University Recreation’s Adventure Education hosted its first bike maintenance day Wednesday to help students and other community members fix and learn the ins-and-outs of their bikes.
Chris Bullard, adventure education coordinator, explained while the UREC can’t currently repair student bikes regularly, this event and future events should teach students about bike maintenance and prepare them for any future issues their bikes may pick up.
“We’ll be helping them go through the process of troubleshooting their bikes and seeing what the issues are and how to fix them,” he explained. “We’ll bring over our tools and spend some time working on the student’s bikes as well.” The course is set to reoccur in fall and next spring as well. However, Bullard said summer is a convenient time to premier the event with students taking fewer classes and Adventure Education instructors keeping a less hectic schedule as well.
“It’s convenient for them and us,” he said. “We can design the curriculum and take care of things right now before they get back into that busy time.”
Two Adventure Education instructors, Brad Penny and Stephanie Linares, oversaw the event, which ran from about 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. The course progressed from general information to specific solutions during the hour and a half.
The two instructors covered areas like repairing common damages, what bike tools are most handy and convenient to use, how to replace tire tubes and other specific and common issues regular bike riders encounter.
Linares even touched on certain traffic issues. “You have to be an aggressive driver on the road,” she said. “If you’re too far to the side, cars will think ‘Oh, I can pass them up because they’re not on the road.”
She also stressed the recyclablity of bicycles and how keeping spare and left-over parts can come in useful.
“Bikes are really recyclable,” she explained. “You can make a bike basically from several random parts.”
To demonstrate more mechanical solutions, Penny and Linares used Student Recreation Complex bikes, which were donated by Student Government. However, the last hour of the course saw instructors helping participants with their own bike problems. As instructors approached each person’s individual problems one at a time, this allowed participants to see examples of how to solve certain issues.
Bullard said the experience from this event should help instructors improve the curriculum for future events as well.
“We’re just trying to get this knowledge out to the students who are here over the summer and also give our staff the opportunity to continue growing and learning as instructors,” he said. “We’re continually looking at the curriculum and how we’re presenting it.”
This event was free for UREC members and non-members, but participants had to reserve spots ahead of time.
 
____ Contact Austen Krantz at [email protected]