Bike Racing in New York City

By: James Nord

By Soigneur

September 10^th, 2019

To be a successful bike racer, even at an amateur level, requires sacrifice. Doing it in New York, a city where just living and surviving also require huge amounts of sacrifice, is so much harder. Nobody moves to the city to race bikes. They come here to try and shape the world, to try and make it on Broadway, to write for the magazines they grew up reading. We don't spit out new pros, and we don't house existing ones in the off-season. Nobody in their right mind would move here to race bikes, and yet, ask anyone lining up for the races, and they will tell you they couldn't imagine living here without it.

Just the other day, I was racing in Central Park and thought, "This is probably one of the highest-net-worth pelotons in the world.” Honestly, that is likely very close to the truth. Hedge fund managers, investment bankers, and trust-fund kids alike line up in our parks for a chance to break their collarbones. So, I wondered, why do these titans of industry drag themselves out of bed, when much of the city is still up drinking, to race bikes around the 10-km loop in Central Park? Why suffer the same two training rides over and over and over? Why would you ride down Flatbush on a Tuesday, dodging illegal bus services, your wheel swallowing potholes, while you inhale amazingly potent clouds of smoke, to race around another circle, this time at an abandoned airfield? I was especially interested in these questions because I have developed a problem.

I don't know if I lost the will to win, or if that burning emptiness is being filled with things other than cycling. I used to win bike races when I was a little younger, when I hated my job, when I was in an unhappy relationship, when the New York life I was living wasn't the one I had envisioned. Cycling was a place where I could excel simply by putting in the work. The formula was simple: ride 250 miles a week and sacrifice almost everything else in my life, and I would be fast.

In those days of discontent, my bike stood in the corner. A beautiful machine that, if used correctly, could take me to a different place, a place where I wasn't working a mediocre job, wondering where it all went wrong, a place where what mattered was my work ethic and not my network. It was a time machine, a magic wand, a way to transport me to another life.

Then, things changed. I started a company and grew it. For the first time in my life, I loved my job. I worked like crazy. I took clients out at night and enjoyed New York City's eating-and-drinking scene, the finest in the world. I stopped getting up at 4:45 for rides. I met a great woman who made six-hour weekend rides less appealing. I started flying 100,000 miles a year. I pursued my vision. I’m not sure I ever realised what, if anything, I was losing along the way, but over time being a good bike racer seemed less important.

I wanted answers, so I turned to some people in my life who have better things to do than race, but still commit themselves to it. Take my friend Piers North. I met him years ago, when he was turning out world-class advertising as a creative director at the agency Mother and moonlighting as one of the original cool kids in the Rapha Continental videos. He raced like he had something to prove, worked like a maniac, and managed to fit in partying with Madonna every once and awhile. He had the kind of New York life I dreamed about, when I dreamed about those things, and I wondered why he had made such a busy life busier by insisting on riding a bike, and he said, "In one word: balance. The harder I worked, the more I needed the outlet of racing to reset."

Same goes for Greg Fowlkes, who has been a teammate of mine for years, has done the Rapha Cent Cols challenge (100 cols in 10 days) three times and is the managing director at one of the largest banks in the world. If there was ever a person who had better things to do, it’s Gregg, but he agreed, saying, "Not only did I enjoy the competition, but it also gave me something outside of work, something that I could get excited about, so that I wasn’t thinking about work all the time."

So, maybe that's it—maybe bike racing is a way to balance a hectic life, a place where you can control your destiny, and at times accept your fate, even if that fate is being a middle-of-the-pack racer. Fowlkes finished our conversation by saying, "Of course it hasn’t always been easy balancing work and family life with racing. There is no substitute for training, and training takes time. Sometimes you have it, sometimes you don’t. Expectations get managed. There is almost always friction. But it’s all been worth it, and I’m so happy to have been a part of it.”

Matt Seaton, an editor at the New York Review of Books, spent 20 years racing his bike and getting into every break humanly possible. Since he'd recently stepped away from the sport, I asked him the same question: why? Like Greg and Piers, he mentioned balance and stress relief, but went further inside himself and expanded, saying, “The answer to all that is: I was dedicated to it, certainly because I liked the idea of being an elite athlete—relative to ordinary civilians, I mean. I think racing gets bound up in your sense of self. Being a bike racer is an identity; you belong to this special group of people; you cultivate a particular way of inhabiting your own body as a cycle-sport athlete.”

New York is a terrible place to ride a bike, but strangely that’s created a great bike culture. This was reiterated to me on a meandering five-hour ride with Molly Ritterbeck, Training, Fitness and Health Director for Bicycling and Runner’s World Magazines. She told me how, when she moved out to Connecticut for a few years, a place surrounded by world-class riding, she just couldn’t find the community she had back in NYC, and now, living in the concrete confines of the city, she rides far more than she did when surrounded by the bucolic farmlands of CT.

As for me, I am trying to learn from my elders and understand that, like any relationship, the bike-racer-to-racing relationship changes as we do. Sure, I fell in love with racing because it was the only place in my life where I could win, but I think it’s ok to love it now because it's a safe place to lose.