Women Can Ride

By Deb Peterson

When Cathe Carnes fell and injured her knees while helping with the Katrina Hurricane cleanup, her running days were over for good.

“You could ride a bicycle,” said her doctor.

Oh, the power of suggestion.

That one simple idea in the hands of a woman who thinks big has today become an annual program in Jonesboro that gathers women of all ages, teaches them cycling safety and the rules of the road, leads them on weekly rides, and prepares them for tours, one of which is 55 miles long.

“It’s a rolling party,” Cathe says.

That one simple idea is the grandmother not only of the Women Can Ride program but of a list of projects that includes the creation of 60 Share the Road signs, “I’m a Rider” posters showing the myriad kinds of riders you’ll find on a bicycle, and route brochures for new riders, with a special edition for Arkansas State University students.

She hasn’t been successful—yet—at convincing the city of Jonesboro to create marked bike lanes on popular routes, but the city has swept the shoulders for her group rides.

“We’re doing what we can,” she says, “and maybe eventually we’ll get lanes.”

The lanes are important. Many motorists don’t realize that bicyclists have a right to ride on Arkansas streets. Many of them are rude to cyclists.

In the early days, when Cathe rode alone, motorists sometimes threw ice and drinks at her.

“When you ride with someone else, they pretty much leave you alone,” she says. “When you ride in a group, nobody bothers you.”

She quickly found a riding buddy in Sally Broadway, current chair of the Northeast Arkansas Bicycle Coalition who runs a bicycling program for school-aged children.

On their regular rides, the two women often talked about putting a group together so if one of them couldn’t make a scheduled ride, they could find a substitute. Cathe was training for a long ride in Texas, and Sally had tips for her.

“Those conversations turned into dreaming about teaching ladies here those bike skills, safety tips, biking etiquette, and street smarts,” Cathe says. “We decided to start a program. If we could teach the mothers and grandmothers of the kids Sally was teaching, in a few years Jonesboro would be a wonderful biking town. You know—if you teach it, they will ride—sort of thing.”

They designed their new program after the Women Can Run program, spread the word, and found several women to be leaders of three groups—beginner, intermediate, and advanced.

“We then met at a local park to teach the leaders exactly what we wanted to teach the other ladies,” Cathe says.

She and Sally rode each of the routes in the three categories at the same time of day the group would ride, checking traffic levels, street conditions, and difficulty.

“We wanted to include hills, both up and down, left turns, intersections, railroad crossings, four-lane roads as well as neighborhood streets, shoulders, and traffic,” Cathe says.

She and Sally also approached local businesses about sponsoring the program, and received emergency packs filled with Luna bars, sunscreen and first aid items.

On Saturday, May 14, 2011, 65 women and 20 leaders participated in the first Women Can Ride workshop in a church parking lot.

The next day, they took their first group ride. The beginners rode 4 miles, the intermediate riders, 10. The advanced route was a little longer with more hills.

The women supplemented their training with a Girls’ Night Out at Gearhead Cycle House in Jonesboro, where they learned how to change flat tires, shopped for bicycle seats made just for women, and treated themselves to massages.

“We met for 8 weeks riding Sundays and Tuesdays,” Cathe says. “We gradually built up both distance and endurance.”

And on July 8, they celebrated the end of their first Women Can Ride program with a 55-mile graduation ride they called “Ride the Ridge.”

As the biking season begins again, the women meet monthly at Sue’s Kitchen for lunch and route talk, for friendship.

“We ride so we can eat,” one of the women said at a recent lunch at Sue’s.

“We ride for the exercise and the sunshine, for the vitamin D!” said another.

Three generations of women in the same family, new to Jonesboro from Albuquerque, joined the group at Sue’s in April, eager to meet fellow bike riders.

“I would never have known any of these women if not for Women Can Ride,” Cathe says.

This year, they’re doing it all again.

Saturday workshops began May 19, and some of the women, like Cathe and Sally, will be building up to ride in events like the Arkansas Ride for the Cure in Jonesboro on July 28, the Hotter’N Hell Hundred Endurance Ride in Wichita Falls, Texas on August 25, and the Big Dam Bridge 100 ride in Little Rock on September 29, Arkansas’s largest cycling tour.

“Ladies’ Night Out at the Bike Shop” is at 6:30 p.m. June 8 this year at Gearhead Cycle House.

Cathe says there’s a plan to create a similar program in Little Rock.

“Sally and I would love to get the entire state involved and have women riding bikes all over Arkansas,” she says. “It’s the thing I’m proudest of, besides my kids.”

For more information, visit neabicyclecoalition.org/womencanride

M! June/July 2012