Club Spotlight: Lakeside Wheelers
Based in Mullingar, Co Westmeath club Lakeside Wheelers have made the most of the amenities in their locality to not only grow the club but to get more people out cycling.
With over 150 members, Lakeside Wheelers puts a lot of effort into initiatives to get more people out cycling, such as Women on Wheels and Skilling Skills, formally Sprocket Rocket.
We caught up with Eugene Duffy, club Secretary, at Belvedere House. The picturesque location overlooking Lough Ennell, with close proximity to the town, combined with safe spaces, including grass areas, woodland and a large hardcore carpark, makes it an ideal location for various cycling activities all year long.
The club celebrated its 50th anniversary just last weekend and continues to go from strength to strength, running events from National Single Grade Road Races and provincial events, and supporting a range of initiatives within the local community. They offer something for everyone.
Prime Location
Belvedere House is just one of the many amenities used by Lakeside Wheelers. The club also enjoys the Royal Canal Greenway. During the winter months the greenway provides a space to train, and during the summer it’s another safe place for initiatives such as Women on Wheels and Bike Week activities.
Talking about how Lakeside Wheelers use the greenway, Eugene said:
“It’s absolutely a benefit when you’re training through the winter months. The club wouldn’t use the greenway other than for training purposes.”
Members and club volunteers remain respectful and conscious that the greenway is a shared shape and use it accordingly, helping to build and maintain positive relations within the community.
“As an amenity for families the greenway is brilliant. Usually during Bike Week (9th to 17th of May 2026) we bring a group of children for a spin on the greenway, starting at the carpark in Mullingar cycling out to Ballinea bridge where we would have coffee and ice-creams. This event is open to the public and last year was very well attended with over 50 people taking part,” Eugene continued.
Eugene is optimistic about future planned expansion of the greenways and how this will encourage more people out cycling and enjoying what Co Westmeath has to offer.
Lakeside Wheelers also run a successful Women on Wheels programme in conjunction with the Westmeath Local Sports Partnership.
“We’ve been running it the past number of years, it’s just to get ladies back out on their bikes and the social element of it as well being very important. We use the greenway for this. Obviously, we’re not going to take girls or ladies that haven’t been cycling or might never have been cycling in the last number of years so we take them on the greenway.”
Belvedere House is used at different points throughout the year, in the summer for the Cycling Skills programme and in the winter for Cyclo-cross, including for a leg of the Leinster league. Eugene described the course as being “really tough” which makes it popular.
Lakeside Wheelers have successfully found very suitable and safe spaces for a range of activities, making the most of each location.
Cycling Skills
Eugene talked through the Cycling Skills programme. “It runs once a week for the summer months; we might get rained off one of the ten weeks. Even if it’s raining most of them will still want to come out. They absolutely love it, so they do.”
This is another programme where Eugene and the team in Lakeside Wheelers have worked closely with Westmeath County Council and Westmeath Local Sports Partnership to help grow the programme and to increase the reach of cycling in the locality.
The programme is based in Belvedere House, and each year it continues to grow, helping to teach children and young teenagers safe cycling skills and most importantly to have fun.
“We’ve been here for three years now and within those three years it has developed an awful lot. Last year there was around 85 children taking part.”
Eugene explained how running the programme takes a lot of forward planning, organisation and volunteer support.
Preparations for programme include making sure all the volunteers must have their Garda Vetting and Safeguarding and getting the area in Belvedere ready.
The caretakers at Belvedere assist with much of the initial stages of preparation.
“The guys here, the caretakers, will come along, they’ll cut everything. We come along then with our own lawnmowers, and we would cut the areas where we need it down for a really nice surface for the children to cycle on to start with. It’s really a perfect area.”
“There’s lots of potential in terms of where we can go, creating different loops. It takes a lot of time and effort, it takes probably four or five full days to make sure it’s up to the standard that we need for the kids.”
On the first night of the programme all the participants get a bike check, and the volunteers make sure they are well set up for the weeks ahead.
The overflow carpark is the starting point for each session, the large hardcore area is safe and suitable for cyclists of all levels. They then move onto the grass area and woodland and the sessions and programme progress.
The woodland area always proves popular with the participants according to Eugene: “You couldn’t ask for more in terms of location. The children love the forest area, we usually let them in at the end of each session for maybe a hour an hour and this is what they thrive for.”
Each session is divided into three groups – one for those between the age of 3 and 6 years old, another for those between 7 and 9 year olds, and then a final group for those 10 and older. This requires a lot of volunteers to make sure the sessions run smoothly.
“We need at least three if not four volunteers per group so we would be looking at around 12 volunteers, sometimes it’s a little less. We try and get at least 9 – 12 each night.”
Adding to the overall experience, usually on the final session of the summer they set up a coffee van, or an ice cream van or pizza van. All the participants get t-shirts and goodie bags. In recent years athletes including Daire Feeley and Aoife O’Brien have attended on the final night.
Each year sees more children progress, learning new skills and enjoying cycling in a safe and supportive environment.
“Let them come out here and have a bit of fun. Usually when the kids see the rest of the kids doing activities they’re not as afraid to do it and they’ll just get on with it. We have lots of little sea-saws and jumps, and we create all sorts of different scenarios that help them go from cycling on grass to going and cycling on a road, whether it be a road bike down the line. All those skills tie into one and other.”
Running programmes such this isn’t always easy but for Eugene and the team at Lakeside Wheelers it’s very rewarding.
“Like everything there’s a lot of work in it, usually we get there you know. Sometimes it can be nuts but sometimes it’s brilliant."
Accessibility
A big part of the Cycling Skills programme is making cycling more accessible to anyone who is interested in getting involved.
Eugene explained how getting involved in cycling can be very expensive and even with the schemes and incentives available this is a deterrent for some people.
As a club, Lakeside Wheelers are very conscious of this and it takes a team effort to make sure there is enough equipment available.
“We’re lucky enough in that we have good club members who have kids who would have had bikes, and those bikes can be reused again. We store them in a good location and any of the children who might not have the best of bikes or mightn’t have a bike at all, we obviously include them because it’s important to make it accessible to them so we would have a bike there and they can jump on and have a bit of fun of course.”
The initiative has grown over the years Lakeside Wheelers work closely with Westmeath Local Sports Partnership and promote the initiative across both organisations’ channels. This collaborative approach has proved very successful. They also use QR code on posters in Belvedere House which works very well.
“Now we’re in our fourth year it will hit 50 within the first week of putting it out, because so many are coming back.”
Eugene outlined how important the programme is and that is equipping the next generation with the skills to cycle safely and properly.
“Parents are bringing their children out to encourage them to cycle. Less children cycling and knowing how to cycle in comparison to previous generations, changing environment has caused a lot of these changes. The places that used to be suitable for learning how to cycle aren’t there any more, that’s why having somewhere like Belvedere is so important.”
Talking about how to get more children involved in cycling, Eugene said: “Through off-road disciplines, getting them into Cyclo-cross and activities similar to that, that’s the only way to get them in.”
It isn’t possible to run activities for youth members throughout the year due to the volunteer commitment needed but Lakeside Wheelers do their best by adding in a category in the Cyclo-cross.
“When we run our cyclo-cross every year in Belvedere, we’re lucky enough that we do a cyclo-cross spin or race for the children that did the sessions the previous summer.”