Playing the Big Game

An interview with AM Van Doren, owner of Revolutions Per Bikefit Studio

AM Van Doren, the baron of bike fitting

AM Van Doren is 30 and lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. We met during a ride with the Non-Binary Bike Club they founded this Spring, where I learned they were also the owner of Revolutions Per Bikefit Studio. I signed up for the relatively affordable “street fit” service, designed for urban commuters riding their bikes in street shoes, in the lead up to my first half century ride. Not only did AM help me adjust my bike to make it more comfortable to ride, they also taught me a ton about proper body positioning, pedaling and my bike itself. Below, we chat about being Midwestern Princesses, recovering from injury, and the problem with bike culture …

BUT FIRST!

We’ll be co-hosting a group ride to Riis next Friday afternoon. We’ll stop at Roll-N-Roaster, a truly ridiculous coastal restaurant restaurant that serves both roast beef sandwiches AND pizza. Can both be good? We’ll find out next week. Please RSVP to join us on Partiful.

And now … the results of over two hours of conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.

What is a bike fit and why should someone get one?

It depends on who you ask. But for me, it’s pretty simple. A bike is made up of standard components like a frame and wheels that are combined with more adjustable components like stems, handlebars, saddles and seat posts. A bike fit is about addressing how your body interacts with all these components and how these components interact with your body. It’s about improving the relationship between the rider as a body and the bike as a machine. And if ride your bike with good posture, it reinforces good posture in every other area of your life.

I think of a bike fit as a collaborative process. I try to spend a session assessing how the way your bike is setup or sized is affecting your body to provide you with information about how you might change any dynamics that aren’t working. People should come to me if they want to learn more about your bike or your body on a bike; if you’re having any pain or discomfort while riding; or if you have big riding goals and think your bike could be holding you back. I’m not going to tell you that you have to do anything, but I will tell you what I would do to get the results you want.

Of course, if you just want to hang out and talk bicycles with me for three hours … that also works!

I would definitely recommend it. When did you start riding bikes yourself?

I think I was like five years old. Though I was riding a bike with training wheels before that. I guess I can’t remember a time where I wasn’t riding bikes. I’m from Columbia, Missouri. We had a driveway that I’d always ride these Tiny Tot bikes down. But I have a distinct memory of being five at my grandparent’s house in Chicago. There was this little red bike with no training wheels. My grandpa ran behind me pushing me until I was able to pedal for myself. From that moment on, I could ride a bike.

What’s Columbia like?

It’s a hippie place, a college town. So it attracts some interesting types. Have you ever been to Boulder, Colorado? Columbia, Missouri is like Boulder with less money and even more religion. There were vegetarian cafes, plenty of hipster stuff like that. Biking was normal, all of the kids on my street did it.

Did your parents bike?

They did. My dad would commute into work by bike most days a week. We were a pretty active family, big into camping. Every family vacation was like a 20 hour road trip to go camping somewhere. I liked hiking. There was a time when I was a teen where I was sort of like, “oh great, another time in the mountains,” but really, I can’t even front, I was almost always having a great time.

So you rode through your whole childhood?

Yeah. Not as much in high school, I was doing other things. But I brought the mountain bike that I had got when I was 13 to college at the University of Missouri. It was too small, but I would throw it in the back of my Mazda Sportwagon and take it to some of the trails that cross Missouri.

Bike packing certainly existed at this time, but it felt fringe. I was reading a lot of blogs about it. I’m sure if I had really wanted to do it, my parents would have been really supportive. But even as people who backpacked and biked, they would never have imagined doing both at once. Most of my trail riding, then, was just like two miles here, two miles there.

I’d mainly use my bike when I was drinking. Like, I would leave my car on campus, then get a ride home from someone else. The next day, I’d ride my bike to get to wherever I had left my car and drive it back.

That’s the most responsible version of that story I could have imagine.

Yes, I’m very responsible. I never did anything crazy in college. I was very chaste. Very straight.

