To start this post off I’d like to share a few facts you may find interesting:

• Girls and boys share similar attitudes about exercise and bicycling until age 14, at which point more girls fear injury and doubt their own athletic competence.¹ 
• On average, boys cycle nearly 6 times as much as girls (138 miles/year versus 24 miles/year.)²
• People who are confident biking as adults are more likely to have biked frequently when they were young than those people who aren’t biking as adults.³

Anchorage GRIT was born in 2017. The brainchild of Lael Wilcox & Cait Rodriguez, Anchorage residents and avid cyclists with a passion for empowering youth on bikes. There has been a lot of leg work from Cait, Lael, a team of eager mentors, support of teachers and administrators, local cycling organization Bike Anchorage, Revelate Designs, Specialized, Big Agnes and some fundraisers and community financial support (whew! that’s a long list), in making this cycling program possible. 

The six-week program took 12 girls in seventh grade, aged 12-13, put them on bikes, paired them with mentors, and a goal of a capstone campout six weeks, and nearly 60 miles, down the road. They learned a range of on and off the bike skills from bicycle mechanics, to tracing patterns for their own panniers, and learning about navigation. GRIT will be in its fourth year this coming spring, 2020. It’s likely that some of the girls packed away the skills they learned from participating, that they won’t really value the experience they had until they’re older, and cycling resurfaces down the road. But it’s also known that impact of GRIT has changed the course for some of them. 

We reached out to Alana, who was a part of the inaugural year of GRIT in 2015 to catch up. She’s come back as a mentor in the subsequent years. We’ve also kept in touch since I met her through GRIT. She was looking for ways to fund her bike tour last summer and I suggested she make some jewelry with bike parts we had available at the local bike collective, she jumped on it! The next week earrings and necklaces were at the collective and she had a booth at a First Friday show shortly after. You can now buy them at The Bicycle Shop. And she funded her bike tour(s), which you’ll read more about below. 

We asked her a series of questions about how GRIT has impacted her, and here is what she has to say.

How old are you now, and when you started biking?
I am 15 years old and a sophomore in high school. When I was 13 years old, I started biking with more confidence and enthusiasm after participating in the GRIT program.