Craftsbury Green Racing Project

Decmber 15, 2009 – As I’ve written about before, one of the unique things about college racing is that every Thursday, you and your five fastest teammates get on a bus and drive off to try to win a carnival. It doesn’t matter if someone was sick on Monday, if another teammate had two midterms and skipped practice to study, or how busy you all were earlier. You’re on that bus, driving somewhere far away, together.

Post-collegiate racing isn’t like that. Sometimes, we feel like a real, close-knit team: we just returned from two weeks in Montana, where we all competed in the West Yellowstone and Bozeman SuperTours. But a lot of the time, we’re our own teams, all orbiting independently of one another. For instance, we won’t all race together again until mid-January at the earliest.

In fact, we might not even all train together in Craftsbury until then. Before straggling back to Vermont (and sea level), we sent Tim off to Silver Star with the Sun Valley Team. Then we ditched Hannah in the Minneapolis airport, where she collected her skibag and headed north to compete in biathlon races at Mount Itasca. At the Burlington airport, Ida left us to go spend time with her family; later this week, she’s heading to Canmore. Suddenly our team seemed much smaller.

It’s obviously beneficial for our athletic careers to be able to pick and choose a few race that our tailored to our specific goals and abilities. But: it’s a lonely benefit. A recent message from Hannah said, “My hotel room is lonely. I don’t think anyone is even in this hotel.” (Things have improved for her, as she switched hotels and has been able to spend time with the USBA athletes.)

It’s lonely for us here, too. Most of my training has been by myself. The four of us who are home spend a lot of our time sitting at our laptops, all working (or not working) quietly. I spent one afternoon completely alone in the house, watching the snow fall outside. After the crowds of West Yellowstone, we feel isolated.

On the other hand, though, with only four of us at home, we can all fit on the sofa when we want to watch a movie (I can imagine this would be especially beneficial for horror films. Maybe we should go to the library…). Also, cooking is less of a hassle, both in terms of kitchen space and simplicity. We get more one-on-one time with Pepa. There are benefits to being the ones left behind when your teammates travel.

And that, I’ve realized, is something else I’m not used to. I’m not used to having the luxury of not racing every weekend. I can take some time to train and prepare for the races I really care about. After college, nobody has teammates counting on them to score points in every single start. When you’re sick, you can make sure you recover completely, and when you’re tired, you can rest up.

So, things change more than they stay the same. But at the end of the week, we’ll climb in a van, drive off to Presque Isle, and maybe try to win a race. There will only be a few of us, and we won’t be working for a team score, but to us, that’s a team.