Cycling is the New Skiing
Connor Benton is a MN high school skiing legend that some of today's youngsters might need to look up in the nordic history books but they could just as easily learn about him on the front page of Velonews (he appears there weekly, no doubt). Benton led the Hopkins ski team charge in his day, fine-tuned the Harris Dirnberger machine as mentor, and started the Benton family skiing dynasty. He moved on to riding bikes at Cal and has had incredible results ranging from 1st in the 2013 Ice Cream Diablo Hill Climb Challenge, to another win in the 2014 Western Collegiate Cycling Conference Slow Race, all the way to achieving highest honors at the 2014 Cal Cycling "White Gold" Best Bike Tan Competition. In Benton's following dialogue (discourse, discussion, or diatribe) we delve into what many people have only dreamed (dreamt) of delving (or diving, probably not driving, nor deriving, that's math) into - his thoughts:
"To say I had a good time growing up nordic skiing in Minnesota would be putting it lightly. Even though my coaches these days don't call me "chief" or "idiot" (or whatever the nom du jour happened to be), I still have a lot of the MN ski scene embedded deep in my subconscious. My mother has recently described me as "attention deficit disorder personified on a bicycle", but messing around and occasionally breaking equipment has been second nature to me ever since I put on a pair of rollerskis.
Some of my fondest memories, indeed, have resulted from my various mishaps in both sports - whether it was falling down in the Presque Isle JN classic sprints, and loudly proclaiming 'I think I broke a nut' coming across the line, or crashing this year in the collegiate national championship criterium in Asheville, NC, and showing up to the awards banquet a couple hours later, bandaged and shirtless (I had a thrift store blazer on, to be fair).
It's these kind of memories that have truly been my principal experience of sport. While you can't deny the magnitude of hundreds and thousands of hours and miles of training, it's uncanny how most of it seems to fade away while the memories remain. Cycling, to me, has been another way to make memories, to meet people with all different takes on life, to have a reason to get up at 7 AMon a Sunday.
Coming to school in the Bay Area, I had a vague idea that I'd try cycling. If I'm being perfectly honest, I think I had a vague idea that I'd try ultimate frisbee too. But I think the many close parallels with skiing really got me hooked on cycling - the individual/team balance, the different techniques, the Euro-centric professional world, I could go on and on. Cycling has been almost an extension of my skiing life. I've been through the same road trips and flights to races (with all the hilarity-interspersed boredom that accompnies team travel), the same juggling act of school and sport (and all the late nights that entails), and the same thrill of competition that somehow never gets old after countless starts and finishes.
("View from Tibidabo", photo by Connor's right hand (I would assume) via Facebook)
So why am I writing this? I guess this is just me, finally writing down what I've always felt about my transition from skiing to cycling. I hope that, especially to any junior considering hanging up the boots like I did, this brief post is as entertaining and enlightening to read as it was for me to write. Skiing has a way of sticking with you - and I hope to embody the Moose Nordic spirit as thoroughly as I can in my wheel-based endeavors."
And who knows, you might find me goofing off from the 9th wave of the Birkie next year!