Linn County cyclist brings women together with mountain biking group

Leah Fuller stumbled into mountain biking mostly by accident, happening upon a trail in George Wyth State Park when she was growing up in Waterloo. Now, more than 30 years later, she runs a Linn County area Facebook group with more than 300 members for women mountain bikers.

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“I ended up buying a mountain bike from Scheels. I didn't know anything about mountain biking, but I just needed a bike that could handle that stuff. So, I just kind of did it on my own. There wasn't a club or anything. I just liked doing it,” she said.

Fuller would ride the trails at George Wyth often when she was in college at the University of Northern Iowa, but she wasn’t plugged into the mountain biking community at the time. Eventually, she graduated, got married and moved to Marion. She still regularly went biking, but mostly used her road bike, taking the various paved trails around Linn County. Then one day in about 2014 or 2015, she happened across another mountain biking trail.

“I like to do a lot of outdoor stuff, so I would ride the regular trails. Then it was kind of the same thing. I'm riding out at Wanatee (Park, near Marion) where they've got the horse trails, the wider trails, and I’m dinking around and sure enough, hey, there’s a single track out here. What the heck? It was kind of like a deja vu of 20 years ago,” Fuller said.

It didn’t take long of riding on Linn County’s mountain biking trails before Fuller ran into other cyclists, and learned about LAMBA, the Linn Area Mountain Bike Association, which is responsible for the single-track trails in the county.

She started attending occasional group rides with the group, but was disappointed by the lack of other women in it, she said.

“I was like, this is all fine and well, but I want to ride with some women. And I knew a handful of women who like to mountain bike, so I looked around and asked if there was a women’s mountain biking group somewhere, and there wasn’t. It kind of surprised me,” Fuller said.

While Fuller didn’t find a women’s group in Linn County, she did come across information about Fearless Women of Dirt, a women’s mountain biking group started by cycling blogger Josie Smith in Decorah. Smith recently had started expanding the group to other locations across the Midwest, and was looking for ambassadors to lead new chapters. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to Fuller, so she reached out.

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In late 2019, Fuller started the Fearless Women of Dirt Cedar Rapids Facebook group, and started planning the first group rides for 2020. Although Fuller didn’t know it when she started the group, the timing worked out perfectly as many people were looking for socially distant, outdoor activities they could do in the early stages of the pandemic.

“I thought, we’re supposed to be doing everything outside? You know what? We’re outside. I want this. I need this. So, we started riding in 2020,” Fuller said. “Sometimes it was just me and one other person, but by the end of the season, we had five, or six or seven regular people, and then it just grew from there.”

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Now, five years later, Fuller’s Facebook group has almost 350 members. Only about 30 of them regularly attend group rides, and not everyone can make it every week, but Fuller said she’s happy with how the group has grown. Last year, she said the average for a weekly ride was usually between seven and 12 people, but the largest turnout was about 20.

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“Just about every week we have at least one new person,” Fuller said. “It’s super fun. We’ve got our regulars, and then once summer starts you’ve got people on vacation and with conflicts.”

The group meets every Monday evening during the summer, usually hitting trails at Wanatee Park or Beverly Park and Sac and Fox Trail in Cedar Rapids. Fuller said later in the season, she’ll sometimes take the group to more advanced trails like Sugar Bottom Trails in Johnson County. She said she tries to plan the route around each week’s participants because she wants the group to be a place where people from every skill level can feel welcome.

“We've got some really great ladies who are so supportive and better than I am at cheering each other on and reaching out. When somebody comes to something they've never done, like going over a root, or going over a log, or even something bigger, like doing a little drop, or a skinny, or some other technical feature, we'll stop, and they'll walk them through and support them, cheer them on,” Fuller said.

Fuller currently is planning for the first ride this year to be on either April 14 or 21, depending on what the weather looks like. She’s also partnered with Linn County Conservation to host a special women’s group ride May 3, which is International Women’s Mountain Biking Day.

“We’ve got everything from new people to people who race, and I’m somewhere in the middle. Just a chick who likes to ride her bike,” Fuller said.

Comments: (319) 398-8328; emily.andersen@thegazette.com