear was assuaged by people telling the potential ride leader’s face that they were interested in that ride.

Believe me I’ve posted rides and been the only person to show up. But I’ve made it a point to post rides that I wanted to do. So if no one else showed up, I still got to do a ride I wanted to do. It was hardly a burden if I was going to ride anyway.

I’m not sure why there is reticence today to lead a ride. There are the usual reasons: not wanting to be “obligated” to do it (FOMO??); being shy (as if we were going to judge you based on your ride); and “I wouldn’t know where to lead a ride”. At some level it is a matter of personality: some people are afraid of being in a leadership role. Is that due to lack of self-confidence? Chris Thomas is one of the shiest people I know and yet he went from volunteering to lead a ride in Fresno, where he lived at the time, to leading a zillion AIDS Lifecycle training rides and then Double Bay Double training rides. (Incidentally when he did list that ride, we drove all the way to Fresno to do his ride and support him as did a few other Bay Area members.)

But I don’t believe ride leaders are born even if personality makes it easier for some people to make the move. Ride leaders are made and we don’t yet have a proven recipe for developing ride leaders despite 40 years of existence. We are indeed slow learners! One thing I do know is that I cannot recall a single case of someone new to the club showing up and then leading a ride very shortly thereafter. Someone new to the club comes on a ride, checks us out, and decides whether to come a second time. If they like the experience, then maybe they come on a few rides and make friends in the club. Only at that point do they offer to lead a ride. That rarely happens nowadays. Coleading a ride with another member makes it easier to step up. Also, having a coleader means that someone else is guaranteed to show up!

I also suspect that we rely too much on self-volunteering rather than directly asking, “Hey, would you be interested in leading a ride for the club?” We replicate what we know and in my case no one needed to ask me to lead a ride. I haven’t started cold calling members but maybe that’s the next ride coordinator’s decision.

Stepping up to leading a ride is surely a sign of some emotional investment in the club. When you make friends in the club, leading a ride becomes much easier. We certainly don’t expect every member to lead rides (although that would be wonderful!) But at our membership level we should have about 15-20 active ride leaders in any year and we’re below that.

David Goldsmith asked me that question years ago. I can’t remember exactly what it was in reference to but I do recall being amused and of a lightbulb popping up in my head about the cultural zeitgeist behind that question. There was a time when people did most everything around the house whether it was house cleaning, fixing the car, installing a new garbage disposal, gardening, or wiring a new outlet. It was just understood that we could do that and we only hired someone to take on tasks that required a professional such a lawyer, doctor, architect, etc.

Certainly part of the ethos of 1950s and 1960s was that boys learned from their fathers (or that shop class in high school) and girls learned from their mothers (or the home ec class in high school) how to do these kinds of things. Boys grew up learning how to do household repairs and to wield as many tools as their dads could afford to store in the garage workshop. Is that still true today? Perhaps less so. Today boys’ spare time is devoted to a myriad of after school activities instead of helping their dads with household repairs.

When I was in high school I hung out with a small group of budding bike fanatics and yet none us had anything remotely special for a bike. (I had a Schwinn Continental with steel rims and an Ashtabula crank!) One day John suggested we take our bikes apart, clean them, and put them back together. On his backyard patio no less. Before that I had only a vague idea of how bikes worked and were put together. John knew only a little bit more then I did. That experience was revelatory if hard and frustrating. It was a bit over our heads but we managed to take apart our bikes right down to the ball bearings including the freewheel and reassemble everything. It took all day. And yes, we did have a couple of parts left over. But by that point we were exhausted and our bikes appeared to work fine anyway. The end result was that I was never intimidated by working on a bike again.

Until now. Taking apart a downtube indexed shifter is as “contemporary” a repair as I feel confident to do on new technology. Shimano shifters—thank god!—are not intended to be disassembled and if they fail you just replace them. But other technologies give me the heebie-jeebies: suspension forks, hydraulic brakes, and electronic shifting systems. I have managed to learn to use a torque wrench and live with tubeless tires. I know that at some point I’m going to bite the bullet and learn how to do those repairs, make a shitload of newby mistakes, but eventually get competent enough to handle my own repairs and maintenance. But I am avoiding it as long as possible, ie. until something irretrievably breaks.

