MU| F e a t u r e s
J
ordan Redding ’13 had never been
on a bike for more than 50 miles at
a stretch. She’d also never framed an
entire house.
So, yes, you could call last summer’s
participation in Bike and Build a voyage of
discovery. Emphasis on “voyage.”
It was 4,000 miles in 78 days – Connecticut
to California – through the time-worn
Appalachians, the endless horizons of the
Great Plains and the sky-piercing Rockies.
But the voyage, and the discovering, went far
beyond mere points on a compass.
There was also the less proscribed, and more
fulfilling, voyage of discovering oneself and
one’s capacity for learning.
“What I find after doing this is now I’m
more educated about affordable housing and
the affordable housing cause,” says Redding,
who joined 30 other riders ages 19 to 27 on a
journey designed to inspire civic engagement.
“And so now I know what the whole
affordable housing cause is about, and I know
a lot of people now that I met on the trip,
they want to continue to serve and kind of
help out when they can in their communities.”
It’s an essential component of Bike and
Build, a service initiative that combines a
cross-country bike trip with the construction
of affordable housing. In Redding’s case, 58
days were devoted strictly to riding, averaging
72 miles per day but putting in as many as
120 at the top end. Sixteen days were build
days, during which the riders partnered with
Habitat for Humanity, women’s shelters and
groups such as Youth Build in Louisville,
Ky., to paint, weed and, on one memorable
occasion, frame an entire house in two days.
But it was getting to see the tangible
benefit of their work that was even more
memorable.
“The whole summer they would say it’s
not just a bike trip, it’s a service trip,” says
Redding, who’s been an assistant athletic
trainer at Manchester since January 2016.
“So we actually got to meet a lot of the
people we were building for. For us it was,
oh, no big deal, but it matters the world
to them. That was definitely rewarding to
touch that many peoples’ lives that way.”
It was also community service in the finest
tradition of Manchester, with its ongoing
mandate to make the world better than you
found it.
“That’s what Manchester prepares you
for. It’s part of a Manchester education,”
Redding says.
Not much prepared Redding for that. She’d
done a couple of triathlons, which is where
she’d gotten hooked on riding. But training on
the tabletop flatness of northeast Indiana did
nothing to prepare her for the mountains, or
those 72 miles a day.
“The first two weeks of the trip were
terrible,” says Redding, who built a lasting
friendship with Clif bars on the trip. ”They
were just so hard because we were climbing
the Appalachians and here in Indiana I never
trained for that.
“But it’s kind of like anything you take up.
It takes up to two weeks to kind of get into
shape. But after that it was pretty easy. Once we
were out West and we were riding it wasn’t too
bad because we were all in shape and we kind
of knew and could kind of feel our bodies.”
One more discovery.
By Benjamin Smith
And the riding part?
Jordan Redding ’13, an assistant athletic
trainer at Manchester University, poses on the
North Manchester campus (opposite page)
and (left) holds up her bike in triumph. Jordan
spent the summer of 2016 volunteering for
Bike and Build, an organization that builds
affordable housing (above).
Manchester | 31