What Riding Taught Me About Asking for Help

Growing up in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, I was passionate about sports and spending time outdoors. BMX and snowboarding gave me somewhere to put my energy and a community of people who understood why movement mattered.

Then, during my first year of high school, something shifted. Anxiety started showing up in ways that were difficult to name. Depression followed. For most of my high school years, both went untreated — not because help was not available, but because asking for it felt like admitting something I was not ready to say out loud.

Riding helped. It always helped. But it could not reach everything that needed attention.

The shift came when I recognized something that sounds simple but is not easy to feel: I was not the only person on the planet facing my own thoughts every day.

Other people were carrying the same weight. Other people were finding their own ways to cope, to stay moving and to keep going. And other people were reaching out — not because they had given up, but because they understood that carrying everything alone was making things harder, not easier.

That recognition is part of what became IN2R. Not just the need to ride, but the reminder that nobody has to ride alone.

Anyone who has spent time on a board or a bike knows that falling is part of the process. You do not stay down. You assess what went wrong, adjust and try again.

Mental health works the same way — but the adjustment sometimes requires more than trying again on your own. It requires a different kind of support. A conversation. A professional. A person who can see the situation from outside it.

Asking for that support is not quitting the ride. It is making a smarter choice about how to continue it.

Riding also teaches you to read conditions. You pay attention to what the environment is giving you and adjust accordingly. Paying attention to your mental state — recognizing when things are harder than usual, when the drift has set in, when you need more than movement — is the same skill applied differently.

Asking for help can feel enormous before you do it. Afterward, it almost always feels smaller than expected.

The first step does not have to be a full conversation or a formal appointment. It can be telling one person that things have been harder than usual. It can be calling a line where someone will listen without judgment. It can be admitting to yourself that what you have been carrying deserves more attention than you have been giving it.

Make the first move smaller than you think it needs to be. The important part is breaking the silence — not doing it perfectly.

I built IN2R because I understood something that took me time to learn: riding helps, connection matters and asking for help is part of keeping yourself moving — not a sign that you have stopped.

The clothing carries that message. Not as a slogan, but as a reminder that the person wearing it is part of a community that takes mental health seriously and does not expect anyone to figure it out alone.

Whatever your ride looks like, you do not have to take it by yourself.