But beyond the higher technological skillset necessary to take care of these repairs—it really isn’t that much more complicated than before—there has just a cultural shift in bike repair: find people to do ALL your maintenance and just throw money at your problems. The inability whether it’s due to lack of time, lack of interest, or just ennui is much more acceptable these days. We all understand when someone hires someone or uses a convenience instead of doing the work themselves. Instead of preparing a meal we go out to eat. It’s easier especially when you’re tired after a day’s work. Fix your bike? You’d rather be riding it instead of wasting your precious Me time wrestling with a recalcitrant tire. How many of us still clean their home instead of hiring a cleaning service? Dry cleaning? Nowadays we can send out all our clothing for washing and it’ll be returned nicely ironed and folded too. There is no shame anymore in not knowing how to do things ourselves; we just understand that we hire others to do things for us. It’s just more things than before.

When I was a teenager I took car repair classes at the local community college. I am probably the last person with any kind of abiding interest in cars. I’ll drive anything as long as it’s cheap and can get me from point A to point B and is reliable. But I thought I should know something about our car and feel less marooned when it came to an unexpected failure. Working hands-on on my car was just as revelatory as working on my Schwinn. After those classes I didn’t work on my car very much but I certainly felt competent and could talk to my mechanic. As with bikes, auto technology has quickly advanced and now nothing can be done to a car engine without a diagnostic computer to tune it. So I’m back to square one again: ignorant and completely in the hands of auto mechanics.

We are embodied beings so knowledge we acquire through our bodies and not just from reading or watching YouTube videos can take us to another level. The experience of using our hands especially to learn about the world is valuable knowledge. How much torque do I need to apply to snug up a bolt? What does that feel like? How much to turn that adjustment screw to quiet the rattle in the rear derailleur? You learn that through your body. It is felt knowledge. Buddhists say that you don’t give a starving person a menu, you give them food. That is to say, talking about enlightenment is worthless; one has to experience it directly to know. So it is with bike repair. To understand your bike intimately you have to work on it. Yes, mechanics can make your problem vanish. But will you be “fed”?

Has it felt like there haven’t been many club rides recently? Maybe you hadn’t noticed because you’re not riding much. Or, at least you’re not riding much with Different Spokes. And we know one begets the other: fewer rides results in less interest and expectations, which results in even fewer rides. This has been a bad year for the club partly due to the record rainfall for the first four months of 2023. But we didn’t rebound once the weather improved for riding. As some of you know this has also been a bad year for illness, injuries, and accidents and not just among the usual ride leaders. Both David Goldsmith and I have been derailed this year from leading many rides (although David is doing a lot better than I!) Whether it’s a home remodel, Covid, accidents, or one’s aging body letting one down, life has a way of interfering with cycling.

There is also usually a lull in rides before AIDS Lifecycle as some members focus on that event. But honestly we don’t support AIDS Lifecycle anymore as we used to by offering training rides. Lifecycle has its own robust training ride schedule and doesn’t need any help from us. (We’ve outlived our usefulness to it, it seems.) This year the rebound post-Lifecycle didn’t happen for some reason and we had very few rides offered.

What has been revealed in glaring clarity is that there is little interest in leading rides in the club right now. The Jersey Ride, which by the way has been the most popular and well-attended ride in our history, does not have throngs of members eager to lead it. It’s usually a board member or an ex-board member who finally relents and volunteers to lead it after much exhortation and prodding from Yours Truly. Do I like beating the bushes to find a JR ride host? No, it’s a minor chore but the fact that I have to do it rather than having a member spontaneously step up before I even ask, saying, “Hey, I’d like to lead next month’s JR? May I do that?” reveals the lack of volunteerism and ennui we have now. I find JR hosts and often with a response such as, “Oh, I’ll do it but only if no one else does.” Apparently leading the JR is also viewed as a minor chore by others. And perhaps that says something about the JR itself. Maybe it was a good horse in its youth but it’s outlived its time and should now be put out to pasture. If no one is jumping for joy to lead the JR, then perhaps we should just stop offering it in its present form. If you like the JR, then maybe you should do something about preserving it by leading it once in a while because frankly that burden has fallen on an extremely small number of members who likely would prefer to be riding somewhere else. Or maybe the JR needs to get away from the Tib loop and go elsewhere as a breath of fresh air?

