Girls

Right... boys, butt out.

Girls, give her a chance. She's demonstrated that she knows very little, and it's always better to give the benefit of the doubt.

My father does weights, and he frequently gets new people turning up at his gym and explaining that they don't want to do too much because they're looking to get fit and not build muscles. The chances of building muscles accidentally is fairly slim, it takes effort and a lot of it as well as time. So my father gets quite exasperated by the question and thinks they're nuts.

How does this relate? Well if she has seen photos of most track riders, then their thighs are freaking enormous. It's a reasonable enough question if you honestly knew nothing to say, "Will that happen to me?". Of course the answer is an emphatic NO. But the question is still valid.

As for the "Is it a boy thing?". Doesn't the existence of the Trixie Chix in part reflect a reaction against the inherent sexism that seems to be present around cycling and an attempt to re-sexualise cycling for women (not in a sex way, but in a gender way... to assert that you can be feminine on a bike and not have to deal with the chauvinism).

The membership of this forum is predominantly male and the reaction of the majority when a new girl appears is evident even from some of the comments in this thread. Her question may be naive, but it's not entirely irrelevant. When a girl is hit on by hormone fuelled boys, isn't it a good thing to remove her from that heavy-aired environment and allow her to ask the questions and get straight answers without the underlying mistrust of boys and their longings getting in the way?

Her questions were naive (to say the least), but should we be an ass about answering them straight?