The Team

Years ago, Matt & Rumon met while they were both going around in circles.  It was a fleeting meeting, though, in no small part due to the fact that super-strong sprinters (Matt) have little time for puny pursuiters (Rumon).  Or that Rumon simply couldn’t keep up.  Or that Matt was too busy admiring his own legs in the mirror to pay Rumon much attention.  In any event, they came, they met, they parted ways.

Circumstances brought them together again late last year while both were working on the Vancouver 2010 Olympic & Paralympic Winter Games.  Again, perfunctory greetings exchanged, a handful of minutes trading niceties, and then they were on their respective ways.

Both, you see, were very busy doing…stuff.  And not at all busy, any longer, riding bicycles.  Or, for that matter, doing much of anything to stay in shape.  Any shape, to say nothing of the shape that they used to be in, Matt having been a Beijing Olympic Games Qualifier and Rumon, much earlier in the decade, having spent a couple of years on the amateur national triathlon team.  Time had passed, calories had been consumed but not expended, gravity had taken hold and they were quickly sliding away from a connection to the sporting life that each had – at least up until a time – held dear in their lives.

They needed a shake-up.

That shake-up arrived in the spring, with a call from mutual friend Mark Butschler, a sales manager for Tinhorn Creek Winery.  Mark described that he and his buddy Keith Nicholl, owner of North Shore Athletics, had raced the TransRockies last year and had a great time, but this year they and their respective companies were looking to support two additional racers in the coming edition of the mountain bike stage race.

Are you in?  Hell yes.

It was time to get back on the bikes, to remember how to turn circles with the pedals and, for Matt, to figure out whether his 1800-watt-producing sprinter’s body was up for 6-7 hour days in the saddle, back-to-back-to-back.  For Rumon, it was less about figuring out whether his body could handle a new type of training and racing – that was itself, at least to his former version of his body, familiar – but instead to figure out whether his body would hold up at all, having had two heart operations in 2005 and 2008 and still being in the midst of treatment.

With uncertainty as a constant companion, they got down to training.   And, because it’s the digital era, to blogging.

Learn more about Matt.

Learn more about Rumon.