My story is not remarkable. It’s not the stuff of cycling legends. It’s not the metoric rise of Ben King or the family destiny of Taylor Phinney. It contains not the glory nor the tragedy of the careers of Pantani and Van Den Broek. It’s probably not all that unlike your story. But while it may lack in brilliance it is mine to tell. So here it is… my history as a cyclist.

I was not destined to get so obsessed with bikes. While I did grow up in the country and often used a bicycle to get around, I was not that kid you hear about who was constantly riding. I rode to my friends houses to play around and do typical kid stuff but most of my friends lived close so there were no epic adventures to be had in my youth. In fact until I went away to college bikes were still just a toy.

In the fall of 1997 I moved from Nokesville to Richmond, VA to attend the fine arts program at VCU. My first year away from home was spent living in the dorms and simply walking most of the time. I brought my car with me and often drove home on the weekends to work and did not even bother to bring my bike with me to school. At the end of my freshman year I, like most VCU students, moved off campus into the fan district. Now I was living several blocks from campus and all of a sudden it made sense to have a bike. So the next time I traveled home I was sure to grab the trusty Novara mountain bike that I had occasionally used since junior high. All of a sudden I found myself riding almost daily and I began to notice other bicycles and their riders with a new level of interest.

At the time all the kids like myself that were into the punk and hardcore scene hung out on campus in Shafer Court. All day long we would come and go between class, hanging out and messing around. I noticed that some of the other kids were riding these strange bikes that looked kind of like road bikes but only had one gear, no brakes, and the pedals moved when they walked them around. Track bikes. A couple guys were bike messengers but most were just students. Looking back it was actually pretty amazing how nice most of these bikes were. The cheapest track bike you might see being walked through campus would be some thing like a GT or Debernardi, a far cry from the $300 fixed gears that are common today. I was fascinated by these bikes as well as some of the more traditional road bikes some other people had.

Around this time I had become friends with a few other guys who were starting to also take an interest in bikes beyond casual transportation. Some time in 2000 I bought a used Raleigh road bike from my roommate, who had in turn bought it from another guy in the music scene. All of sudden I could ride further and faster and things started to click. My friend Jason was also getting much more into riding and we ended up meeting a couple of guys that were a couple years younger that were also going to VCU that a little experience with collegiate racing.

I’m not sure exactly when it was, but my first “group ride” was with Jason, Ben, and a guy named Greg Wittwer that was really into racing. We rode from my house in the fan across the Huguenot bridge and back along Riverside Drive to downtown. At the time I thought I was quite the badass. These days that route is just the 18 mile “riverside loop” but at the time it seem like a small adventure. By the time I got home I officially caught the cycling bug. At the start of the next semester of school I used some of my financial aid money to buy my first NEW road bike. It was the bright yellow and blue Specialized Allez with Shimano 105 components that I had read about in Bicycling Magazine. I had done my research and had decided that it was the perfect bike for me and I had to have it. Soon I had clipless pedals and that winter I got my first pair of bib shorts!

Meanwhile, from the fall in 1998 up to late 2000 I had been going to school and working part time for VCU as a security guard in the dorms. I was getting more and more bored with security work and was having some serious thoughts about dropping out of college. While I thoroughly enjoyed certain aspects of school I lacked the motivation to take it seriously enough to get good grades. I wanted to goof off, go to shows, and ride my bike. So I quit school. I needed a job and ended up working at a Service Merchandise in the west end for a while. As far as mindless retail jobs go it was ok. I showed up, sold some electronics, then punched out and went home. Boring, but it paid what little bills I had.

What happened next seemed so unimportant at the time but ended up being a pivotal moment in my life. In October I had heard from a friend that there was this bike shop called Rowlett’s that this guy I kind of knew worked at sometimes. He would work there in the fall and winter to help build kids bikes for the holiday season. This year he had a real job and was not going to work there. I was told to go mention he was a friend of mine and ask for a job. So I did and it worked. I don’t remember the first day I started working at Rowlett’s but I remember that I could not get enough. I started out building kids bikes, when it was time to clock out I hung around and watched what the more experienced guys were doing. I asked questions, I read catalogs, and I couldn’t help but notice that Surly Steamroller track bike on the floor every day. When the holidays ended they kept me on as a part time bike builder. In the spring it got busy and I learned how to work on the sales floor. I found that my growing love of bikes made it easy for me to talk to other people about why one bike is better than another, or what pedals they should buy.