Were you not out at that point?

No, I was definitely not out. I was making out with girls at parties every weekend. When I did come out at the end of college, I was told by everyone that it was pretty obvious.

Everyone was like, “Yeah! We know!”

Exactly. When I moved to New York in like 2016, I was out as bi socially, but not at work. It took me until like 2021 to come out as a lesbian.

What were your first years here like?

Well, I didn’t have a bike. I was living in the East Village with a roommate that worked at Goldman Sachs. It was a teeny tiny place, like 200 ft for both of us. My bed took up 90% of my bedroom, like a tiny futon across from the fridge type vibe. Have you seen the IKEA table that has a ledge you can fold down? That was all we could fit. I didn’t feel like I had room in my apartment for bikes. I remember these was someone in my building who always locked their bike up on the landing outside our apartment. I was so jealous.

When I moved to Brooklyn the following year, I got one almost immediately. I think I moved on July 1. By July 4th, I had bought a bike.

What kind of bike was it?

It was a Specialized Diverge from 2017. I bought it new. I walked to Bicycle Habitat and bought it. I loved it. I stripped the paint off it, made it raw aluminum. I upgraded a lot of the components on it with help from friends. And then, last January, it was stolen. It was tough to lose something I loved so much.

So how many bikes do you have right now?

Well, I have three in ridable condition and then a frame in a box I need to build. The frame is a mountain bike with suspenion. I have a gravel touring bike, a fixed gear bike and then another rigid mountain bike a client gave me. I also have a sad old Italian folding bike that I bought on a whim at the Bike Jumble but have only rode three times. It needs new tires. And I feel like Mr. Bean every time I ride it. It’s not bad, I just want to feel sexy when I ride a bike.

I guess I’ve found a way to replace my monogamous love for that one bike with a love for many many bikes.

Is becoming a biker a pipeline to polyamory?

Oh god. You know what, at least in the lesbian bike scene, totally. Personally, I’ve tried it and it’s not for me. I’m a fully monog type guy. It’s the midwestern dad in me. Like, let me get a lawnmower, two children, a wife, and let me grill some chicken.

Is that actually how you feel?

It’s weird. Coming out as non-binary and being out as queer and living in New York City has made me super chill with the way I grew up. I’m kind of recreating my childhood as an adult. Instead of a super intense church, I go to a super intense Aikido dojo. Instead of being involved in misogynistic religious space, I’m involved in a misogynistic industry.

It’s kind of a reclamation of my identity. I went through a period where I felt like I had to shake off an identity that was foisted on me: the Midwestern Christian girl. And then, as you get older you can see the parts of it that actually make sense for you. I really like the kind of life I grew up with. It was a lot of outdoorsy people who just camped and chilled and read books. That’s basically what I like to do now! I go to the beach, I have my bike. That’s my life. It’s not that dramatic, but it’s been interesting to realize that I was cut from a very specific cloth.

My parents are like, stupid accepting now. Which is weird, it’s like, what was all that repression for? It’s so strange, because it was very clear and obvious when I was growing up that I couldn’t really be who I was. There was something wrong with that. But now, it’s kind of chill vibes. I had to deal with the trauma, but now I kind of have to try and forget about it? Because we’re on great terms. I call my dad and he’s just like, “What’s up man! Business sounds like it’s going great! I’m proud of you and see you like a human being.” Like, what? Fine, I’ll take it. I guess my parents love me in a way I can experience.

Are you familiar with “The Artist’s Way”? This is sounding a little Julia Cameron to me.

Oh yeah. I’ve done it twice. Actually, funny story, “The Artist’s Way” is why I have this business. I had bought it a couple of years ago and did it seriously last Spring. Soon after, I hosted this pride party with a friend and had the unfortunate realization that you can actually do anything if you just decide to and work at it.

