Learn-to-cycle courses are booming in Australia as adults saddle up for the ‘golden age’ of biking

Cycling instructor Mara Ferraro, a self-declared ‘grandmother wearing Lycra’, conducts a women’s cycling class at Mill Park leisure centre in Melbourne. Photograph: Eugene Hyland/The Guardian

On a quiet path in a sunny, grassy park, six women are playing an unusual game of limbo. All on bicycles, they lean as far forward as they can without dropping their gaze or whacking their heads on a foam pool noodle as they ride underneath it.

The women, aged from their late 30s to early 60s, all pay fierce attention to this task. There are some wobbles, some stops and starts, but that’s to be expected: many of them haven’t been on a bicycle in years. Some never learned to ride at all. They are here to change that.