Bad luck on not being able to cycle successfully Henrietta, perhaps you could find someone with a tandem, there are plenty of women who ride on the back of a tandem and admit to not being able to ride their own bike, or you could even get a tricycle, not all are heavy dreadnoughts. Many more women are cycling now although the greatest increase is in sporting cyclists. A few years ago our own daughter discovered a lady wanting to get 100 women to ride the Manchester 100 Charity Ride. She got her 100, and if all did as well as our daughter in getting nearly £1000 sponsorship money then Chrisities did well out of the initiative. Since then several of them have stayed in touch and have had holidays together, the first was to ride from Lands End to John o'Groats and more recently going on cycle holidays to Majorca. But it is not just sporting cycling, it is often much quicker to go to the shops by bike than by car and you don't have to be a young athlete to do so. A lady cyclist i know was so incensed by someone saying in the Stockport Press that Stockport was far too hilly for cycling so the Council should stop catering for them, that for the first time in her life she wrote to the paper saying that she got her shopping on her bike which meant cycling up Lancashire Hill with loaded panniers, and she was over 80 years old.