Canter Bridge

The concluding section of Tori Bortman’s The Bicycling Big Book of Cycling for Beginners  makes the claim that ‘teaching, bicycles, and writing are Tori Bortman’s passions’. By the time the reader encounters this line, the truth of it has become clear.

Bortman has provided beginner (and, I would say, that face-saving term ‘advanced beginner’) cyclists with a jargon-free, highly readable companion for the first thousand miles on thin rubber tires.

These pages contain no in-house tech talk meant to bolster anyone’s credentials and squeeze the newbies into their corner. Instead, a gifted teacher who really wants her students to love the sport as much as she does builds our understanding from the ground up, step by step, brick by brick, ride by ride.

I’m finishing my first thousand miles and cannot think of a more amiable companion that The Bicycling Big Book for Beginners and the ambitiously empathetic voice it channels to riders whose gasping lungs and pumping legs are just beginning to know their strength.