Yearning to pedal brave and free

The first thing Bruce Rosar asks his aspiring road cyclists is this: "What did you like about riding a bike as a kid?"

"The freedom," Janis Ayers of Durham answers in an instant.

"Yeah, that's pretty much it," agrees fellow classmate Florence Amadi, who lives in Willow Spring.

Freedom. For generations of kids, their first taste of freedom came the moment the training wheels came off. For city kids, exotic parts of the neighborhood they'd only heard about were now theirs to explore. For kids in rural areas, the mobility of two wheels could mean a chance to disappear unnoticed on a sleepy summer's day and ride to a nearby town. The bicycle, in fact, played a key role in liberating an entire sex. According to the Web site annielondonderry.com, during the bicycle's heyday in the 1890s, a heyday driven by female cyclists, Susan B. Anthony told the New York World's Nellie Bly that bicycling had "done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world."

No wonder Ayers and Powers were willing to sacrifice three hours of this and their next two Saturday afternoons to take the Street Cycling course Rosar leads, offered through the town of Cary at its Middle Creek Community Center.

The class, designed by the League of American Bicyclists, is aimed at folks who would like to ride beyond the neighborhood and the greenway, but who cringe at the thought of mixing it up with motor-propelled vehicles.

A fear not without cause. In 2006, the latest period for which information is available, 773 cyclists were killed riding their bikes (about 2 percent of all traffic fatalities) nationwide, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Twenty-one of those fatalities were in North Carolina (accounting for 1.3 percent of all traffic fatalities).

Scary as those figures may be, Rosar assures his class that knowledge is safety by quoting biking educator John Forester: "Cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles." Thus, the goal of Street Cycling is to give "cyclists the confidence they need to ride safely and legally in traffic or on the trail."

The class seems overly basic at first. An early lesson: Riding a bike is about more than just balancing the thing.

But the curriculum quickly moves on. Rosar addresses subtleties that may escape casual cyclists. The ideal seat height for maximum efficiency (a slight flex of the knee when your leg reaches the bottom of a downstroke) or seat angle for maximum comfort (no more than 5 degrees pointed up or down). He talks about proper clothing, showing off a blinding neon green vest for visibility, essential tools (including a dollar bill, which can be used to purchase a snack or to patch a nasty blowout), that the most significant bit of equipment -- other than the bike -- is cycling shorts, which are padded and will keep you from chafing.

Alas, when it finally comes time to ride and learn some valuable pedaling skills -- riding in a straight line, starting and stopping, hand signals and "scanning" (looking over your shoulder while continuing to ride the aforementioned straight line) -- it starts raining.

"You can ride in the rain ..." says Rosar, who has been teaching the class since 1991. But they won't this day (that's covered in a more advanced commuting class). Instead, the aforementioned skills will be homework. Homework in preparation for next week's full immersion session.

Riding the mean streets of downtown Cary.