The Countdown to Racing Begins with New Goals
Cycling is an oddball sport that has a tendency to chew up and spit out participants at a shocking rate. In fact, in New York City fewer than half of new CRCA members make it past their first season racing bikes. And yet despite these trends, for the past decade cycling has been my primary athletic pursuit. Through the cold winters and brutally hot summers, I keep finding sufficient reasons to put in the miles, with a focus on the traditional USAC categorized racing calendar that first brought me into the sport.
Over the years, this has added up to however many hundreds of hours of training, and several dozen races going in circles around New York City’s Central and Prospect Parks (it will never cease to amaze me that we’re able to roll out of bed, spin to Central Park, and race our bikes in the middle of Manhattan). Unfortunately, outside of the city, the East Coast race calendar has seemingly shrunk nearly every year since I came into the sport. Just going through my results the number of events that no longer exist leans toward the depressing - RIP to Battenkill (as a USAC race), Bennington Race Weekend, Pawling Mountain, Housatonic Hills Road Race, Bethel Spring Series (one of the series that led me to fall in love with bike racing), Green and Gold Criterium, NYC Spring Series, White Plains Downtown Criterium, Fort Lee Criterium, and Chris Thater, to name a few.
As so much of this local/regional scene evaporated under budget pressures and the shrinking pool of USAC racers, in recent years I have been fortunate to find motivation on the road at some of the biggest events on the calendar, including both Gateway Cup and Intelligentsia Cup. These races delivered production value that I had rarely experienced on the East Coast, and for three years running I spent a mid-summer week racing bikes in Chicago at Intelligentsia (I loved it so much that I put together a guide for the race) paired with grassroots races of a more local variety. This combination worked well as I raced 20+ USAC events every single year since 2011. Even after a tough year of racing in 2018, I wrote on the Journal:
Because if there is one thing that this season confirmed its that finding joy in this sport is all about surrounding yourself with good people who can derive happiness from the repeated failure that is inherent in the very nature of bike racing. This year, my ninth in the NYC peloton when the average rider only makes it through one or two seasons, I lined up two dozen times and failed to win on every single occasion. But I still found happiness racing alongside the rest of the TBD crew and cheering on their success, be it their impressive performance at Giro del Cielo or watching the self-proclaimed #slowboiz transform into fast boys with a bucketload of results after just a few months racing with the team. Those are the memories that I'll ultimately look back upon from the 2018 road season.
However, the downside of this multi-year consistency is that after nearly a decade of racing in New York City I have done most of the local races and several of the national series several times over. In the early years of racing, category upgrades and podiums at races that start at 5:30 AM were more than sufficient rational for long training hours, the repetitive courses, and all of the risks associated with racing bikes (distracted drivers are never far from mind). But last year I realized that I just wasn’t deriving the same motivation from my usual combination of USAC events. Call it too much repetition in training and racing, call it old age, call it whatever you want - something was definitely missing as a tiptoed my way through some of my worst fitness and certainly my worst results in recent years, all topped off by a hip injury that sidelined me from riding for most of the fall.
This all added up to a pensive mood as I thought about resuming training a few weeks ago (knock on wood that my hip cooperates). Looking back at my 2019 race calendar, if there was a bright spot is was actually a non-race that I did toward the end of the summer. As I wrote about on the Journal, that event - D2R2 - was harder than I expected, and more fun than I imagined. And just like our many Spring days spent in Vermont at Rasputitsa, it reminded me that there is a whole wide world of events out there beyond the traditional USAC road racing spectrum. I don’t know if gravel is killing road racing, just like I don’t know how gravel-focused racers build a calendar around events that sell out in in a matter of minutes when registration opens 9-months in advance (basically the exact opposite of the last minute registration rush for USAC categorized racing). But I do know that after a decade of racing in the exact same circles around New York City, it’s exciting to think about a calendar that for the first time likely features multiple gravel events in a single year.
I have already purchased a USAC license in order to partake in the local grassroots scene that I know and love, and I’m keeping an eye on several bigger out of town races like the Reading Radsport Festival where I’d love to fit in a road trip with and race as a domestique for teammates. But this process of mapping out the 2020 calendar has also been a good reminder that personal goals should evolve over time. And as those goals evolve, cycling actually has an impressively broad array of events to choose from, especially with the massive growth in mass start events over the past few years. So whether its categorized races, gran fondos, gravel, cyclocross, mountain biking, or whatever else takes place on two wheels, this is a good time of year to ponder the event format that you enjoy most and start chasing it.
On the (gravel) road at D2R2.
A New York City based cyclist and sometimes photographer. Part adventure rider, part crit racer, and fully obsessed with an English bulldog named Winifred.
Instagram: @photorhetoric
E-mail: matthew@tobedetermined.cc