At the time a few of my friends had started to ask me about fitting. I had learned how to do it a few months before, and started to say yes. It was a slow start. I officially registered my LLC a year ago. I started with those contacts, and have continued to grow entirely through word of mouth and the Instagram account. People are weirdly recommending me on Reddit? It’s been fun to meet the Reddit bike nerds. I mean, occasionally I get a challenging biker in here, but I’ve been pretty lucky.

And really, getting to work with more types of people has only helped me grow and develop my skills as a bike fitter. I’m seeing more types of problems and getting better at helping people try things to fix them. It’s been really cool, but also kind of a shock how quickly this became a thing I was spending five days a week on.

What were you doing when you moved here?

Uhh … management consulting.

Seriously?

Yeah. I studied business in undergrad. I actually had wanted to move to Chicago. II wanted to be in a city, but, it’s so Midwestern, I was just like, “New York is so extra.” Everyone who I went to college with that wanted to go to New York was so type A and I am very very type B. So I just assumed it was not for me. But I couldn’t find a job in Chicago. The company I did end up working for told me they could send me to Philly or New York. I said I’d go wherever, and they sent me to New York.

I spent 18 months as a consultant. I had fun! I was very ambitious. I was trying to be a boss bitch at that moment, living in my tiny apartment. I had all these other yuppie transplant friends who were also working in like accounting, sales or finance. I would go out with my business fraternity brother’s alumni network.

Wait, you were in a FRAT?

I was in a frat. Just when you think you know me! But yeah, we’d go out a lot. I was living it up. But eventually, I was just like, I don’t think I can keep doing the corporate thing. When I took the job, my dad actually told me I was selling my soul. For him, it was like I was conscripting in the army. I was really mad at him initially, but once I had been in the environment for awhile, I came around to his way of thinking. It just felt like it really restricted the way I was allowed to exist. And ultimately, there wasn’t really a lot of pathway for me to grow there. By the time I left, our company was starting to push its consultants to just like, help people implement software. I enjoyed some of the projects, but like, my brain is just not set up to do that.

I had started to interviewing around when I found this career changers program for people that wanted to become teachers. And there was one for Physical Education for elementary school. I’ve always loved kids, so I was like, “You know what, let me just apply. Nothing will happen of it anyway!” I think I sent the application in the day it was due, just a few hours before the midnight deadline. I found out I got the job when I was on a bus back from Philly. I had decided to take it by the time I got home.

How long were you a teacher?

I think collectively, it was about three and a half years, if you include the amount of time I was in schools and the time after where I was tutoring. I loved teaching P.E. The program I was in was kind of designed to challenge the idea that P.E. should just be like, unstructured recess. Not that that is bad and useless, by any means, it certainly has a time and a place. But physical education is a massive developmental realm. You can use the time to help kids build crucial motor and social and problem solving skills. You can instill a love of sports and recreation that will carry on into adulthood.

Because I was teaching at public schools, I was able to do this for kids whose parents wouldn’t have the time or money to like, enroll their kids in after school sports programs where they’d otherwise develop those abilities. Without those opportunities, some of those kids end up growing into adults who don’t really know how to feel confident in their bodies, who don’t know how to move, who don’t know how to stay healthy and share outdoor space with other people.

It was a really hard job. I was like 24 when I started doing it. It was instrumental to my development as a person, but it took a lot from me. I would see every single student in the school, which meant learning the names of 450 kids, but also trying to be attentive towards their needs.

You said you tutor. Do you still do that?

No. I love tutoring and the kids are usually great. But it’s a challenge to deal with the parents paying you money. They usually have goals for the kid that you have to at least listen to. When you’re teaching at a school, you can be more focused on what the kids need. It creates a lot of different pressures to manage. Anyway, it’s nice then that, today, when one person chooses to come to me for my services, I can completely focus on their needs. I won’t ever need to talk to their parents.

To be honest, you might hear from my mom. She loves to comment on my stories.

Well, that’s fine. I’ll FaceTime your mom. I love reply guys actually. People talk shit on them, but if you’re hyping me up, or at least hitting me up in a way I can ignore, I’m okay with it.