One of the guys that worked there was named Stratton. Stratton seemed cool. He was always a little bit of a jerk to me but I knew he actually RACED bikes and helped organize a team. I had started following professional cycling at this point but was still really intimidated by the local racing culture. Bike racers seemed like a bunch of rich jerks and did not fit into my early 20′s punk rock mindset. I had bought that Surly Steamroller and was really getting into track bikes. I was drawn to their clean lines and stripped down function. Pedal faster, go faster, pedal slower, go slower. Then at some point in 2003 one of the older guys at the shop by the name of Mark Batterson told me about how they used to race their bikes around the paddle boat pond at Byrd Park and do something called an miss and out. By some strange coincidence Tim Barry (who I knew as, that guy with a really sweet old beat up track bike that is in that band Avail) happened to walk into the conversation and said “man that’s cool, somebody should do that”. I thought to myself… yeah… somebody SHOULD do that. I guess I can do that. So a few weeks later I put on the first “sprint club”. The name was a reference to the movie Fight Club and I envisioned it being this punk rock bike racing league. Something for track bikes only. Something illegal and dangerous. A few of us met at the Byrd Park paddle boat pond. Chad Rathbone, Andrew Wolak, and a guy named Joey, whose last name escapes me were the first competitors. I don’t remember who won that night but it was the beginning of some cool stuff. Between the 3 that raced and a few others we were stoked. We started scouting out other places to ride and stumbled upon Riverview Cemetery. Next to the more famous Hollywood Cemetery, Riverview had all the twists and turns you could want. It was sketchy but not too sketchy. You could ride almost flat out at times and then feel like you were about to crash and try and somehow slow down your brakeless bike.

Our second race was there. This time we had a few more people and we decided to meet every other Sunday that summer to race. And race we did. We bombed around the cemetery, we found some of the steepest hills in downtown to have uphill sprints, we ferreted out empty industrial areas. Basically anywhere there seemed to be little traffic and something we could make into a course we would race. Our little group started to grow. By the following summer of 2004 we would often meet up and ride 20 or more strong to a spot to race. Some would just hang out and drink beer, others would race. It was this amazing micro cycling community and it was OURS.

Then the arms race began. We realized that some of us were getting better at racing and we split the races into categories. The faster guys were pushing bigger gears. Riser bars and bullhorns were being replaced with drop bars. We held time events and created a points series. While things seemed to be getting more serious we made sure to keep it light hearted by throwing in scavenger hunt style races we called “point to points” where you raced to spot, did a mini race, then raced to another spot. Sometimes we would follow our regular races with something we called bar-b-q races where each person was assigned a food item to get and it was a race to the grocery store then back to our house in Oregon Hill to cook out and relax.

Back in bike shop land I had upgraded my ill fitting Specialized to an Orbea with Dura-Ace, my Surly had been replaced with an Olmo. One of the mechanics had taught me to build my first set of custom wheels, and at some point I bought a USA Cycling license and finally decided to try road bike racing at Bryan Park.

I got dropped. And lapped… and lapped again. I’m not sure how many times I was lapped that day but it was more than a few. If it had not been for the encouragement from Stratton and Mark at the bike shop I would have probably quit racing before I ever gave it a chance. So I went back. This time I was less awful. I still got dropped but each time I did I would wait at the top of the hill for the pack to come back around so I could get back onto the group and try to hang on. Eventually I was able to hang on for a whole race. Success! As I kept going out to Bryan Park I realized that the road racing scene was really not that different than what we were doing with the sprint club races. At the root of it both groups were just a bunch of guys that liked to ride as fast as they could with friends.

So at some point those of us that were doing sprint club got this wild idea to drive up to Trexlertown, PA to go ride on the track there. I had met a couple people like our group that raced up there and they were going to meet us there and teach us about the track. We spent HOURS riding that day on the track and I came back to Richmond a changed man. I wanted to race on a track. That’s all I could think about.

I remember hearing that 20 or so years ago some guy had put on races at some old auto track in Midlothian called Southside Speedway and that some guy on the cycling team that Roweltt’s sponsored was family with them. I did a little research and tracked down a woman by the name of Sue Clemets that owned the speedway. She had not been the track owner the last time bicycles raced there but she was amazingly friendly to this guy with a buzz cut and tattoos. She agreed to rent the track out for bike racing and in the fall of 2005 I put on my first sanctioned race. 67 people showed up to the first race and a month later 140 showed up for the second. I held events for road bicycles as well as track bikes. The roadie guys raced around the track and then all of the track bike kids had their turn. But by now the season was winding down and the weather was getting colder. Over the fall and winter I thought constantly about putting on more and better races.

In 2006 I had a plan… three races at the speedway and one new event in Bryan Park. I had this idea to use the larger loop in the park that goes all the way around the Azalea garden. I somehow managed to convince the people at Parks and Rec to let me put on an event. At the time I thought things were all on the up and up but I later realized that things were dangerously close to getting royally screwed up. In my haste to get things put together I only ever had a verbal commitment for the date we wanted to race but never actually acquired an actual permit from the city. Whoops! Suffice to say I lucked out and nothing bad happened that day and when I went to the parks and rec office the following week they were surprisingly understanding. Disaster averted!

