Just like a bike comes in a variety of colors, empowerment comes in a variety of flavors.
Or, to fit the theme of this essay, just like a bike pump comes in a variety of prices… from a Foundation High Pressure Bike Floor Pump that’s just over ten dollars; to a Topeak JoeBlow Booster Floor Pump at over $200. (That’s the one we used for the photos below that you are going to love; yes, it will make you feel just as empowered. That is a non-legally binding promise.).
And, just like a bike comes in a number of different sizes, there is no one-size-fits all path to empowerment.
What makes you feel empowered might vary from day to day.
According to Merriam-Webster to empower means:
- to give official authority or legal power to
- to enable
- to promote the self-actualization or influence of
This week, I found empowerment riding a vintage Crescent ladies bike for 120 kilometers in Öland, Sweden. But that is a story for another time (perhaps in a couple of weeks, if you leave a comment below to tell Jeff that you love this type of writing on his website). As it just so happens, there is a bike pump story to go with that adventure, too!
Before we dive in, and before you get your chamois in a bunch over artistic nude photos… please calm down. I’m currently publishing this from Sweden, and I’m reminded of how progressive other countries are. The US, unfortunately, has a long way to go. A core element of my work is to normalize nudity, and to rewrite the stigmas around what nakedness means. Nudity is not sexual by default. Nudity is our natural way of being. It has felt so incredibly refreshing to have conversations with my Swedish friends about the American mindset in contradiction to a more open-minded European POV. Let’s continue to celebrate that, and appreciate innocence of the human body in its natural form.
The story for today is about empowerment found in learning the basics of how to maintain your own bike.
It’s about growth, healing, relationships, and finding a sense of independence in a sport that is often dominated by men, or if not by men, then by group riding.
In this case, empowerment is woven by independence and trusting myself to have my own back.
22 January 2026
But first…
Yesterday, I went for my first solo bike ride since before the trip to Iceland, where we rode on both on lava and in two feet of snow with Lauf Cycles.
The irony was not lost on me that my ride preparation was very disempowering because of… yes, a bike pump. Exactly what this essay is named for, and inspired by.
It’s ironic because a while ago, I wrote an essay about how empowerment is a bike pump. But instead of empowering me for this first ride in several weeks, the bike pump humbled me… to the point that I was ready to apologetically ask Bonnie to get out of the car, so that I could change out of my bike clothes and we could go for a trail run instead. Sorry, Bonnie.
Fortunately, I am stubborn when I am befuddled about how something works — especially when it’s something that I have succeeded at many times before.
What happened, you wonder?
Well, I adjusted the spigot (? this is likely incorrect bike pump anatomy left in for humorous flair) to be pressed onto the valve. I have a Presta valve, so I unscrewed the top, and attempted to cram the two together. Nothing happened, other than an escaping of air. Then again, and again… And… again. Between attempts, I open and closed the spigot. I pushed on it. I unscrewed it. I googled if you need to change something based on a Schrader vs. Presta valve — even though I’ve always had the same valve, so that didn’t make sense. Over and over again, I pressed it on, only to listen to the enchanting orchestra of more air escaping… until there was no air left, and I was left with a flaccid tire.
For a moment, I contemplated trying the same thing on the rear tire. Maybe something was wrong with the valve? But then I would have two flat tires, instead of one.
I finally searched for something on the interwebs again, and, with an eye-roll, discovered the problem. I had the spigot in the closed position. As Charlie Brown likes to say: good grief. Fortunately, it was an easy remedy, and I soon had a properly inflated tire. On the less fortunate side of things, I ended up forgetting my helmet on the drive to the trail, and had to backtrack. But, all was not lost, because I ended up going for a ride a little more remote than what I had planned.
Which meant less humans, bikes, and dogs for Bonnie to run into — which meant less worrying for me.
So, I suppose… empowerment can be a bike pump, as long as you know how to use it, hey?
01 November 2024
Empowerment is a Bike Pump
Like most women I know, my introduction to mountain biking came through a man. An ex-boyfriend deep in the mountain biking world in Bellingham, with roots in Southern cross-country and cyclocross, to be exact. For a year and a half, I immersed myself in the enduro mountain bike world, progressing rapidly in one of the most intense riding regions globally (or so I’ve been told).
