Celebrating women from all walks of life who have used the bicycle as a vehicle for freedom, storytelling, coping, and connection.

Join us for live and prerecorded virtual conversations, starting May 6, during Bike Month.

Register by May 6 and automatically enter the gear giveaway with Ortlieb, Bedrock Sandals, Hope Tech, Sawyer Products, SHREDLY, TrainingPeaks, Wechsel Tents, and Zenbivy. Eight chances to win.

Register by May 6 to watch live
Register by May 20 to watch later

Cycling With 2025 is presented by Miles of Portraits and

And supported by

Speakers and Interviewers

Meryem is currently on a 30,000 km solo journey criss-crossing Africa, starting in her hometown of Casablanca. Through joys and struggles, she is showcasing the beauty of her continent, embracing the journey, and challenging perceptions of what’s possible for African women and women around the world. We’ll chat with her from the road, so wifi might be spotty. :)

YouTube
Website

Meryem Belkihel / @MeghyLost

Natalie is the first documented transgender woman to bike the Pan-American Highway, from Alaska to Argentina. In 2021, she wrote an essay for Bicycling Magazine about her experience cycling south after experiencing her lowest low. In it, she writes, “Few things in the world are as freeing as reaching a point of no return and coming out the other side.” Natalie is driven to bicycle travel for its constant surprise, connection to the earth, and the people.

Print photography store
Instagram

Natalie Corbett

Janie is a social-change communications consultant, trained end-of-life doula, mindfulness coach and ultra endurance cyclist. She has raced the Tour Divide and the TransAmerica Bike Race (twice), placing third overall in 2017. Today, she is less focused on going fast and setting records, and more interested in exploring how endurance sports can keep our minds flexible and our hearts generous, no matter what life brings. Her most recent adventure is navigating breast cancer.

Janie Hayes

Brooke is a climate organizer, independent journalist, and correspondent for High Country News. She covers climate, water, land, and the energy transition. In 2018, Brooke and Kailey Kornhauser received the 2018 Lael Rides Alaska Women’s Scholarship, enabling them to craft a 1,000-mile bike trip across the state of Alaska. Along the way, they listened and shared the stories of climate change and fossil fuel extraction.

Website
Photo: Jeri Gravlin

Brooke Larsen

Mary McGowan / @rebelwithoutacar

Back in 2015, Mary sold her car and began using her bicycle to get everywhere. She is a passionate bicycle enthusiast and advocate who has used the bicycle to get from A to B, travel the world, and volunteer for nonprofits like Bike Walk Greenville and Momentum Bike Clubs. On YouTube and Instagram, she shares the trials, tribulations, and adventures of carfree living in a U.S. city.

Photo: Peter Bauman

When Jasmine lost the old version of herself, she went on a search to find her. In the midst of what she later realized was depression, she started small with short bike rides in her neighborhood. During her 2020 Cycling With Virtual Summit interview, she says, “Being able to see in real time that my body and my mind were still working [made me realize] like, okay, I can do something. I’m not completely lost.” Then, with $50 in her pocket, she embarked on a cross-U.S. bike trip with her dog and a violin. At the end of it, she did not find the old Jasmine, but rather, something much better. She found the new version of herself and accepted her.

Jasmine Reese

Bursting with joy and love for the cycling community, Marley is a self-described fat cyclist and cofounder of All Bodies on Bikes. The nonprofit believes, “All bodies are good bodies and all bikes are good bikes.” Marley’s cofounder, Kailey Kornhauser, was interviewed at the 2020 Cycling With Virtual Summit.

Instagram
Photo: Gretchen Powers

Marley Blonsky

Judi is the founder of Uptown & Boogie Healthy Project, a nonprofit aimed at expanding access to fresh food and cycling to low-income residents in New York City. She speaks passionately about her bike trips around the world, and how they’ve inspired her bicycle advocacy and healthy food access work back home.

Judith “Judi” Desire

Laura’s journeys have taken her tens of thousands of miles via cycling, hiking, hitchhiking, and sailing. She has hitchhiked across Latin America, cycled the Great Divide, backpacked through swamps and deserts, and spent more than a thousand nights in her tent. Along the way, she works from the wild as a freelance writer and visual storyteller, propping her portable keyboard in public libraries, cabin porches, and caves along the way.

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Facebook
Kaisa Leka in conversation with Laura at the 2020 Cycling With Virtual Summit

Laura Killingbeck

With a bicycle and a cardboard sign, Devi traveled across six continents to collect stories on the impacts of climate change, eventually turning it into 1,001 Voices on Climate Change, a book published by Simon & Schuster. She has been an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Times, and Rest of World.

Website

Devi Lockwood

Stephanie, a recently minted Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Denver School of Public Affairs, is the first documented Black woman to have completed the 50-year old cross-country TransAmerica Bicycle Trail. Following her trip, she founded and led the Denver chapter of Black Girls Do Bike, an organization that fosters and promotes the joy of cycling among women and girls of color. Stephanie writes in Adventure Cycling, "As straightforward as it is to ride a bike, it is much more difficult to overcome the apprehension of entering a world that does not expect you in it.”