RIP to your DMs. So when did you start doing Aikido?

Well, I’ve always been interested in somatics and the body-mind connection. It came up a lot in my P.E. training. I had read about Aikido during my studies. Then a few years ago, I noticed that there was an Aikido dojo like two blocks from my apartment. I decided to try it and just very quickly got into it.

How would you describe it?

It’s most similar to judo, but it’s non-competitive. It’s more about blending, working in harmony with the other person who is with you on the mat. Everything is a partner technique. Like, the person who is doing the throw and the person that is being thrown are both supposed to be playing the role as best as they can. Of course, things come up during practice, but it isn’t meant to involve like, combat. It’s about improving yourself in a dynamic with another person. I really like the vibe of it.

It sounds chill in a way that cycling is often not.

Yeah, I think our sport is burdened by the number of niches there are. Like, you can organize cyclists into two camps. There are people who bike a lot and have made biking a central part of their identity. And then there are cyclists who just use a bike to get around.

I think people in the former group break themselves up into a lot of micro categories. There are people who ride only in large groups, commuters that advocate for more urban infrastructure, people who train solo for super intense races. There’s further division based on the type of bikes you ride, whether you’re a roadie or a fixed gear rider, a vintage bike only person, all these different camps.

There are certainly spaces where all these folks can come together and live in harmony. But you can’t just eliminate the history of our sport and the cultural knowledge that leads people to believe choosing to ride a certain type of bike with a certain type of body in a certain type of way reflects something on their legitimacy as a cyclist.

Some of this comes from industry itself, which is still mainly run by and for men. It’s weird, bikes are still seemingly designed with people between the height of 5’ 6” and 5’ 11”, which is a wildly small range. If you fall outside of that, you’re often paying the same amount of money to get a less efficient, improperly balanced product. You’ll have to work harder to go as fast as people with the type of bodies these bikes were designed for in mind. You’ll probably look less comfortable doing it, and therefore be taking less seriously because you might be seen as weak.

The problem then perpetuates itself. The people who are most served by the current cycling social scene and industries—slim 5’10 dudes—will be the most fervent consumers of the sport. So they’ll continue to get all their needs met. While the rest of us will just never be catered to.

I think New York has a pretty awesome cycling culture. It’s really diverse compared to what I’ve seen other places. Have you ever been to the Thursday Night Social Ride? It’s wild. You’ll see all sorts of people on all sorts of bikes just riding together without issue. And it is genuinely massive. When the weather is nice, they’ll have hundreds of people on rides. If you don’t love chaos, you’ll hate it, but I think it’s wonderful. They do a great job too of not just sticking to a single borough. They always start in Columbus Circle, but you’re just as likely to end in the Bronx are you are Brooklyn.

Of course, like any community, we have our issues. Most of the group rides are still super heavily male and a lot of women I know have experienced harassment and other upsetting things at them. But I see a lot of reasons for optimism.

Are there any misconceptions about city cycling you’ve noticed?

The danger aspect is interesting. I love riding here and am very confident doing it. But if the thought of riding in New York City scares you, I’m never going to try and convince you into it. Just do literally anything else. But if you decide to do it, you can really find a lot of helpful information about how to do it safely that’ll help you become confident yourself. Some of that will come from reading and watching things online, but also going on rides with groups and chatting with people at bike shops will really make you feel like part of the community. And your knowledge will build over time. There are pathways. It’s a skill set.

Do you have a favorite place to ride in the city?

I’m happiest when I’m riding down to the Rockaways. I’m pretty loyal to biking straight down Bedford Ave. You can take it almost the whole way there, then turn left at the Applebee’s that’s right on the coast. After a bit more, you pass Roll-N-Roasters on the left, which I think is the best food establishment in the world. Have you been?

Only once. Someone broke up with me at the beach, but because she had driven me there, we had to drive back home together. We stopped at Roll-N-Roasters on the way.

