Never a Pro

 

The 7:38am plane to Ontario, California boarded on time, an unexpected upgrade provided ample legroom for the 2 hour flight from Seattle. I was headed down to SoCal to visit some facilities of the company I work for. It was just as well after a 10 hour drive back from Ketchum, Idaho the day before where I’d been riding in my first gravel event ever, except for a local Gran Fondo earlier in the year and an aborted debacle on a borrowed bike a couple of years before that.

Rebecca’s Private Idaho is one of the premier gravel racing events on the calendar each year, bringing more than a thousand riders of all abilities, including some of the nation’s top pros to challenge themselves among some of the most beautiful and difficult terrain in the country. I wasn’t altogether sure what I was signing up for in 2019 when I thought it’d be cool to try to ride it in 2020. Covid made that notion moot by canceling the 2020 edition and so, here I was, getting ready for my first foray into gravel racing in 2021 at the seasoned age of 48 and a complete novice at bike racing.

The short version is that I finished 9th in the general classification (full results), with my very good friend, Peter Stroble, finishing 10th, probably surprising most folks that know us, and perhaps somewhat, ourselves also. So, here we are – Never a Pro. I thought it might be fun and helpful to write a bit about the journey I suspect many of us in middle age take towards cycling while juggling a full life of kids and family, a demanding job, and all the typical commitments and stresses of everyday life. How, exactly, can you be Fast at 50 if you’re not a pro? How is it possible to be a category 4 rider with only 2 road races to your name (one ended in a crash and the other with a dropped chain) and show up to one of the most prestigious gravel events in the country without even a gravel bike and end up in the top 10?

That’s what Never a Pro is all about – think of it as a training and racing diary, while trying to keep it real about how we try to juggle it all – the insane early hours dedicated to training, the nagging doubts of whether our goals are dumb (they’re not) and selfish (they are), the guilt of not always being “just a parent” or “just a spouse,” the sort of willful ignorance of aging, and perhaps most importantly, the thrill of dedicating yourself to self-improvement - investing in that process every single day amid life’s chaos, and being able to pull back occasionally to remind yourself of how far you’ve come.

Along the way, I hope you'll find a sense of familiarity and camaraderie, knowing that you're not alone. We're all, in our own way, chasing our goals, and sometimes we just need a bit of encouragement and motivation to know that whatever you set out to do is possible with hard work, even if you're Never a Pro.



How I Got Here

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