About a year into our adventure-infused relationship and as relational turbulence began to escalate, I became acutely aware of my dependence on him for navigating the mountain biking world. On a sunny spring day, I decided to take my first step toward independence: riding my first trail away from the familiarity (and therefore, perceived safety) of Galbraith.
But, as I packed up my bike, I realized that I didn’t even have a bike pump. I had to laugh at myself, realizing that I couldn’t even inflate tires without him.
Over the following months, I developed curiosity about the 101’s behind maintaining my bike.
I began collecting questions:
- What was the best chain lube for sloppy Pacific Northwest weather?
- When and how often does my chain need greasing? And why do people laugh at me when I refer to it as “grease”?
- What does that sound mean coming from my chain when it’s in the lowest gear?
- How often do I need to bleed my brakes?
- How often are you supposed to service your fork? Is this something you can do yourself?
- How does all this suspension work, and is the maintenance something I can do myself?
My world began to open up as I ventured on increasingly independent adventures – starting with meandering afternoons on Bellingham’s British Army trail, and growing into my first solo trip to Squamish after the relationship finally came to an end.
This trip reminded me of the magic that comes with traveling — and riding — alone.
I come from a background of solo international travel that started when I was 15, spending summers in England with family. That grew into study abroad independent studies, where I backpacked around Europe for college credit — until I graduated and could finally follow my lifelong dream of moving to Europe. I spent over a decade traveling back and forth, eventually making my home in Stockholm, Sweden with a self-employment visa under my belt. And all this travel? Alone.
When you travel alone, you inevitably make connections that would otherwise be missed if traveling in a group, or even in a pair. When we are with someone else, that person is our anchorpoint for social connection. It creates a comfort zone for us, and it makes you less approachable to strangers: because you’re already in a unit.
So it was a pleasant reminder when I met a new friend on Squamish’s Rupert trail, and we dove into a forest bike therapy session — winding between luminous devil’s club leaves and the iconic slabs that make Squamish riding so unique. Though she lived in Nanaimo, we stayed in touch, and met in person once again more than half a year later. Connections like that, at least in my experience, don’t happen in group settings. Another benefit of finding empowerment through solo riding.
Still, the question of safety is one that I’ve eventually had to face as I choose more adventures to step into without a partner in tow. From mountain biking to splitboarding, I’ve happily wandered into the backcountry with calculated risk. It’s something that a lot of people won’t do — and with good reason — and many may label as foolish. Even in my life coaching program modeled by Navy SEAL training, we emphasize the importance of having a swim buddy — eventually, something will inevitably go awry, and in those moments, your survival will depend on the person who is with you and their level of training.
We don’t rise to the level of our expectations — we fall to the level of our training.
So in this new world of backcountry empowerment, I’ve found myself in a bit of a conundrum. I have a love of independence and have never been good at canceling a plan simply because I didn’t have someone to go with. Where is the balance, I continue to wonder?
But before we dive into questions fueled by logic, let’s rewind to my initiation into the mountain bike world.
During the spring of 2023, I stepped onto the first bike I had ridden in almost two decades. A crash in grade school had deterred me from ever really having any interest in riding again. But despite that, I was apparently handling the bike quite well, because the first trails I was led down were blues. I give credit to two things here:
First, you don’t know what you don’t know.
Having never done such an activity before, I had no idea how hard the things were that I was doing. I had no comparison to what is considered slow or fast. I literally had no metrics to measure where I was at in exploring biking. It definitely helped to have someone leading the way who knew my ability level — because of that trust, I could follow his lead without overthinking anything. That, above all else, I’ve learned, is the greatest danger in downward descents: overthinking will get you injured more often than not.
And second, there is a lot to be said for the skill of managing mental resilience with stress management and other tools to mitigate fear responses.
After over a year in the new-to-me mountain bike scene, my comfort zone had been riding with others. That’s how it began, and, speaking of safety, it seemed like the safe thing to do. But beyond safety, the mountain bike community that I was initiated into often declared very loudly that riding is only fun in groups. Lately, as I’ve stepped back into my role as a life coach, I’ve found myself increasingly tired of people who are always running (er, riding) and avoidant of spending time alone with themselves.
