Hello everyone! I am Laura, new Sorella race team member for 2024. I love riding bikes
(particularly, I love being deep in the woods on beautiful singletrack). However, I also love doing science, and for my big girl job I work as a postdoctoral scientist in the Schools of Physics & Biology at Georgia Tech. With a background in Mechanical Engineering, I love building robots—particularly, I love designing robots which are inspired by nature. Some questions I think about all the time are: how do animals move around with amazing agility in complex terrains, like on or under sands and soils? Can we translate the physics principles utilized by these animals to the robotic systems of the future? And in turn, can these robots not only help humans access new terrains or perform new tasks, but also help us better understand our natural world?
The titles “mountain biker” and “physicist” very rarely end up in the same sentence, let alone used to describe a single person. And while these two titles often feel incongruous, they’ve both become totally inextricable parts of my identity. I’ve always hated the phrase “work-life balance,” because to me it implies two parts of our lives are separate entities that are somehow at odds with one another. As much as societal pressures like to make us believe that we can put our lives into little bins, I’ve increasingly come to recognize that nothing ever falls cleanly into our make-believe categories. And, as I might argue, I think that might just be a good thing.
During my last year of grad school, someone asked me how I make time to ride while defending
a PhD. I was at a mountain bike race at the time, hungry and dehydrated, and almost without
thinking, I responded, “I don’t know, I think mountain biking makes me more creative.” I didn’t
answer their question about time management because, let’s be honest, my form of time
management was (and still is) a mostly chaotic and haphazard approach. Instead, I said
something which I certainly didn’t understand at the time, but the more I thought about it, began
to carry a lot of truth. And maybe, that thought began to unlock why it was so critical that I keep
riding when things got tough in the
lab—that somehow those couple
hours spent on trails up in the
Berkeley hills were the glue holding
things together, even as
experiments and data analysis and
papers occupied my mind.
While riding singletrack, your brain
is constantly on, responding to
micro changes from the trail and
the terrain below you, your bike,
and your body. Fast trail riding
requires total and all-encompassing
focus, something I struggle to find
in many other places in my life.
When you’re riding well, calculating
lines through rocks and roots
becomes almost subconscious; my
best ever rides and races were the
ones where I’ve felt confident
enough to let my body and bike
intuit their way through a trail without thinking. Any mountain biker can describe to you
however, that the sport is not entirely serene – instead, it’s a fascinating combination of this flow
state and fear; it’s somehow both a meditation and a thrill ride all at once.
I think mountain biking as a sport is not so much about adrenaline seeking, but instead about
getting up close and personal with your own fear. Riding trails requires an assessment, whether
conscious or subconscious, of the risk and reward of every single action we take on the bike.
When should you push yourself to ride that thing you haven’t before? And when is it time to
listen to your brain or body telling you it’s time to dial back? Becoming a good rider requires not
just physical prowess, but also this continual risk assessment and psychological commitment.
In this way, it’s as much a mental sport as it is a physical one, which is why there is so much
growth potential for all of us at every stage in our riding – whether that’s just getting used to the
trail, hitting a big new feature, riding a familiar loop just that little bit faster, or even setting out on
remote trails in a place you’ve never navigated before.
In a way, mountain biking has developed in me a willingness to look fear in the eye, both on the
trail and in my everyday life. Being a scientist is scary, in that I don’t know what the outcomes of
my research will look like, and I also often don’t even know what questions we’re trying to
answer in the first place (let alone, more often than not I’m the only woman in the room). It’s
overwhelming to try to plan and implement an experiment that you don’t know will ever work, or
to spend months building a robot that no one’s ever designed before. As abstract as it may
sound, being a competitive mountain biker has taught me that it’s okay to be daring, and it’s only
in pushing the boundaries of our fear do we make new discoveries.
When I had signed up to write this little article, I intended for it to be about juggling life as an
academic and as a competitive cyclist. I could’ve talked about organizing the little boxes on my
calendar a little better, or the funny way I sometimes try to use my commutes as training rides,
but at the end of the day I’m not sure if I believe work-life balance really exists. However, I do
believe there’s a continual push and pull of many parts of our lives that make each other
stronger. Instead of my original plan, what came out when I went to write this was an ode to
cross country mountain biking, and the way that it makes me feel strong, and powerful, and
creative— but also, the way it forces me to acknowledge that which I am afraid of. We are not
fearless, but rather capable of better understanding our own fear.
I used to often think of riding as something that was just for fun and to help me stay in
shape—however, more and more recently as my academic career heats up, I’m starting to
realize how something as silly as riding bikes in the woods can mean so much more. I’m so
grateful for the bike, the places it’s taken me, and all the amazing people it’s brought into my life
(including my wonderful Sorella teammates). Here’s to the power of our bikes to make us not
just more physically fit, but also more courageous both on and off the trail.