Steel’s downhill descent isn’t always a bad thing. No feeling in the world compares to the excitement of tearing down a mountain bike trail on a steel frame with wheels, flying over jumps and hoping you have the skill to make it to the bottom alongside your friends.
Expanding Lehigh’s existing cycling infrastructure is a time and cost-efficient way to improve the community, providing a shared source of sweat to build closer relationships.
So many of Lehigh’s community-building efforts are passive — movie nights and bingo don’t work up the sweat of ripping down a dirt trail with a group of friends.
Trails connecting Lehigh’s campuses could increase accessibility to students.
Traditions and culture are what make any school itself, and Lehigh is no exception. It’s the memories of huffing and puffing up the many stairs and hills or late nights at Linderman that turns disparate students into familiar faces.
A huge part of this identity is the geography of campus, and mountain biking is a celebration of that. It has both the fun of the climb and the exhilaration of the descent, creating a perfect balance of physical investment, risk and reward.
Students can banter about the best trails, the fastest descents and the coolest features.
The exposure to the outdoors has also been proven to increase mental and physical health with fresh air and activity.
Developing other areas of Lehigh’s campus, like nature sites, creates a new environment for students to socialize away from academic stress. Students can encourage each other to get outside and be active.
Encouragement is a common form of communication among cyclists, whether that’s urging your friend to hit the jump they’ve been working on for the last week or coaching a rookie through their first tightly-banked berm.
Different trails and features become traditions, whether that’s a celebratory ride after surviving an exam or a meditative pedal up the hill to sweat out distractions.
More than anything, it’s a way to meet students one might not normally cross paths with in academic environments. Anyone can love biking, no matter where they come from or what they study.
Positive peer-to-peer talk and mentorship on the trail can quickly translate to the classroom, whether that’s quick explanations, homework help or a study buddy.
Trailbuilding, which is mapping out and cutting brush to make trails, is another way to further the community focus of a strong mountain-biking network. Students designing and building trails for themselves and the rest of the campus provide a chance for them to gain hands-on experience and reshape Lehigh.
So what can Lehigh do to capitalize on the untapped potential of their forests?
The first barrier to address is cost. Bikes, even at the entry level, aren’t cheap, and many students may not have the $800 needed to get into the sport.
This is especially true for Lehigh’s students who come from low-income backgrounds, which may lead to them being excluded from other social opportunities for financial reasons.
When the university levels the playing field with bike grants, free rentals or other forms of access, they create a space that’s about skills and dedication, not spending or mannerisms.
Lehigh, having the scale and resources it does, has the opportunity to work with local bike shops or even international suppliers to reduce costs and provide bikes to students on financial aid free of charge.
A semi-standardized fleet of bikes would not only make the trails accessible to everyone, but would help combat the elitism that creeps into any sport requiring significant amounts of equipment.
If Lehigh took care of trail maintenance it would kick-start the culture, providing exciting and safe paths for new riders to try out without requiring them to build or maintain their own tracks.
Safety is a concern, just like in any sport, and there’s potential for friction or disagreements between riders and pedestrians on the trail or vehicles on the road. However, this is also an opportunity for students to work together to resolve these situations.
This is a learning opportunity more than anything else. Success in anything requires preparation. Putting on a helmet, in many ways, requires the same skills that adapt your mindset to review for an exam or take on responsibilities in a club.
Lehigh has a long and storied history, and adding another avenue of community and connection gives students another way to become family.