My name is Chris Creed and I’ve been involved in the sport of cycling for a long time. I raced on the road back in the late 80s and early 90s, and then followed as a casual fan. My wife, Rene, and I got married in 2000 and I started introducing her to the sport. We would watch the Tour in July and then we started riding around a little bit.
Rene got into spinning in 2007, and that prompted me to get back on my bike a bit, but before long we were racing. We then partnered with a local bike shop and started a development team that has morphed into the Gateway Devo Cycling Team, which we have been running for 11 years. Our main mission is to give young riders under the age of 25 the opportunity to turn pro in the sport, which has happened 15 times so far. We are super excited about that! Sepp Kuss is one of our alumni.
In 2018, Rene wanted to hold a Strider bike camp for kids with down syndrome, so she got a grant from the Strider Education Foundation and we put together a week long camp with 15 kids. It was an amazing experience and it motivated us to continue down this path of using the bike to make the world a better place. We’d been doing it through the road-side of the sport for a while, and we dipped our toes into the striders, but we felt it was time to expand.
So, Rene became an ambassador for All Kid’s Bike and we started expanding the focus of our nonprofit - Living Life on 2 Wheels. The big picture is getting everybody out riding bikes and having fun, and becoming healthier and happier.
And I’ll add in here (Rene Creed) - I have always been drawn to kids. A few years back I started thinking about the fact that there are so many kids out there who don't have the opportunity to ride a bike, and I decided we had to do something bigger than just holding camps and having programs if we really wanted to have an impact.
I started looking into the All Kids Bike Program and was really impressed with what they had to offer and decided we needed to introduce it in our community. We currently have the program embedded in one elementary school here and the kids constantly come home talking about it. Every time we run into a teacher, they're like, ‘Oh my gosh, those bicycles are such a blessing! The kids love it! It's so good for them!’ It has been a great addition’.
We recently partnered with Express Mart convenience stores here in Jefferson County and launched a fundraising program through their stores on March 1st. Essentially, individuals can go their gas stations and purchase a little cartoon bicycle for $1 or $5, and all proceeds go towards the All Kids Bike programs. Our goal is to get funding to support a program in every elementary school in Jefferson County - all 35. We were also recently awarded a $35k from the Jefferson Foundation to go towards cycling initiatives here in Jefferson County. Both partnerships will play a key role in getting more kids and families outside and riding.
We know how powerful the community is and we know a community needs certain things to be able to foster a cycling culture. Surprisingly, we don't have a bike shop in town. So, we decided we needed to build one just before COVID hit. Like so many others, I got really into making sourdough bread and that prompted us to start bouncing around the idea of doing take-home meals alongside our bike shop - maybe that could help encourage families to have home cooked meals together? It seemed kind of crazy but it was an idea - nothing more at the time. Not long after, I came across a woodfired pizza oven on an auction site and I've always been a baker, so...I bid on it! I didn't end up getting it, but I did mention to Chris that I thought this could be the center of our bike shop. We could have a woodfired pizza oven!
Thankfully, it wasn’t purchased from the auction. I tracked it down and I bought it! Next, we bought a little shop in town and now we are completely tearing everything up and redoing it to make it our own. We had to make it work for pizza. And for retail. Pizza, beer, soda, wine, and bicycles. It’s going to be cool. And it will be a family business. Did we mention that we have eight kids? We do! One girl and seven boys. They are excited to work there when we open!
(Chris Creed) Ultimately, we're hoping that we can be a catalyst and show people that there's so much we can do - you just have to do it. When we're trying to explain our vision to people, we usually just say, ‘remember when we were kids, and how we would just go out on our bikes until the lights came on? That's what we want to create’.
We know that we're going to end up building this pizza shop that serves bicycles. We are doing it because we want to give opportunities, we want to grow people and we want to make the world a better place. And we think that we've got to start with the kids.
