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<\/p>\nIn Tamar Mayer Professor of Geography Peter Nelson\u2019s \u2018Rural Geography\u2019 course last fall, each Monday began with the same question: Did you do anything rural this weekend? Some students shared stories of apple picking, others recapped camping trips, and one at the start of one class that semester, Wren Capra \u201928 casually dropped that she had ridden her bike from Burlington to Montreal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Capra\u2019s response evoked surprise, but served as a good reminder of the surreal athletic environment at Middlebury. If you\u2019re not an elite athlete yourself, you are likely in the midst of one. In \u2018Rural Geography\u2019, Capra was that elite athlete: a back-to-back endurance mountain bike national champion and member of the Middlebury College Cycling team.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Capra is not the only nationally-recognized rider on the team. Teammate Dani Bronk \u201928 earned Middlebury\u2019s first women\u2019s collegiate national mountain bike title with her Short Track victory in the fall of 2024 \u2014 a race in which Bronk and Capra jointly led the field for a quarter of the course\u2019s undulating grassy loops. Yet one can only fully appreciate their dominance in the saddle by understanding their similar cycling origin stories.<\/p>\n
Having Nordic skied since fourth grade, Capra quit her team by her sophomore year of high school due to personal and overtraining-related struggles. However, a love for being outdoors, exploring and networking her surroundings remained. Much like a teen\u2019s sense of freedom when getting their driver\u2019s license, getting on the bike was liberating for Capra. A Steamboat Springs native, she found joy in feeling connected to her environment and in exploring Routt County, CO, as a whole.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Biking] feels different from the organized sports that I\u2019ve always been in throughout my childhood\u2026 it\u2019s so expansive and there\u2019s so many places you can go. I\u2019m not confined to a Nordic trail, I can ride my bike basically anywhere. It\u2019s freeing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
To help bring structure to training, Capra joined Avout Racing, a Denver-based cycling team. Capra was soon taking part in the biggest races in the United States, including the Pan-American Mountain Bike Championships in her senior year. Despite the major competitions and titles, Capra’s motivation for staying on the bike has remained the same. \u201cThe reason I do it is because I just want to. It\u2019s not really results-driven.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n Capra and Bronk on the hunt at nationals in Bentonville, AR.\n <\/p>\n
Bronk likewise entered competitive cycling while transitioning from another sport. Having hoped to compete in DI alpine skiing, Bronk faced a decision: either take a gap year to improve her recruiting chances or move forward and try something else. \u201cAt that point, I wanted to explore other things within skiing, but then it was summer, so I just started biking,\u201d Bronk said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The same zeal for exploration set in for Bronk, discovering gravel roads around her house that she never knew existed. Bronk joined Middlebury\u2019s team once she arrived on campus, taking the national crown in the Short Track her first semester. As with Capra, though, success doesn\u2019t define her relationship with cycling. \u201cIt\u2019s not even my college sport; it\u2019s just a hobby. We just go race on the weekends in the fall,\u201d Bronk said. This perspective has helped her avoid burnout, especially as she began cycling because of the burnout she felt with skiing.<\/p>\n
Capra and Bronk\u2019s successes on the dirt and grass only tell part of Middlebury\u2019s cycling story. Mountain bike and cyclocross competitions take place in the fall, while road racing occurs in the spring. The transition to the pavement brings a different ethos of competition and a shift in athletes\u2019 personalities; part of this change was on display at UVM\u2019s Catamount Classic road race on Saturday, April 25.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A powerful aspect of cycling is its tendency to marry immense physical suffering with landscapes of profound natural beauty. Cyclists begin the 10.5-mile race loop at the Charlotte Central School, quickly diving downhill as Camel\u2019s Hump sinks into the horizon. Horses, chickens and sprawling farmhouses flank both sides of the road, and on the northerly and southerly legs of the course, the Adirondacks and Greens line up like spectators. The course climbs, falls and winds, and absent the antsy peloton, a gentle breeze and the distant sound of cars would put you to sleep sitting along its perimeter.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
\n Herschel Brown wins the men’s 3\/4 race at the West Point Criterium earlier this season.\n <\/p>\n
Peter Warner \u201927 and Herschel Brown \u201928 were Middlebury\u2019s two competitors in the men\u2019s field. Warner rode in the top-level 1\/2\/3 category, while Brown competed at the 3\/4 level. In his debut road race, Warner placed ninth out of 27, finishing in just under two hours and 34 minutes. A varsity Nordic skier for Middlebury, Warner approaches cycling with the combination of a love for exploration and typical \u201cNordie,\u201d house music-bumping intensity.<\/p>\n
\u201cCycling is mostly for fun,\u201d Warner said. \u201cI get to do something hard, suffer-y.\u201d Part of embracing long road races \u2014 the 1\/2\/3s had to complete six laps, totalling 63 miles and nearly 5000 feet of climbing \u2014 is making \u201cfun\u201d synonymous with \u201chard.\u201d Brown adopts a similar mindset. \u201cI enjoy the sightseeing, but I also just enjoy pushing myself a lot. I am definitely performance-oriented when I can be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brown rode farther than most on Saturday. In addition to completing the Mt. Philo hill climb race earlier that day, Brown biked from campus \u2014 a 37-mile commute \u2014 in an attempt to finish the day with 100 miles. \u201cAll I can think about is that I\u2019m hurting a lot right now,\u201d Brown said. Middlebury Cycling is a team without a coach, yet it has national champions among its ranks. It\u2019s a team that will go to nationals, but only if it can secure the funding. It\u2019s a group of athletes who love to explore, will go to the well to do so, and have built a community of others of the same adventurous bent. In many respects, Middlebury Cycling resembles any other team on campus, yet maintains its distinctive quirk \u2014 be it on grass, gravel or asphalt. <\/p>\n
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Simon Schmieder<\/p>\n
Simon Schmieder ’26 (he\/him) is a Senior Sports Editor.<\/p>\n
Simon is an avid runner and biker and enjoys spending time outdoors. He is a philosophy and political science joint major with a minor in German, in addition to being a Philly sports fan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Tamar Mayer Professor of Geography Peter Nelson\u2019s \u2018Rural Geography\u2019 course last fall, each Monday began with the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":640514,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[569],"tags":[64,63,784,85],"class_list":["post-640513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cycling","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640513\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/640514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}