A gorgeous experience. Actually, I had a really similar experience. I was with someone that I wasn’t dating, but kind of wanted to be dating. We had this talk where it became really clear it wouldn’t work. But we went to Roll-N-Roasters after and I’ve been a stan since. I just like the vibe of it. I like that they have pizza and roast beef and shakes and Coronas and champagne on the menu. Oh and if you come in with a helmet, they give you a free water bottle. Disposable plastic, but still. People talk a lot of shit about it, and I want to defend it.

Does it remind you of the midwest? Like, it feels like a weird fit in New York to me.

Yeah, it’s like Sonic or DQ. It’s like yeah, we’re going for ice cream and burgers and roast beef and some drinking. Whatever we need! It’s a nice antidote to the places in Brooklyn that are like, “we’re not pretentious” but in a pretentious way.

Where it’s $30 for a hamburger.

Yeah, there’s something nice about just a regular spot. I don’t even think the food is that good, and it’s certainly not free. But you get exactly what you pay for and it always hits the spot.

And crucially, unlike Rippers, it lands on the map before Riis.

Yeah, I like Rippers but it’s main advantage is that it is right on the beach. Whenever you eat it, you’re feeling the beach endorphins.

Right right. How do you feel about going over that tiny bridge where you’re supposed to dismount?

The Gil Hodges? Yeah, I don’t dismount. That would be narc behavior. It actually feels more scary to me to dismount for some reason. And it is wide enough that you can pass people who are biking in the other direction. Just barely.

We were supposed to do that ride together a few months ago, but that was when you messed up your knee. Was it a biking injury?

Nah, it was an overuse injury from Aikido. I had torn something in it but it wasn’t so bad that I stopped training at my usual 15 hours a week. I then tried to do Farmer’s Daughter, which is a 65 mile gravel race with like over 6,000 feet of elevation gain. I got like five miles in and was just starting to climb when I started to feel a lot of pain. At that point, I had also been waking up in the middle of the night with pain, which is obviously bad, but I had been ignoring it. The race was a breaking point for me though. I called my doctor and started the process of acknowledging and dealing with my injury.

How has your recovery from the injury been?

The race was in May. At this point, nine weeks out, my knee feels great. I’m passing all the PT tests and I’ve been told that I can go back to my original intensity levels in another six weeks. Which was pretty high, actually. I was really going for it in the weeks before I had to stop.

But it’s been difficult to actually keep myself resting. I process the world through my movement. In the week after the gravel race, I ended up irritating it more while I was on crutches. It was so frustrating to barely be able to do anything and to have to stop working for a week. I couldn’t really even go up and down the stairs of my apartment. I was forced to revisit every single coping mechanism I’ve ever used in my life, healthy and unhealthy. I learned a lot about myself.

Like what?

Well, starting the bike fitting business over the last year has been this hard, weird, intense thing. I’ve been really supported in a lot of ways, but it’s also been something that has led me to feeling a lot of pressures from different people. I was trying to do a lot of things at once. What happened with the injury is that all of the noise got really, really, really loud. I couldn’t get out of a certain thought patterns. I kept thinking “I can’t do this” or “Everything’s going to fall apart.”

But, then, it didn’t. And I started to feel a sense of clarity around what my priorities actually were. I guess that happens when there are only a few hours each day you can do things. Like, I would love to go to your birthday party, but I can’t because of the stairs in your building. I would love to go get a drink with you, but I can’t because I already did an errand. I’d love to do like three clients in a day, but I literally cannot stand up that long.

It was intense, but I feel like it really speed up the process of me becoming the adult version of myself. There’s something very adult about being able to identify how you really want to be able to spend your time and to lock in on what’s important to you. That’s really how I feel now. I’m so much more zoned in than I was pre-injury. So, I guess I should thank my knee for everything it took away from me.

Yes, thank you, knee! I suppose that includes the non-binary bike ride, which you’ve now officially stepped down from as a leader, right?

