Who I Am

My Career in Bikes in Short

Here are a few highlights:

Co-owner and manager of two bike shops in the Boston area:

Ride Studio Cafe

Ride Headquarters

Raced in Colorado with many top professional women.

Raced in Italy less competitively but for better prizes: prosciutto and large boxes of pasta

Have ridden all over the world and have guided tours in Italy.

Longest one-day ride was a 166 mile gravel and mixed terrain ride that spanned much of Massachusetts.

Consult with multiple bike builders and have helped design a range of innovative bike models.

Have worked with more Seven Cycles customers than anyone else in the world.

Have a significant amount of bike mechanic experience and can build a bike from scratch.

Pre-bikes, my background was in mechanical engineering and information technology custom software design.

The Long Story

I’ll spare you the long story of how I got to where I am for now since it doesn’t fit in a small space. The short version, which is still much too long, is that I discovered bikes as a young engineer just out of college living in upstate NY. My first “real” bike was a quality steel road bike built to order, equipped with very decent components. I am grateful for the people who talked me into it even though I didn’t particularly want to get into cycling. I needed a hobby and my friends were bike riders. The reasons aren’t impressive.

My alma matter, CU Boulder, was in the heart of cycling, but I didn’t realize that cycling was a sport or fun past time. I never even considered the thought of owning a bike worth more than a few dollars that was meant to be locked up on campus in all weather.

Once I took delivery of my new road bike, it was a matter of days before I was logging long miles and taking on any group ride I could find. Long riding led to racing, then life took me back to Colorado, allowing me to choose new friends and construct my life the way I wanted. Interestingly almost all of my new friends, who remain my closest friends, were into cycling. This led to competitive racing that I put at the center of my life, while I kept a full-time desk job in a few technology positions.

After the appeal of chasing high-level national racing faded, I quit my job, moved to Italy with my bike and I enrolled in a 20-hour/week, 3-month Italian immersion program in Perugia. I knew “ciao” and not much else prior to landing in the country. I have relatives there whom I’d never met and who didn’t speak English, so I wanted to learn the language, connect with them, and generally see the country. Seemed as good as an excuse as any to go to Europe and take some time off from normal life.

As luck would have it, an Italian racing team that I bumped into one day on a ride took me under their wing and I ended up spending almost a year living as an Italian racing throughout the summer, spending countless hours at huge dinner tables all over Italy with the team all catapulting Italian words over each other to opposite ends of the table. Needless-to-say, my Italian vocabulary works really well when eating and generally getting along with people on group rides.

Post-Italy, and tangentially related to skills I’d picked up in Italy, I relocated to the Boston area for what was supposed to be two months in January with the promise of a guiding position in Italy the following spring. I quickly became enamored with cycling culture, the appreciation people in Boston have of hand-made bikes, how nice the community was to let me into it, and how many kinds of cycling people enjoyed. For once, I didn’t feel that I needed to race in order to be surrounded by a cycling community and find great group rides.

I discovered that the part of racing that I’d enjoyed the most in the US was the training rides and the time spent with friends at the race, after the race was over. After experiencing Italian Gran Fondo racing, I was ruined for ever wanting to road race in the US again. Gran Fondos balance the joy of cycling in a similar way to how U.S. gravel events are now approaching their events.

In Italy, if you’re an American woman who races a bike, you’re a rock star. Too bad I couldn’t import that back to the States with me! I found that everything I ever wanted in a home was in Boston, including my future husband who I also found there. I turned down the chance to return to Italy and started what is now my life’s work.

A management and bike sales position opened up at a cool-concept bike shop in the Boston area and someone who knew me well enough talked me into applying for it. It’s one thing to ride a bike, it’s a completely other thing to spec out custom bikes with riders who have been riding since before I was born on equipment I’d never heard of, manage employees, work with mechanics who have a lifetime of experience wrenching, order parts with endless nuances in their specs, manage suppliers, learn everything from proper gearing for New England (different from that in Colorado) to sizing of apparel, how to properly fix everything from a flat to adjusting finicky front derailleurs and rubbing disc brakes…

I have been fortunate to work with the best bike suppliers on the earth, namely Seven Cycles and Honey Bikes, as well as other important suppliers such as Quality Bike Products, 45NRTH, and Industry Nine. There is a long list and the list has changed over the years. Suppliers who work hard for small bike shops are the reasons small shops can still exist amid a world of a few huge brands threatening to own every small shop and every item sold within that shop.

I learned a lot in a short period of time, and even now, almost 10-years in, a day doesn’t go by that I don’t learn something new. Four years ago, I helped open a new bike shop, working closely with the contractor to do everything from choose the flooring to laying out the lighting.

I have met everyone from every walk of life, all kinds of people, all ages, some of the biggest hearted, most wonderful people, people who ride for enjoyment on the weekends, who are running big companies doing stressful things during the week, some people who ride because their spouse does it, others who commute to avoid insane parking fees for their car, some who are avoiding dark things in their personal lives, plenty who are searching for health, weight loss, the feeling of wellness, most looking for connection with others, who are seeking a bike shop community, group rides to connect with people on these rides, and who ride to find a social outlet. There are a few who are traditional racer types, but these numbers are dwindling in the Boston area. Few people are pure “roadies”; most have identities across cycling disciplines.

The people in the center of the cycling community here are those who ride the most and do the most types of riding, not who are the fastest. There is a comfortable balance of men and women on most of our rides. Diversity of sorts exists, albeit not as obvious until everyone starts talking and you discover that 80% of the people on any given group ride are from other places, many of them being from other countries. This guy builds homes for a living, she is curing cancer, he is writing a book, she just turned 75 and rode 7,500 miles so far this year.

I discovered that by working in the bike shops, I get to be in the heart of where people come together for all of the reasons they come together, on a daily basis. I get to wish people well at the start of the group ride, and hear their stories at the end of the ride.

All of the things that brought me to this sport continue to excite me and bring me to work every day.

I look forward to bringing you closer to the cycling community and helping you find the best rides, experiences, equipment, and everything to bring you some of the joy I have found being so deeply immersed in the cycling world by way of Ride Studio Cafe and Ride Headquarters.