RUTGERS 2007 RACE REPORT

By Zach Byers

Hi, we’re the Pitt Cycling Team. We go to Pitt.

The weather finally broke in Piscataway, just for a day, to see the arrival of nearly 400 cyclists from around the east coast. The reason: The first collegiate race of the season for the Eastern Collegiate Cycling Conference. And among the teams was the Panther Cycling Club at the University of Pittsburgh. In its second season, the Team’s participants for the race had ballooned to 16 riders, including four women, a first for the club. I had forgotten how much I love cycling season, particularly because every trip the team makes through Harrisburg (a pleasantly large number) Noah Gorelick’s parents put on the greatest carb-loading dinner, giving us all a true home away from home.

We arrived in New Jersey safely, registered for the races early and we were off to bed…sort of. The night’s meeting had disclosed that we would be rising bright and early, 5:45 to be exact, to roll out to the opening time trial the next morning. News that brought a collective sigh from nearly everyone, save for Katie Spiker, a crew defect who stated, “Great, I get to sleep in.”
At this point, I would normally be moving on to the bit about the TT, but the still night was not so uneventful. The snoring of peacefully sleeping Ryan Kerr robbed hours of rest from roommate Zachary Byers until he finally fell asleep at two thirty with the help of music and the comfortable bathroom floor. At about the same time in a different room, an ill-timed wakeup call from the hotel wrested Matt Appleton (affectionately known as Mappleton) from bed. All he knew was that it was still dark outside so it could very well have been 5:45 and so, uttering curses under his breath at the ungodly hour, started making coffee.

Saturday’s Individual Time Trial was a 2.8 mile, out-and-back course along a park river which had apparently flooded at some point over the winter. Race organizers decided to delay the start of the time trial in hopes that the patches of water, dangling precariously on the verge of turning into ice, would dry up a little. Much to our amazement, it pretty much worked. The sun finally rose above the trees, winds died down and temperatures prompted those leaving later in the day to strip down to the summer essentials and start those nasty, perennial cycling tans anew.
Kicking off a weekend of bright spots for the Panther Cycling Club was Men’s D class rider Kyle Macfarlane. In his first ever bike race, he managed to finish in fifth place with a time of 6:49.
Next up was a first, not only for the club having female cyclists, but also for the ECCC. This year, they decided to expand the conference with a men’s and women’s intro category to accommodate newer cyclists and teach them the basics of bike racing; essentially a men’s E class and women’s C class respectively. Katie Spiker took sixth place with a time of 7:59.
The men’s C class TT saw Florian Zink finishing in 25th with a time of 6:47:84 and Zachary Byers right behind him in 26th at 6:47:85; one hundredth of a second slower.
Evan Perrone, unable to do something serious on a bicycle for even one day, took off for the TT on a steel-framed Surly with bar-end shifters, and leg hair flaring from the bottom of his shorts; basically the complete opposite of aero. The laughing stopped, however, when he overtook a rider from UVM on a carbon fiber T-Mobile edition Giant who had left twenty seconds earlier.

We then moved on to the Criterium race, held on Rutgers’ campus. As the day faded on, the winds came up, keeping everyone on edge and stopping breakaways before they even started on the fast, flat course. Anyone dropping off of the back would surely be eaten up by the wind pretty quickly unless they found another group to work with. Unfortunately for us, most of the highlights for the crit involved crashes.
The men’s D class featured two of them involving Pitt riders. First, it was Ryan Kerr that ate it, and if that wasn’t bad enough, was run over one and a half times…that’s right, one and a half. One rider ran into him while on the ground and another fell on him, leaving him with some very nasty road rash, tire tracks up his back and blood on his rear derailleur (seriously). Luckily for him, his girlfriend and C class cyclist Erin Mishey was there to bandage him up. Kyle Macfarlane was the second casualty of the race. In a great position, he went down and ripped apart the back of his chammy and spent the rest of the day trying to keep his backside covered up.
Florian Zink and Zachary Byers once again teamed up in the C class crit. The pace was kept hard and fast all day, averaging near 24 miles per hours over the windy course. After rotating around the lead pack, Byers came in near the end of it.
Evan and his steel-frame also did well in the men’s B class crit, finishing in the lead group.

After the previous night’s dinner at the hotel restaurant and a good night’s sleep, we packed up the vans and returned to the Rutgers campus for the circuit race featuring laps of 2.5 miles with fast corners and howling winds in the face of the peloton coming through the uphill finishing stretch. Saturday’s temperatures and sun had progressively degraded throughout the day with even more wind, overcast skies and a bit of snow.
Another disappointment came for Macfarlane when, what looked to be a strong finish at the front of the race turned into a dropped chain on the final lap. Also coming in for the finish was Mappleton, while Kerr’s injuries forced him to sit out for the day (Erin made him cry about it later).
Katie Spiker again showed much promise in the women’s C category, coming in around 10th place in an exciting dash to the finish line.
Zach Byers and Evan Perrone came in well in the lead group in the C and B road races respectively.
It was a great day and a great weekend for all of us, but we were all graced with one more surprise just before leaving. Before the women’s A class circuit race, a UNH rider took the announcer’s microphone and proposed to his girlfriend, a fellow cyclist who was lined up for the race. She accepted and race took off.

The Gorelick family again had us for a snack on the way back home to Pittsburgh. And here I’d usually be doing the bit about wrapping everything up and looking forward to the next week, but the aforementioned Kyle Macfarlane gives me reason to continue. Cycling was not enough for his weekend. He decided to get a different sort of game on and so, approached random women cyclists to find out if he could get a date. When his usual pick-up line of “Hi, I’m Kyle, I go to Pitt,” began to fail, he changed it up a little with things like “Hi, I’m Kyle, nice pedals,” and “Hi, I’m Kyle. So are you racing or what?” There was even an episode in which he was in a bathroom stall neighboring a quite attractive Army girl, but he thought the situation just a little too awkward to make an approach.

The first week of the season was successful for both veteran riders and the great turn out of new ones alike. It was also a testament to the effectiveness of the training season’s skills sessions put on by the club, preparing everyone for the season and giving them a technical advantage coming into the week. It also stressed that collegiate racing is a diverse world in which many different disciplines must be mastered in order to be successful. The only way to do that is to go out and do what everyone on the team did this weekend and participate in every race. Next week is a team time trial, crit and road race, hosted by Drexel and UPenn in Philadelphia where the weather will hopefully be a little warmer and we’ll see the turnout of some of the invited ACCC teams.