I have yeah. I came out as non-binary last summer in Pride Month. A big part of how I came to be able to see myself as non-binary was through meeting other trans and non-binary cyclists I met on different group rides. They were also often some of my first clients here at Revolutions. In conversations, we realized that all of us hadn’t really felt all that included in certain group rides, even ones that were designed to be inclusive. Like with NightCAP for example, which is specifically a place for women, or at least non-men. The people who would join were mostly straight women and then some queer people. And I kept meeting some AMAB and non-binary people that didn’t feel all that welcome in that space.

So, I started planning random ad hoc rides in Instagram DM chats with like, nine people. Then, in November, I led a workshop on bike fitting at Principles, a bike cafe in Gowanus, and met this person Jordan, a mechanic at Ride Brooklyn. I traded them bike fits for help designing my website, and we started going on rides with the larger group. Eventually, I asked them if they would co-lead this as a regular thing. They were on board pretty immediately.

What were the goals you all set out to accomplish?

It’s really just to make cycling more inclusive and accessible, and to make non-binary cyclists more visible. There are plenty of cycling groups that are open and friendly, but a lot the people you meet can be standoffish and exclusionary. I just wanted our club to be a place that would be super welcoming of everyone, no matter whether you were non-binary, questioning things about your gender identity, or just looking for good vibes.

It’s been great, it’s been awesome. I met you there! But these days, I just have a lot on my plate. After the knee injury, I’ve been doing a lot of necessary reprioritization. I was thinking about talking to Jordan and KK about stepping down at the end of the year. Then, I just had one of those weeks where I was like “Oh, I am treading water, and next week I’ll be treading water too.” I can only sustain that for so long before something has to go. So, I talked to them and they agreed to keep leading it.

It’s really nothing dramatic. It’s just like, if I want my business to become what I can be, I need to take it seriously and put most of my energy into it.

Was that a hard decision?

I mean, yes and no. Since my knee has been functioning again I’ve been working like, six days a week. And I feel honored to have that amount of work and opportunity. For awhile, I felt like I was operating with a lot of audacity. I wasn’t sure if the industry would kick me to the curb. It hasn’t. People have been connecting with what I’m trying to do and resonating with my mission. It’s help me grow more confident as I’m getting more skilled. It no longer feels like I’m just playing around. I’m trying to create a tangible difference in how information about bike fit is understood to push the industry in a way that it will support more kinds of people.

It’s hard to keep your brain right when you’re getting like, one day off a week. In order to do this job to the level that I want, I have to be able to pay attention to every single particular client and bike that comes in. The details are super important. To be a frank, after being a year of being in my 30s, I feel like my years of being open and exploring the world are wrapping up. I just want to be able to hone in on a few things and become masterful at doing them. I don’t want to just talk a big game. I want to play a big game. And to play a big game, you have to be dedicated.

As much as I love riding bikes with friends in the streets, it’s just going to have to be a smaller portion of my time each week. That’s sad, I’ve been mourning that over the last year. But I would rather be a really good bike fitter and a really good business owner then to be just pretty good at those things and also only pretty good at being a ride leader. I just don’t want to half ass anything.

How did your last ride go last week?

It was actually enormous, I think it was the biggest group we ever had. I think that’s because we had tried to do the ride three times, but kept having to postpone it. Twice that was because of rain, but once it was because of my knee. The concept for it kept getting progressively sillier. We decided to add games at each of the stops, which were really fun. Everyone was a great sport about it.

I actually decided it would be my last ride the night before it. I texted KK and Jordan with the news before we met up for it. But I didn’t actually tell any of the riders, so it wouldn’t be like a goodbye ride for me or anything like that. It was still really lovely to show up and see so many people, including friends who have been coming to the rides a lot and new people I had never met. It’s just a really fun group.

Will we see you on non-binary rides in the future?

I mean, no not at every ride. But like, I’m going to keep riding my bike. You’ll see my around, I’m sure.