The Wheel Thing

After two weeks of torrential rains in Houston, Rice senior Ryan Helmick can hardly wait to hit the road again with his 24-speed bike. He will pedal through the city streets and parks and along the bayous. With each stride, he will detach himself from his studies and the campus and his worries will fly with the wind.

“There’s nothing there but you and the breeze,” Helmick says. “It’s very liberating.”

Helmick is president of the Rice Cycling Club, which has been in existence for about a decade and recently counts 10 members. There’s been a decline in membership, he explains, because people have the misconception that you need to own a bike to be part of the cycling club.

Not true, he says. The cycling club has two sections, one for mountain biking and another for road riding. For the mountain bike section, members do need to have their own bikes. They meet once a week at Willie’s statue and usually ride in Memorial Park.

Students in the road riding section, however, can borrow road bikes from their colleges. In addition to having access to a bicycle, members need a helmet, which is required by law, and a bottle of water. The road cycling group meets every afternoon on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at Willie’s statue and decides which route to take. Occasionally, the group will head to the bike track behind the football stadium, but that, says Helmick, “is monotonous and boring.”

More often, the cyclists will pedal to Memorial Park or along Braes Bayou for a 15- to 30-mile ride. Helmick says he plans to have weekend rides that will span about 40 miles to Katy, Texas. That may sound a bit too strenuous, but Helmick says that a person can easily work up to that distance. “If you are having trouble keeping up, that’s not a problem. Someone will stay with you for safety reasons,” he says.

Biking is not dangerous, even in Houston traffic, Helmick says, as long as you follow the safety rules: stay in a straight line, always signal when turning, and always let the other bikers know where you are going. “By and large, riding a bike is pretty safe,” he says. “More so than playing soccer.”

Riding takes less of a toll on your body compared to high-impact sports such as soccer. In biking, the impact on the joints is slight, so that even people with bad knees can pedal with relatively little pain. There are many other benefits of biking, he says, including making friends, becoming more athletic, and getting to enjoy the outdoors.

Helmick got interested in biking in his senior year of high school because running gave him shinsplints and stomach cramps. He wasn’t a very good swimmer, and other sports didn’t interest him like cycling. “Biking was a lot of fun. I stuck with that, and I am very happy I did,” he says. “You get a break from studying, you get to go outside of Rice and see some of Houston, and you get some fresh air and sunshine.”

That’s the reason Rice senior Charlie Coggins joined the club. Coggins, who is vice president of the cycling club, has been mountain biking since high school. He joined the club because he wanted to continue riding with other people and to maintain his skills.

“The thing I love most about mountain biking,” Coggins says, “is the feeling of exhilaration I get when balancing control and mastery of the trails with the notion of risk and surprise constantly waiting around the next corner.” To drum up interest in the cycling club, Helmick plans to offer cycling skills seminars and a trip to the Alkek Velodrome in Katy, where Olympians sometimes train. The velodrome should be of special interest to those cyclists who enjoy the thrills of high speeds.

Some of the members of the cycling club compete in bike races, but the majority join the club just for fun. “It’s not like we are taking attendance. People show up when they want to,” Helmick says. “So basically, the cycling club is for people to ride together in a relatively safe environment.”

—David D. Medina