New York City’s Ride Up Grads Is the Bike Camp You Wish You’d Had as a Kid

Published September 4, 2022 06:00AM

Ride Up Grades by Trek Summer Camp is the only public free two-week intensive youth road cycling program on the East Coast.

But there is none quite like this one—the aforementioned are all either school-based, cost money, aren’t on modern road bikes (and certainly don’t provide them), or aren’t daily intensives.

The goal of Ride Up Grades is to introduce kids to road cycling with the aim of teaching safe commuting skills and building endurance. The ability to go by bike offers life-changing freedom to young people, and doing it on drop-bar bikes creates a broader base of young riders with the ability to try road racing. It’s part skills clinic, part attempt to make cycling cool again. Take it from me: there’s nothing cooler than independence.

For full transparency: Ride Up Grades is my project. I’ve taught youth cycling since 2016, and from my first day with Bike New York I saw the need for a road cycling summer camp for kids.

In 2021, Ride Up Grades (which consists of me and personal trainer Teresa Fisher) launched the road cycling camp in partnership with Trek with funds from Outride, apparel company Ostroy, and generous individuals worldwide. We keep it going with help from Jason Marshall, the mechanic behind Seneca Village Bikes, who let us store unreasonable amounts of full bikes and bike parts in his home for over a year.

Every weekday, for two weeks in July, 20 kids gather at the Trek Bicycles store on 96th Street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side before the shop opens. My counselors and I bring up Domane road bikes for the kids from the basement of the shop: a mix of donated bikes from Trek and loaner rigs from the shop.

We fill everyone’s bottles before loading the cooler into a Burley bike trailer along with snacks, first aid, a pump, and tools. A Trek staffer on an e-bike ferries our things around for the day.

For the first few sessions, we head to a nearby park where work our way through a series of League of American Bicyclists drills and games. We begin with the basics, and work our way up to drills on shifting gears.

To teach the group of kids how to shift, we have them ride a circle up one hill in Riverside Park nonstop for over 90 minutes.

Next comes practice at dodging the potholes and pedestrians—drills that prepare them for riding in the city. We teach riders to look over their shoulders for oncoming traffic before merging; then, it’s emergency stops and turns, as well as never to ride within arm’s reach past a pedestrian or another rider. Also, we show them how to keep one bike length apart when they ride single file or when they’re on their own riding behind strangers.

There’s a bit of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do guidance. On an enclosed rail trail, our advanced riders get to practice drafting, but we focus mostly on skills the whole group is ready to learn, like spacing, pacing, and cornering.

A mechanic, nutrition, and recovery day is included each week, where we teach campers the basics about their machines: bicycle anatomy, how to change tires and reseat a chain, as well as the basics of how to eat for endurance activities, and how to stretch afterward. We generally end each day with a round of stretching and, in true camp fashion, Circle Time, where we talk about what we liked (and didn’t) about the day.

It’s basically a novice-level cycling training course for road biking. I’m sure this sounds simple, but you should also consider that we do the camp in New York City’s 90-degree heat, with 60-percent humidity. Most rides take us up and down the West Side Highway, which is a sun-exposed strip of protected bike path that runs the length of the west side of Manhattan.

Like last year, we rode to Governors Island, Inwood Hill Park, Randall’s Island, and took the train out to Prospect and Van Cortlandt parks. We spent our last day riding through Pelham Bay Park. Altogether, we did a little over 150 miles, having had to cancel a day and a half due to rain, and not counting the drills (like the 90 minutes they spent on the hill).

These first two years Ride Up Grades by Trek Summer Bike Camp have been free, with one-quarter of campers coming from families that make less than $75,000 a year. For 2023, we will move to a sliding scale with the aim of expanding camp locations to areas where more residents live below the poverty line. I won’t whip out my Uncle Sam costume and point aggressively at you from this article, but I will say: your local camp needs you. There’s a list of United States youth cycling programs here, but it needs updating.

We complain that American road cycling needs a second renaissance. Here in New York City, where I was born and raised, cyclists complain that riding is dangerous and expensive, and the community is difficult to join. If we want to see cycling get more attention or become more accepted, the secret is not in converting old people.

Rather, teaching young people to ride safely and introducing them to various cycling clubs and resources is a part of the route to a community and society that likes bikes. We also support riders outside of camp sessions by providing bike and gear sponsorships in conjunction with apparel brand Ostroy. If you want to get involved or ask about starting your own program, reach out to staff@rideupgrades.org.