‘Just a chick who likes to ride her bike’ organizes summer group rides
Leah Fuller stumbled into mountain biking mostly by accident, happening upon a trail in George Wyth State Park when she was growing up in Waterloo. Now, more than 30 years later, she runs a Linn County area Facebook group with more than 300 members for women mountain bikers.
“I ended up buying a mountain bike from Scheels. I didn't know anything about mountain biking, but I just needed a bike that could handle that stuff. So, I just kind of did it on my own. There wasn't a club or anything. I just liked doing it,” she said.
Fuller would ride the trails at George Wyth often when she was in college at the University of Northern Iowa, but she wasn’t plugged into the mountain biking community at the time. Eventually, she graduated, got married and moved to Marion. She still regularly went biking, but mostly used her road bike, taking the various paved trails around Linn County. Then one day in about 2014 or 2015, she happened across another mountain biking trail.