Instagram
Stephanie’s interview at the 2020 Cycling With Virtual Summit
Photo: Jenn Piccolo

Stephanie Puello

Inspired by people like Jasmine, Whitney found the courage and confidence in 2021 to bike across America – something that she had previously thought could not be done as a plus-size Black woman. In a joint Instagram post with Tommy Corey, author of the book All Bodies Outside, Whitney writes, “[On the trip,] I was changing perceptions and busting untold stories like mine wide open. Being that representation, not just for myself but for others, is essential because we have all these narratives that aren’t necessarily true.”

Whitney Washington

Behind the Scenes

Annalisa van den Bergh: Summit Organizer and Designer

After losing my mother in my early twenties, I cycled across the U.S. Along the way, I took portraits of everyone I met in a series called Miles of Portraits, which later expanded into an international film series I made with a friend, and now, this virtual summit. I’m a RISD-trained graphic designer, writer, filmmaker, and #Insulin4All advocate. My work has been featured in the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, Quartz, and on the cover of Adventure Cyclist Magazine. The Cycling With Virtual Summit is a culmination of the connections, inspiration, and trail family I’ve gathered from 15,000+ miles of bike travel.

Website
Photo: David Sheppard

Melissa, who illustrated the marketing materials for this summit, is a designer based in Kyiv, Ukraine. We met when we were both students at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in the Netherlands and reconnected a decade later when we both found ourselves back in the country. She is an expressive illustrator who loves word play, primary colors, and inserting joy into her work. The bicycle in the header illustration is inspired by the vintage one her late father rode.

Instagram
Website
Photo: Annalisa van den Bergh

Melissa Chan–Yarova: Illustrator

Register by May 6 to watch live
Register by May 20 to watch later

Schedule

LIVE Tuesday, May 6: 9am PT / 12pm ET / 6pm CET

Cycling With All Bodies

Marley Blonsky in conversation with Laura Killingbeck

How can we build a more inclusive cycling community? What actually makes a ride inclusive? What are the challenges of being a content creator in today’s economy?

LIVE Wednesday, May 7: 9am PT / 12pm ET / 6pm CET

Cycling With The Patriarchy

Panel discussion with Laura Killingbeck, Natalie Corbett, Stephanie Puello, and Janie Hayes

A conversation in response to the viral internet debate asking women if they’d rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear. Inspired by Laura Killingbeck’s BIKEPACKING.com piece, Weighing in on "Man or Bear".

What are the different ways fear can present itself? How can we learn to work with our intuition? How does the patriarchy mask the true feelings of men? What are the particular experiences of trans women and women of color in the outdoors? What structural issues in the cycling industry can be improved upon?

LIVE Thursday, May 15: 10am PT / 1pm ET / 7pm CET

Cycling With Climate Change

Devi Lockwood in conversation with Brooke Larsen

How can bikes be used as tools for conversation and storytelling? What voices stand out from journeying six continents in search for stories on climate? When attempting to garner empathy, does storytelling trump even the most alarming statistics?

LIVE Date and time to be announced – since we are catching Meryem on the road!

Cycling With Curiosity

Meryem Belkihel in conversation with Annalisa van den Bergh

How can we let go of irrational fears strangers have for us? How can the bicycle bust preconceptions and generalizations about a place? What has been most surprising while crossing the continent of Africa? How can riding a bicycle teach us about other cultures?

Prerecorded Watch anytime

Cycling With Courage

Whitney Washington in conversation with Jasmine Reese

How does one get the bravery to bike travel on their own? How can we gain the confidence to ride our own ride? How do you manage strangers, family, and friends’ fears? How can we let go of the misconception that cycling must lead to weight loss?

Prerecorded Watch anytime

Cycling With Community

Judi Desire in conversation with Mary McGowen

How can bike travel inspire bicycle and healthy food advocacy work back home? How can we inspire more people to get on bikes? When bike traveling, what are the benefits of not planning and going with the flow? What is observed from biking through so many cultures?

Cycling With 2025 is presented by Miles of Portraits and

And supported by

Special thanks to Patreon supporters and in-kind sponsors Big Agnes, Hope Tech, Quad Lock, Sawyer Products, SHREDLY, Supernova, TrainingPeaks, Wechsel Tents, Wild Rye, and Zenbivy.

Register by May 6 to watch live
Register by May 20 to watch later

Thank you for supporting this work

Opting to pay for this summit not only supports the work that goes into organizing and designing it (I’m a one person team), but will also help fund the documentary I’ve been making since 2021:

Throughout his life, Sonny Rasmussen has experienced misconceptions of his deafness, intelligence, and ability. While riding a bicycle though, he feels everyone is equal. The bike has become a connector between communities and a vehicle that his best friend Dale calls his lifeline.

Bike Is His Lifeline follows Rasmussen’s two attempts at the 4,200-mile, cross-America, self-supported Trans Am Bike Race (TABR), as well as the journeys of a handful of TABR cyclists including a Canadian racer coming out of a depression, an 81 year old multiple time finisher, and a trucker turned cyclist.

From the unprecedented closure of flooded Yellowstone National Park to the relentless nothingness of the windy Great Plains, cyclists’ willpower is tested and upheld by a continent spanning community that will renew your faith in humanity.

“I start cooking a week in advance. When we see they’re about a mile out, we get out our cow bells and we scream and holler like our lives depend on it. It’s an amazing feeling being part of somebody’s dream like that. It chokes me up because it’s a dream they’ve worked hard for. And there's almost an obligation on our part to make sure that dream can go as far as it can, safely.”

(–Jalet Farrell, co-owner of the donation-based Spoke’n Hostel)

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