On my first solo rides, I began to discover a different rhythm. While I’ve loved the high intensity of enduro riding — getting up as fast as possible to enjoy the exhilaration of the downs — I found new pleasure in slowing the pace. One thing I’ve learned in this container of solitude is that while I do enjoy the high of the adrenaline, I’m not an adrenaline junkie. During the winter months when I’ve explored the difference between in-bounds snowboarding and backcountry split-boarding in the Mount Baker Wilderness, I’ve had similar sentiments: yes, the downs are fun, but I enjoy being fully immersed in the grind of the hard work required to earn my turns — whether surfing the snow or winding my bike between old growth trees.
I am very proudly a self-diagnosed uphill athlete.
But back to the bike. During this ride up to British Army, I paused to watch eagles soar across the sky, dancing in the air and serenading one another. I stopped my ascent to observe snakes weaving through the long grass, dancing along the trail.
The more intense riders I’ve met talk about immersion in nature through their fast-paced circuits. But for me, I have to slow down to marinate myself in the environment. Otherwise, it feels like I’m moving too fast for it to penetrate my skin, and the healing power of nature slides right off.
As with everything, the philosophies you discover in a sport cross over to other areas of life.
As they say: how you do anything is how you do everything.
It’s easy to avoid presence when you’re racing through life in the same way you race through the trees. Yes, your drishti is focused ten feet ahead, but you miss out on the beauty all around you.
Drishti: the sanskrit term used to define a technique where the individual softly focuses and maintains the gaze on a particular point.“Where our eyes are directed our attention follows.”
Rather than marinate yourself in moments, they blur around you — sitting on the surface, unabsorbed, and easily forgotten. It’s an unfortunate theme in the world we live in, racing between one thing to the next, and where attention spans last for less than fifteen seconds. We are living in the age where the human attention span is less than that of a gold fish.
For me, the bicycle has become more than a vehicle purely for the sake of physical movement — it’s a conduit to spaces of solitude, steeped in stillness that nourish artistic exploration. As a fine art photographer, I use my bike to venture more efficiently into the quiet corners of forests that many never see, carrying my camera in my hip pack (and the hopes of avoiding a very expensive crash) with an intention to capture human vulnerability in its most raw, natural state.
Empowerment, for me, has come in chapters.
Layer after layer has adhered to me, like a second skin. As a fine art nude photographer, my reclamation of self began with taking nude self portraits in the northern moss-strewn forests of Sweden. The art was a way to take back my life and my body after fleeing the country from an abusive relationship. Over time, it became a way to confront a lifetime struggle with body dysmorphia. Now, I create sacred forest bathing containers for athletes to celebrate the hard work and discipline they dedicate to sculpting their bodies.
During those first chapters, mountain biking wasn’t a part of my world. Instead, I carried the world (in the form of a weight plate) on my back, rucking as an active forest bathing meditation.
This chapter of healing has revolved around a mountain bike — my beloved Ziggy — and I’m grateful for the additional ease to get places that take much more time to hike to.
These solo bike expeditions into the wilderness aren’t just photographic missions, but pilgrimages of sorts — each pedal stroke taking me deeper into landscapes where human presence woven together with the beating heart of mother nature feels a little more intimate. The mountain bike allows me to access these sacred, solitary spaces that exist beyond the edges of marked trails, where the forest breathes its own secret language and light filters through ancient branches like whispered memories.
In these moments, the bike pump metaphor extends further: just as I learned to inflate my own tires and am still learning to maintain my own trail machine, I’m also creating spaces of profound personal autonomy — both on the trail and through my art. My nude forest bathing shoots become another form of self-maintenance — a way of understanding myself through the lens of wilderness, vulnerability, and uninterrupted presence.
With my art celebrating the result of disciplining the human body, it’s only natural for the human body to be used to power the vehicle that gets us into these natural studio spaces.
As much as I have loved the high intensity of enduro bike riding that comes with the sole purpose of getting up as fast as possible to enjoy the downs — I found a new kind of pleasure in slowing the pace down to saturate myself more deeply in the nature surrounding me, instead of pedaling as fast as possible through it.
