Linette Messina Found Freedom on Her Bike

 When Linette Messina was growing up in West Chester Borough, PA, she was always riding her bike. It got her from here to there, but it also took her away from the painful domestic-violence situation that was often seizing control of her home. “We used to run away from home a lot,” she says. And so, nearly 30 years later, when her marriage began to fracture and her home life felt stifling, she turned to her bike again for a way out.

Messina, a Philadelphia-based photographer, had remained active throughout her adult life, mainly doing CrossFit. But in the height of the pandemic when everything was shut down, Messina dug out her old road bike—the one she rode to the bars and classes in college at Drexel University in Philly. “The tires were flat, and it was pretty rotted out. I took it to a shop for a tune-up, and when I finally got it back, I went out riding in the city. It was so good to be out in the world on my bike, and I felt like I was 20 again. I remember my husband at the time took a picture of me giving the devil horns with the bike,” she says. “He had no idea he was documenting my escape.”

The Wheel Deal

At that point in her life, the 46-year-old photographer was raising her two sons with her husband, and she felt unwanted and unappreciated. She was deeply unhappy and felt misunderstood, and riding her bike quickly became a way to clear her head and take time for her. On the bike, she felt freer and more herself than just about anywhere else in her life. “But that bike was a death trap. It was an aggressive road bike that my 40-something body wasn’t accustomed to anymore, and I got into a wreck, and pedaled home with a bloody calf,” she recalls. “So, I called my buddy, Fernando, who is a bike mechanic, and asked him what to get. I asked him what those bikes were called where people could ride on dirt or the road, and he told me to get a gravel bike.”

Gravel bikes offer riders more versatility—they have less suspension than mountain bikes, making them faster than mountain bikes on paved roads. They also have a sturdier frame than road bikes, so they give riders more stability on dirt roads or unpaved paths. Messina started riding her new gravel bike mainly on the Schuylkill River Trail (SRT), a multi-use path that extends 120 miles and includes Forbidden Drive in Wissahickon Valley Park, a dirt path that’s closed to car traffic.

While she found places to ride, Messina also quickly discovered a welcoming and diverse local cycling community. When the killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minnesota inspired more conversations about racial inequity across the country, Messina realized she was facing an identity crisis at home. As the daughter of a Sicilian father and a Puerto Rican mother, Messina considered herself a woman of color. “I was very sensitive to racial issues, and with all the difficult conversations happening about race, it’s something I wanted to bring up at home with the kids,” she says. “But at home I was being told that I wasn’t a woman of color, that I was white, and that was just really hard to grapple with.”

She discovered Kings Rule Together/Queens Rule Together (KRT/QRT), a community of cyclists of all ages, genders, skill levels, and races. “I got to meet so many people of color and just a different mix of folks than I was used to hanging with. I started riding with them weekly,” she says. “That’s when I went to Vermont for a women’s gravel clinic, and I met all these amazing women, many of whom were amateurs or beginners learning how to ride on gravel.”