Our house leaned against my father’s bike shop like it, too, depended on wheels to stay upright. Inside, rows of polished frames gleamed under white lights - carbon fiber bodies, thin as promises, built for speed. They looked like they already knew where they were going. I didn’t.
At twelve, I still couldn’t ride a bike.
In a place where cycling wasn’t just a sport but an identity, where my father’s name carried the quiet weight of a professional rider, this felt less like a delay and more like a flaw. Kids younger than me raced down the streets outside, their balance effortless, their laughter trailing behind them like wind. I stayed close to the doorway, as if crossing it required more than just a step.
So I found another way in. Behind the shop, past the showroom that felt too polished for my uncertainty, there was a repair corner that smelled of oil and metal. That’s where I found him. The uncle who fixed broken chains and bent wheels, who understood bikes not as trophies, but as things that could be taken apart and made whole again. I begged him to teach me.
He said yes, but only in fragments of time, during the short pauses between customers, when the shop exhaled for a moment. We practiced in the narrow alley behind the shop, a space that felt like it existed outside of expectation. And the bike he gave me wasn’t one of the sleek carbon bikes lined up inside. It was old. Its paint had faded into something unrecognizable, and its chain sang a rough, uneven rhythm with every turn. It wasn’t built for speed. It was built to endure. Maybe that’s why it was perfect.
He would steady the seat with one hand, his fingers still marked with grease, and let go before I was ready. I fell again and again. Each fall felt like proof of something I already feared, that I was too late, too behind, too far from who I was supposed to be.
But he never rushed me. “Again,” he would say, like a quiet reset button.
In a week, I learned. Not in the way I had imagined. There was no triumphant moment under bright lights, no audience, no father watching with pride from the doorway. Just a slow realization that I was moving forward without falling. That balance wasn’t something I was given, it was something I negotiated, constantly, between fear and motion.
I thought that was the beginning. In some ways, it was also the end.
Because just as I found my balance, I was asked to let it go. My mother, who had carried more weight than anyone ever acknowledged, saw something different when she looked at the path ahead of me. Where my father saw speed, she saw sacrifice. Early mornings, financial uncertainty, a life built on risks that didn’t always pay off. She didn’t say it harshly. She didn’t need to. Her words were quiet, but they landed with the weight of everything she had already endured: no athletics.
For a long time, I didn’t argue. Not because I didn’t care but because I did. I knew what it meant for her to say that. I knew what it had cost her to keep our lives steady while everything else moved unpredictably. Choosing her words felt like choosing stability over motion.
So I stepped off the bike.
But leaving the track didn’t mean leaving cycling.
If anything, it brought me closer in a way I hadn’t expected. I found my place not on the saddle, but behind the scenes. Working with the Mongolian Cycling Federation, volunteering at some of the country’s largest sporting events. At first, I told myself it was temporary, a way to stay connected to something I wasn’t allowed to fully pursue. But the more I stayed, the more I began to see a different side of the sport.
Races weren’t just about the cyclists who crossed the finish line. They were about the hundreds of invisible decisions that made that moment possible. The routes planned, the logistics coordinated, the quiet work that turned chaos into motion. I wasn’t riding the race, but I was helping build it.
And in that, I found something unexpected.
Purpose.
I began to understand that passion doesn’t always move in a straight line. Sometimes it bends, reroutes, or takes you somewhere you never intended to go. The version of me that learned to ride a rusted bike in a back alley thought that loving cycling meant becoming a cyclist. But standing at the edge of a race I helped organize, watching hundreds of riders move as one, I realized something else:
I hadn’t left cycling. I had just found a different way to move with it.
My father’s bikes were built for speed. My mother’s choices were built for stability. Somewhere between them, I learned to build something of my own - not a straight path, but a bridge.
I may not be the cyclist my father once imagined.
But every race I help create, every rider I support, every moment I spend turning stillness into motion - I am still part of the ride.