For a graduate-level psychology class on skill-acquisition in Spring 2019, I will learn how to do wheelies on a bicycle. This site will serve as a record of my progress in that pursuit as I apply theory and methods from the course, practice the skill, and study related concepts.

The Origin Story

My memories of learning to ride a bike are actually some of my earliest memories in life. I can remember straddling my metallic blue bike in our backyard when I was about 6 years old, rocking left and right as I scooted along and alternated between supporting my weight on either foot. I asked my dad a question for which I thought the response would be an actionable set of instructions.

“How do I ride my bike without touching the ground?”

“You have to learn how to balance.”

“Yeah, but how?”

“You just have to practice.”

This hardly seemed helpful and the moment became my earliest memory of experiencing frustration. My second memory of learning to ride bike also included frustration, but this time it wasn’t just my own.

At the park just down the street from our house, my feet rested on the pedals as I held a rigid deathgrip on the handlebars. My dad pushed me up and down the sidewalk through the center of the park, one hand on the end of my right hand grip and one hand on the back of my seat. Back and forth and back and forth we went. He pushed, I held on for dear life, he let go, and my feet would instinctively find solid ground as I began to tip over. I don’t remember what instructions he gave me at any point, but I do remember noticing that he was being pretty silent eventually. Neither of us knew what else to do.

There were a couple of older kids from the neighborhood cruising around the park on their own bikes until they decided to just stand nearby and watch the scene. Eventually, one of them came up to my dad.

“Can I try?”

Silence again from my dad as he stepped away.

I wish I knew what happened next, what the kid did or what he said, but I don’t. All I know is that within some amount of time substantially shorter than the amount of time my dad and I had been practicing, I was pedaling around the park with no one running along beside me. My dad gave the helpful kid $10 and walked home as I cruised along with pride beside him.

Since then…

I now have ~24 years of experience in bike-riding. In elementary school, my brother and I would ride our bikes through the neighborhood to pick up trash. In middle school, our family moved to the mountains of North Carolina and we would ride three miles up a dirt road to meet our friends at the swimming hole almost every day in the summer. We also liked to “bomb” it down our steep mountain driveway, and I had a piece of gravel under the skin on my knee for years as a souvenir from that. In college I commuted a few miles to campus and to work on a higher-end road bike. I sold and fixed bikes at two different jobs. I’ve explored every mile of bike trail in the Bent Creek Experimental Forest in Asheville. I’ve ridden bikes along the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve ridden a bike through the busy streets of Amsterdam, the biking-as-a-lifestyle Mecca. All of this is to say that, when it comes to the skill of simply riding a bike, I’m an expert.

Yet, I have never been able to keep my freakin’ front wheel off the ground for more than a second.