“Gravity goddess” Marla Streb is pulled back to Baltimore
Rarah
By Van Smith – City Paper
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She became a world-class contender in single-track downhill—in which, just as in downhill ski-racing, “you start at the top of a mountain and they time you as you go down, one at a time, a very treacherous course with jumps, and you get to the bottom in about five minutes,” she says. In her 16-year career, she won three national and two world championships, broke 24 bones, and wrote two books about it—a training guide and a memoir, Downhill: The Life Story of a Gravity Goddess.
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“We are hoping to open up a bike-themed café with indoor, unlimited free parking, possibly selling retail bikes, and a full liquor license,” Streb explains. “We want to do fresh-roasted coffee in the morning and then stay open all the way into the nighttime. We’re still looking for a property—we’re under contract for one, but it’s a bumpy road.”
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Streb also tends to a company, Streb Trail Systems (STS), that she and her husband founded in the mid-2000s in Costa Rica. It designs mountain-bike trails for resorts and communities. “We created a nice trail system in Puerto Rico for a nature park called Toro Verde,” she explains. Its first U.S. project has been here in Maryland, putting together a trail plan for Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmittsburg.
In the two months since Streb returned to Baltimore, she’s also been laying the groundwork for becoming a local bike advocate. “I’m meeting with city planners,” she says, “because I really want to improve on the bike-ability of this city.” She’s happy to see that there are bike lanes on some of the city’s main thoroughfares, and finds her Fells Point neighborhood is suitably bike-friendly, but she believes much more can be done to accommodate and promote bike-based city living.
“If more and more people see a mom riding her kids,” as they see Streb do, using her “cargo bike”—an extra-long bicycle with a bucket up front, big enough for two kids and a lot of groceries—“then they’re going to think about doing it themselves. It’s a snowball effect. And as more people do it, the city will need to just create space for it [on the streets]. Cyclists are paying the same taxes the drivers are paying, except what cyclists are doing is greener and it’s healthier. I’d love to do anything I can do to help people understand.”
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https://citypaper.com/news/returning-champion-1.1134594oldId.20110420091302947