Quote Originally Posted by velogirl View Post
Vivian! Thank you so much for your passionate response.

BTW, 54 is not old. On our very first race team, one of the racers (who had never raced before) was 52 years old. She is still racing 6 years later.

In our organization, I've found the demographic pretty representative of the women's demographic in the bike industry in general. There's a pretty distinct bell curve, with the critical mass falling in the 35-50 range with a smattering above and below. I think our youngest member this year is 10 and our oldest is 73.
This is exactly what we've experienced here too - we have a lot of women who come to racing relatively late in life and are successful at it. I started at the age of 34. One of the other people who started the same year I did is in her early 50's and is incredible. Most of our riders above cat 4 also qualify to ride masters (and in fact many of the top riders in the area too). We have some younger people but I think the 35+ crowd out numbers them. Our two youngest members I think are 17 this year. (there are already several excellent organizations for juniors in the area so I think we might hesitate to take on very young children)