I started riding a borrowed road bike in my late twenties. The “old guys” in their sixties and seventies taught me to ride in pacelines on the local club rides, and I got stronger and faster. I kept up even when the retired racer (or three) showed up, and I closed gaps, offered to change sides to shelter them in crosswinds, and sprinted around to tell the folks on the front to slow down. Eventually they started inviting me on cycling trips and joked that they had to bring me or they would have to pull.
One rider helped run the biweekly time trial, and one week he invited me to race. I showed up on my Cannondale with down-tube shifters and clip-on aerobars. I was nervous and was glad the held start was not mandatory – I had only been clipping in for a few months and was already concerned enough.
I bought my first road bike in 2009 and was still rocking clip-on aerobars in the time trial.
I broke the women’s course record! A few months later I joined Wild Card Cycling, the local amateur team (we’re a college town in the middle of the cornfields – there’s only the one) and immediately after that the two collegiate women racers (both of whom I had also beat in that TT) graduated and moved away. I was suddenly the only woman on the team.
Another woman moved to town for grad school. She and her partner were both expert mountain bikers, and they and some other teammates invited me to weekly cyclocross practices. I was terrible at it, but they were so encouraging. I gradually improved, and I remember the loud celebration after the first race in which she didn’t lap me. She got a tenure track position in her home state and moved. I was again the only woman on the team. I kept racing but was frequently the only woman in the field.
I was the only woman in the field at Pumpkin Hop CX. I still loved my pumpkin.
It’s not that there weren’t other women riding bikes. It’s just that our area isn’t that large, and in East Central Illinois the pancake flat farm fields don’t offer any relief from wind that’s frequently over 30 kph with 50 kph gusts. It takes raw watts to keep up with a racing team here, and my size has given me an advantage. The local women’s rides have historically toodled along averaging 25 kph, and the racing team rides all start a good 10 kph faster.
I did everything I could to try to help grow it. I led a bridge ride the day after the team ride that was in between, at around 30 kph, with racers showing up for a recovery ride and local women showing up for a hard ride. I rode as sweep on the women’s ride the day before the team ride, helping women at the back learn about drafting. I invited women to the long ride, offering to turn back early with them, so they didn’t have to go all the way to the turn.
Being a college town, the average person stays here for three years, and that happened with all my efforts to build up women’s racing. A woman or two would brave it and then move away. It didn’t help either that I had no older or more experienced women helping me, and I also wasn’t sure how to become a better racer myself. I could listen to the old guys, but I just didn’t know what to do to train myself to be able to handle the hammer dropping, whether by a teammate after the turn on a training ride, or when I braved the 3-4 hour drive to a city with a women’s field.
Not only did Mel not lap me at Furrow Euro CX the year of the whiteout, I passed her at one point.
Everything changed when I started Zwifting. The first Zwift Academy I completed included workouts that did something different than just riding with the men until I got dropped. It specifically targeted improving power at various time durations and taught me how different cadences could change my heartrate at the same power.
That first Zwift Academy race against women at my level was so pivotal that I wrote about it here on Zwift Insider. It was such a different experience than being the only woman in my local race or being outmatched by ⅔ of the field in a city race. Zwift races gave me a chance to actually practice racing in women’s fields every week, instead of it only being a thing I could drive to a few times a year.
The biggest breakthroughs, though came after I joined ATP so I could compete in Zwift Racing League. ZRL races are team competitions where you work together with your squad to win as a team. We talked, shared sweaty selfies, laughed, and strategized.
Megan and I managed to break away off the front to win a Cat C ZRL race in 2021.
I mentioned in our women’s chat that the starts of races always left me dying and some more experienced racers asked me important questions about my warmups. A nutritionist asked me about my pre-race fueling. Another woman asked me if I was “giving myself a call-up.” They solved my problem as best they could in the short term while training me for the long term.
I mentioned in the chat I was having trouble with saddle sores. They got me changing shorts every few hours during long indoor rides, using Bumalicious, a product developed by a teammate’s wife, and they eventually got me to invest in two pairs of really good shorts from Pactimo (one of which was cut off in an ER and I still mourn). My sit bones are happier.
We talk about training, racing, nutrition, and hobbies, and there are always a lot of pet pics and goofy memes. We use Discord to make the long indoor training rides less terrible (and if we can’t talk, we know we’re going too hard), and to communicate during our races (such as keeping our eyes on those Coalition women who have all as one moved suspiciously to the same place). We love each other even though most of us have never met in real life.
ATP lineup at our local Women & Nonbinary Ride, photo taken by Zwifter Whitney Patel (BettySquad)
Probably the most surprising and amazing development, though, is that it has spilled over into my hometown with women I do know in real life! I keep inviting local women to join ATP pretty much immediately if I find out they Zwift. They start Zwifting with us, and they get stronger. They’re not just relying on me to help that happen anymore – they’ve got an entire team of women helping and encouraging them.
When I show up to the local rides there are other ATP jerseys there. And it’s not all ATP – sometimes, there are jerseys for other teams we race against, too. I’ve met nearby women who race for Revo, Betty Squad, and the Herd. Some, like me, do the BMTR Flat 100 when they can in the winter. Zwift and specifically Zwift racing teams are helping encourage women’s training and racing at every level around the world.
My team, ATP, fields women’s teams at every level. We’re a pretty small team compared to others; most of our members are in North America, and I think all of our communications are in English. I found in ATP the women’s racing community I didn’t even know I needed. They helped fill in the gaps, and now in my forties I am a very different racer than I was when I joined them three and a half years ago. I don’t just get dropped immediately when I make the drive to a city for races. Sometimes I ride off the front and win.
I got lucky, didn’t crash, and TTd to a win ahead of a chase at Ken Woods Memorial Road Race in 2022.
If you’re a woman who Zwifts, I highly recommend joining a team – even if just for fun and even if you feel slow. The women’s section here has a list of teams with active women’s riders and there’s also this new post just published with tips on what to look for in a team. I can’t guarantee everyone’s experiences will be as wonderful as mine have been, but if you live in the northern hemisphere, you know what they say: Winter is coming. (And if you’re in the southern hemisphere, there’s no need to wait six months. There may already be a women’s racing community waiting for you too.)
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