Ep. 33 - Roger Gilles author of Women on the Move

Bikes or Death

Patrick Farnsworth

Sports, Health & Fitness, Wilderness

4.8 • 563 Ratings

🗓️ 14 January 2020

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode I interview Roger Gilles, author of Women on the Move: The Forgotten Era of Women's Bicycle Racing. I originally became interested in this book when a documentary I was watching (called Bicycle) mentioned a bike racer by the name of Dottie Farnsworth. As a Farnsworth myself, and knowing that it is an uncommon name, I knew there was a good chance I was related to her.

My mom happens to be a genealogist, so I put her to work on the lineage while I started my search to track down everything I could find out about Dottie Farnsworth. As it turns out there was very little out there, but I did find some pictures and other bits of information floating around on the internet.

Dottie Farnsworth

Shortly after I started my search, Roger released his new book Women on the Move featuring Dottie as one of the main characters, along with many other equally fascinating women. What started as a search to find out more about a distant relative turned into a eye opening journey that paints a picture of a time period in our sport that I was completely unaware of.

The book covers a 7 year period from 1985-1902 when women's endurance cycling races were at an all time high in America. The women who dared to race were truly pioneers, pushing the boundaries of not only what everyone thought was physically possible, but also the clothing and social norms of the time. They truly had to fight on and off the track to pursue their goals, and what they accomplished is truly astonishing.

We all owe these women so much, but I hope women in particular will find inspiration in these stories of courage and athletic accomplishments that took place only 120 years ago.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, friends and welcome back to the Bikes or Death podcast. My name is Patrick and I'm your host.
0:05.8	I'd like to remind you that this show is 100% listener supported. As we go into a new year,
0:12.0	like many of you, I am making goals and I have three goals for this podcast.
0:18.1	Number one, I'm going to try like hell to produce 50 shows this year. So that's basically
0:24.1	one a week. I'm going to get myself a few sick days. But basically I'm going to try to put out one a week.
0:30.6	Number two, I really want to get the van mobile podcasting studio up and running. I want to get it
0:37.2	out there in the field and interviewing great guests. And and running. I want to get it out there in the field and interviewing
0:38.7	great guest. And number three, I want to focus on continuing the listener supported aspect of
0:45.5	this show. If you've been following along, you'll know that I have been pushing to keep this show
0:50.8	free from advertising. And I thought I'd just explain why. In this day and age,
0:56.6	we are just inundated in every direction by consumerism, by someone telling you, you know, what you
1:03.2	should buy, where you should live, what kind of car you should drive, what kind of clothes you should
1:07.6	wear, yada, yada, yada. I mean, the Facebook algorithms and everything
1:11.7	else that's just designed to basically sell you something. How long can we keep your attention?
1:17.5	I want to keep your attention to, but I want to do it because of great content. And I want,
1:24.6	ideally, the listener to value the content that's here and appreciated enough to
1:30.8	show your support. So those are three really big goals this year, and obviously none of them
1:36.9	can happen without your support. If you can appreciate the value of the show and the efforts
1:42.3	that I'm making to produce a quality show with
1:46.1	amazing guests and bring you into the lives of some of these people that we hear about
1:53.1	or watch videos or watch their dots and even some people that you may not be familiar of.
1:59.1	I like to hear stories from all walks of life and all levels
	...

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