The rest of the 2006 season progressed without issues and I put on three events at the speedway mixing road and track events. The season wound down and I went back into winter mode at the bike shop.

While my involvement in racing and race promoting was growing so was my submersion into cycling as a larger entity. I rode to work almost every day, to the grocery store, the record store, shows, parties, wherever. I lived and breathed bicycles. I was dating an awesome girl who was also into bikes which only further fed my obsession.

Then one day that fall, after 5 years at Rowlett’s I realized it was time for a change. Stratton had already left and I was beginning to realize that there really was no future for me there. By this point I had cultivated some good relationships with people in the cycling community and often talked with a regular customer at the shop by the name of Tim Mullins. Some time that winter I had a particularly frustrating day and gave Tim a call. I remembered hearing him talk about investing in a bicycle shop at some point so I convinced him to meet up and talk about things. I explained my frustrations with where I was at now and how I wanted to work in a shop with a fresh approach to not just selling bikes but to being a hub in the community that other cyclists could rely on for more than just the equipment they needed to ride. Strangely enough Tim had been talking to his friend John about exactly the same thing! We met a few more times and finally decided to take the plunge and open a shop.

I put in my notice at Rowlett’s and a few weeks later we were hunting for a space in Carytown to open a shop. By February we were building out a space. I was working most days from 6am to 10 at night… talking to vendors, setting up accounts, getting inventory, setting up fixtures, programming a point of sale and so on… then all at once we were ready to open and that spring the doors opened for the first time at Carytown Bicycle Company.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Since starting Carytown Bicycle Co. with Tim and John my love of the cycling world has only grown. I divide my time in the season between road, track, mountain bike races. I ride to work almost every day and have even started doing some bike touring. I have had the fortune to meet some amazing people both at home here in Richmond and elsewhere as well. Bicycles were my gateway into a community that I could not even imagine giving up being a part of now.

Along the way I have stayed true to my beginnings as a racer and have never lost any of my love for the track. I have tried to infect as many roadies as I can with this same enthusiasm and I have had some luck doing so.

I count myself extremely lucky to get to go to work each day and talk about and work on bikes. It’s not glamorous, nor does it pay a whole lot but I would not trade places with anyone.

In the following years since we opened Carytown Bicycle Co. we managed to establish ourselves as a well know bike shop and now after 5 years we have outgrown our current space and are hard at work preparing to move to a bigger and better space this spring!

So looking back I realize I have been into cycling now for 10 years. Wow. I can’t wait to see what the next 10 years hold.

Thanks for reading all this… now let’s hear your story!

Post Script:

I wanted to mention by name some of the people that were involved in Sprint Club during those few years of bandit racing.

Chad Rathbone. Chad is still a bike messenger in Richmond and focuses on enduro mountain bike racing and having fun.
Andrew Wolak. Andrew is a master mechanic at 3sports and while he does not currently race he is a avid mountain biker.
Joey. I have no idea what he is up to these days.
Dangerous Dan aka Jobless Dan. No longer a messenger but still rides.
Andrew the Wizard. I rarely see him but I know he is very active in the activist community in Richmond.
Stuart Louder. Now a veteran bike messenger and cat 2 racer.
Julie Kulicza. Local elite women’s racer and coach.
Allison Fox. Raced for a time with the Seigler team but not currently racing.
Luke Stevens. Owner of Bunnyhop Bike Shop.
Jason Steed. Now a family man but still rides when he can.
Stuart Squier. Stu was often my right hand man in organizing the sprintclub events. Still a dedicated rider and working at the Martin Agency.
Dennis Throckmorten. Always stoked to ride and often found on the trails.
Mason Haymes. Mason only raced with us a little but eventually caught the road racing bug and is a cat 1.
Jeff Buckles. Raced with us a bit when he moved to Richmond for school. Rekindled his interest in competing with us and was racing at the elite level for several years with Richmond Pro Cycling.
Tony Hall. Also got to the cat 2 level but now focuses on riding for fun and photography.
Joey Jones. Still rides all the time
John Emanuel. Resisted racing outside of Sprintclub for years but is now starting his second full season of road and cyclocross.
Ian Dunwiddie. No longer races but is extremely active in the bike polo community.
Ian Marcuse. Yeah… THAT guy. Does he need an introduction?
Jim Temple. Came out of retirement from doing running races to race track bikes with a bunch of knucklehead kids. Still holding it down like he did back then by still having fun despite being old enough to be our father.