I Never Learned How to Bike With No Hands
I have a complicated history with bikes.
I got my very first bike when I was three years old, and I would gleefully ride it up and down the attic hallway in the building where my parents and I lived. Later, when we left the attic apartment and moved into a house, I took the bike outside, where I spent hours riding in big, looping circles and tracing tire marks into the cul-de-sac of my Long Island neighborhood. I loved to feel the tickle against my knuckles as the shiny blue and white tassels attached to the handlebars blew in the wind.
I was delighted when we moved to Utah not long afterwards and I suddenly had an entire park that I could bike around. I studied the signs posted alongside the trails crisscrossing the park, and learned that one big loop around the park was half a mile. I remember feeling very proud of myself when one Saturday I went out and rode twenty loops just for the hell of it.
Moving once again just two years later, I found myself in a small town that I could practically ride the whole length of on my bike. I felt a novel sense of freedom in my ability to pedal my way to the grocery store and spend my allowance on Pringles, Hershey’s drops, and the biggest bottle of Dr. Pepper that I could find.
Biking gave me a taste of independence, and it made me excited. But that didn’t last long.
When I was 11, I broke my arm after a teenage boy crashed into me on his bike–because, well, he was a stupid teenage boy. I had just finished eating dinner and was walking towards the patch of plum trees where my friends and I liked to hang out before it got too dark outside. One moment I was walking peacefully on the sidewalk, and the next I was on the ground, cradling my left arm. A few hours later, I left the emergency room with a neon orange cast all the way up to my armpit.
I developed an uneasy association with bikes after that. The sound of a bike bell chiming behind me–or coming from any direction, really–sent me into fight or flight mode. I even started to get nervous when I was the one biking, petrified by the thought of accidentally hurting someone. So years went by and I dealt with this fear by avoiding bikes altogether.
So, naturally, I decided to move to a country where I would be surrounded by people on bikes 24/7.
Not my brightest moment.
The Netherlands is known for, among many things, a notable biking culture. “Cycling Facts 2023” from the Netherlands Institute for Transport Policy Analysis reveals some interesting facts about the Dutch affinity for biking:
There are 1.3 bikes for every person in the Netherlands (roughly 24 million bikes in a country of nearly 18 million people!)
The Netherlands contains over 153,000 kilometers of bicycle paths
The Dutch complete over a quarter of commuting trips by bicycle
And one of my favorite facts: the largest bicycle garage in the entire world can be found in Utrecht, the very city that I called my home for five years.
I moved to the Netherlands at 18 with a few goals in mind. I wanted to get a college degree (or two!). I wanted to travel across Europe and explore new places. I wanted to fall in love. I wanted to learn a new language. And I seriously wanted to get over my stupid fear of bikes.
I was thrown in the deep end during my very first week of college. One of the staple activities of our orientation week (or Introweek, as we liked to call it) was the bike market, where all of the timid first year students gathered on the dusty cement football pitch and picked out our vehicles of choice. I quickly honed in on a bright red bicycle–vibrant enough to make it easy to find in a crowd, but beat up enough to dissuade most bike thieves.
And from that moment onwards, the expectation was to bike, bike, bike. Through the rest of Introweek, we all biked together to the grocery store, we biked to a club, we biked into the city center during rush hour–it never seemed to stop. Before I even realized it, the fear started to melt away. Suddenly, the panic morphed into exhilaration, the stress into satisfaction. I felt like a kid again, biking to the grocery store with crumpled dollar bills jammed into my pockets.
Now, anyone who knew me in college knows that I wasn’t necessarily the best biker. I liked to go at a leisurely pace, which meant that I typically formed the caboose of any group biking journey. I crashed occasionally, especially when iced-over puddles were involved. But for the most part, I was perfectly capable. I grew more and more comfortable with biking over my five years in the Netherlands. I knew when to use my hand signals, and I knew the etiquette of when to let the faster bikers pass me. I remembered to always have bike lights with me, lest I got stuck biking in the dark at night. I learned to maneuver back to my apartment with bags of groceries dangling from my arms and handlebars. I developed a mental map of the parts of the city to avoid parking my bike in at all costs. And, of course, I learned what to do when my bike inevitably got stolen.
But of all the bike-related skills I hoped to develop, there was one that I never quite mastered: biking with no hands. I never even came close.
I noticed it early on–people zipping through the city streets with their arms nonchalantly crossed, or their hands shoved inside their coat pockets to avoid the biting cold. They looked effortlessly cool. And every once in a while I would spy a couple biking together, each with one hand dangling by their side and the other intertwined with their partner’s. Romantic and effortlessly cool.
Occasionally, I’d build up the confidence to give the no-hand maneuvering a try. After waiting for a nice long stretch of road without any turns or bends, I’d lift my hands a few inches above the handlebars and see how long I could go before I began to swerve. I usually lasted about five seconds or so before my brain took over and sent my fingers clawing back down onto the rubber grips.
I wanted it to feel smooth, seamless–like I was flying. Instead, it was jerky, panic-inducing, and embarrassing. I watched time and time again as strangers and friends pulled it off with ease, sometimes even twisting halfway around to shout something over their shoulders while their bikes stayed perfectly straight.
I wondered if it was less about the mechanics and more about some deeper willingness to believe that forward motion alone could keep me steady. Eventually, it became a mental battle more than anything, and I couldn’t seem to convince my subconscious that my body was capable of balancing properly (my subconscious was probably right, honestly).
By the time I said goodbye to my final bicycle in the Netherlands (this one with a muted gray frame and the iconic blue accents of a Swapfiets), I felt slightly defeated. Five years of biking and I never managed to learn that stupid trick. I couldn’t figure out the nonchalant look, the method of getting around that screamed, “I’m better than you and I know it.”
But it helped to remind myself that at least I was biking at all. For the younger version of me whose arm hairs would prickle up at the ding of a bicycle bell, that was more than enough.