That first solo trip to Squamish marked a milestone. Crossing the border alone, I felt both empowered and intimidated. Though I’d been there before, the solo expedition carried an underlying feeling of unknown. The only solution was to take the first step and begin exploring. I couldn’t make progress by spinning question marks in my head. What needed to be spinning were the wheels beneath me.
Mountain biking can be therapeutic, but it shouldn’t be your only source of “therapy.”
Still, there’s something healing about learning to maintain your own machine, to trust your own judgment on the trails, and to find your own pace. Sometimes that pace means stopping to listen to the deep, throaty song of frogs or watch red-capped woodpeckers tap for food. Sometimes it means taking mid-ride writing breaks to listen to the muse.
And, yes — the amount of group rides that are available for those who feel in need of company is expansive, and a resource to utilize when finding your feet. But there is still a special feeling that only comes when you experience a ride completely on your own, with no time frame and no pace to keep. Bonus points if you leave your phone and smart watch behind.
More analog, less digital, if you please.
Of course, independence has a time and place. It carries both risks and rewards. It might be wise to wait until you have company before sending the SST rock roll for the first time of your life (unlike myself — I was alone, and waited until a stranger could watch me from the trail), but there is a healthy level of confidence to exercise in taking that first run with calculated risk.
When it comes to pedaling into the feeling of “empowerment,” I’ve found myself hesitant to use that word to label what has been a wild reclaiming of my independence, utilizing the mountain bike as a therapeutic tool for healing. Why?
Well, it seems America is obsessed with empowerment — and for good reason. We are often obsessed with things that we feel insecure about — things we cling hard to once we’ve attained them; or things that are lacking, that we simply don’t have enough of. In some way, they are threatened. But I digress.
Empowerment. It’s one of those words that’s been stuck on repeat, becoming white noise that people have tuned out. To use it is to be vulnerable because to talk about having it means that you have struggled to obtain it. It shines light on a wound, for the world to see.
Yes, and… That doesn’t make it bad. We can still find and feel empowerment, even if the full power of the word has been diluted.
All of that being said, taking myself on solo bike rides has been exactly that: empowering. A big part of that means having the tools and skills to take care of Ziggy (aka my Kona Process DL 134).
Sometimes empowerment is as simple as a bike pump. Sometimes it’s as complex as learning to trust yourself on a technical descent. Either way, it starts with taking that first step — or pedal stroke — alone.
The Joe Blow Booster is special because it has a secondary chamber that can be used to give a large burst of air to seat a tubeless tire. Just take note: it gets heavy after a while, and when the weather is cold enough to include hail, the metal becomes very cold against your hands. Probably not a problem unless you are taking your own naked bike pump photos.
As always, thanks for your support!
Any bike pumps you purchase through the links here will support the JKW channel, and as a result… fuel more empowerment!
If you enjoyed this essay, please click the little heart and leave a comment below — these philosophical musings are what I love most about writing, and they grow when we engage in dialogue, rather than monologue.
with love,
Savannah
p.s. Where can you find more philosophical musings? I publish an essay weekly over on my Substack, Reclaiming the Wild Woman. Kinda’ like my version of Jeff’s Patreon, but free and with written words.
p.p.s. A huuuuuge thank you to Jeff for creating the fun bike pump photos together, and being open-minded about sharing nude photos on the website. As I publish this from Sweden, I’m reminded at how far America has to go to erase the puritanical perception of the innocently naked body. We have a lot of work to do, and this is a step.
Another form of empowerment, dare I say?
We had a lot of fun with this shoot, though it was less than ideal conditions. I only had two days before leaving to Sweden for 2.5 months, but we managed to get creative, even when it started to hail in the middle of it.
Who is Savannah Wishart?
Well, hi! If you’re new here… I help out team JKW with website work, articles, photography, and other random things that might add to the creative goals. As much as I enjoy mountain biking, my main work is as a fine art nude photographer. I work with women to support their journey in building a more loving relationship with themselves, holding space for empowering nude photo sessions in the forests, and on mountain tops. Most recently, I have launched Sophrosyne Studios, serving Bellingham and the Pacific Northwest with adventure elopement photography and adventurous couples and engagement photography. Yesssss, that means mountain biking themed engagement shoots… I’ll just leave that tidbit of information here… You know where to find me.