The shitshow on the GG Bridge in the afternoon doesn’t help. It’s one of the reasons David now leads the Short & Sassy Tib loop since it starts and ends in Marin and he doesn’t have to risk life and limb on the Bridge. It’s also the reason Roger and I no longer lead it: after two JRs where we were nearly hit we will no longer ride southbound on the Bridge in the afternoon and prefer to lead the much safer East Bay Tiburon loop. Maybe you feel the same way and that’s why you don’t want to lead or participate in the JR? But your silence tells us little. Speak up and let us know.

One could argue that the resistance to leading the JR is idiosyncratic. But we’ve had a glorious summer almost devoid of oppressive heat waves and wildfire smoke and yet we’ve had less than half the number of rides we usually have had. For at least a couple of years we’ve averaged about one club ride per week throughout the year. This year it’s going to be much less than half that.

This isn’t to say that no one volunteers to lead rides. There are still a few members who without urging will occasionally post rides from their repertoire. But the ride leader cohort has been dwindling and not replenished at the same rate, so it’s fragile right now. When two or three of the main leaders can’t lead rides, the calendar suffers greatly. This might be tolerable for a month or two. But at some point I would expect members to think, “Gee, there haven’t been many rides. I’ll lead one next month.” This was actually my thought process when I volunteered to be the ride coordinator back in 2016. The ride calendar was dismal and we hadn’t had a ride coordinator in over two years. So at first I led more rides and then in the vain hope of having a multiplier effect I volunteered to be the club ride coordinator. It clearly had some effect since the numbers went up. But now rides are dwindling again and frankly I’m not sure what to do to rectify it. Perhaps there is no rectification needed and this is just part of the natural up and down cycle of the club.

Over the past five years the board has worked to structurally make it easier to lead rides. The club RideWithGPS account has a curated library of rides throughout the greater Bay Area including a Most Popular selection for each county. This should make it easier to peruse and find interesting rides without having to generate a cue sheet, map, or GPS file for participants. Some rides even have ride notes and ride history information in their files. Posting rides on the ride calendar is easy through the “post a ride” link and usually are up in less than a day or even faster through the QuickEvents method. There is a dedicated ride leader forum for those who lead rides to discuss and problem solve issues pertaining to ride leading.

I suspect the common reaction amongst you to the dearth of rides is at best very mild disappointment. It’s so easy to get on a bike and ride by oneself; you don’t have to do any work to arrange or coordinate it, you can leave at whatever time you want, and you can do whatever ride you want including changing your mind midride. Leading a ride does involve a time commitment at an appointed date and time. Why bother when it’s easy just to text a friend or two and see if they want to join your personal ride than it is to organize a ride for the club? I would like to say that it’s easy to find another ride at any of the non-LGBTQ clubs. But that is becoming harder too. Larger clubs such as the Valley Spokesmen and even Grizzly Peak Cyclists have diminishing ride calendars and they periodically plea for more ride leaders. So it’s not just us.

The idea behind leading a club ride isn’t to put members through an ordeal. If that is your reaction, then don’t do it. In all the years I’ve ridden with Different Spokes leading rides has been about wanting to get together with your friends to ride. If that’s not enough to get you warm and fuzzy about leading a club ride, then don’t do it. You should feel eager to lead a club ride, jazzed about it and not repulsed. If that is not the reaction of most of the members, then it’s time to shutter the club. Don’t lead a club ride if you don’t feel like it. On the other hand, as a member you should feel that giving back to the club is something you want to do. Those who take should also give. Or have we forgotten the moral of the childhood story of Stone Soup?

At this juncture of the club, the real question is why members don’t want to lead rides because not wanting to do the most vital function of our club means there is something radically wrong. The culture of the club should be one of excitement, fun, and sharing. And sharing means sharing the “work” of making the club a continuing, viable organization. If there aren’t enough members who want to contribute to the club, then we will wither and vanish just as Different Spokes Seattle, Rainbow Cyclists in San Diego, and River City Cyclists in Sacramento all did.

Well, if you don’t care, then you don’t care. But I know some of you do and now is the time to act rather than sit back in the in the draft and let others plow into the wind. You know what cyclists say about wheelsuckers, don’t you? I’m flicking my elbow at you. Yes, you.