New to Navigation: Planning a Route That Checks All Your Boxes

A Webinar with Guest Speaker Rachel Cohen @rachel-cohen

For many novice riders, route planning and navigation can be one of the biggest hurdles to finding the right roads to quench one’s thirst for adventure. For years, Rachel Cohen simply “followed the pack” and rarely broke away from the ride routes she knew well. Eventually, her love of maps and getting off the beaten path led her to purchase a bike computer, download some navigation apps and start designing her own rides to incorporate varied terrain like gravel and “unimproved” roads in her home state of Vermont and on bike-packing vacations. 

But the learning curve is real, especially for those who aren’t super tech savvy. How can you tell if a road is gravel or paved? What hazards exist and how should one prepare to mitigate risk in more rural riding environments? In part one of this webinar Rachel will share the basics of how to start navigating on your own as a novice, factors to consider when designing a route you’ve never ridden before, and various options for free and accessible apps to get started. From there, she’ll talk through a crowd-sourced resource guide for riders who are looking to take their navigation and tech tools to the next level.

Meet Rachel Cohen @rachel-cohen:

Rachel Cohen is a cyclist, all around endurance athlete, and high school teacher. Her love of long days in the outdoors testing her self-sufficience started when she worked as a backpacking instructor for the National Outdoor Leadership School. Back then she was navigating with nothing but a map, compass and intuition. Today she gets her adventure fix on two wheels and is aided by far more technology, which she describes in this talk. Rachel will share how she finds and creates exciting routes in familiar locations–like right out her back door in Northern Vermont, to far-off vacation destinations like Mallorca, Norway and Hawaii.

Join us for all the webinars we have planned!

• June 5th – Amber Pierce: Growth Mindset: Leaning In & Out of your Comfort Zone
• June 12th – Jess Cerra @jesscerra and Janel Spilker: Nutrition & Prep Focusing on Environment: Heat, Cold, Altitude, Etc
• June 19th – Rachel Cohen @rachel-cohen: New to Navigation: Planning a Route That Checks All Your Boxes
• June 26th – Lentine Alexis @lentinealexis: Flavor as Fuel: Why Flavorful, Real Food Stokes Our Fire For Greatness + Five Ways to Up Your Ride Food Game
• July 3 – Kim Coleman and Nikki Peterson @npetersonsocal: This hour has 42 minutes: How we Make Time for Family, Career, and Bikes
• July 10 – Sarah Lamb: Bike Maintenance Essentials Pt 1
• July 17- Sarah Lamb: Bike Maintenance Essentials: Pt 2
• July 24- Isabel Reyes-Todd: How to approach your first Gravel Event
• July 31- Mary Zider and Andrea Smith: Gravel Skills Clinic
• August 7- Emily Kraus, MD, @ekraus: Injury Prevention and Considerations