In Tamar Mayer Professor of Geography Peter Nelson’s ‘Rural Geography’ course last fall, each Monday began with the same question: Did you do anything rural this weekend? Some students shared stories of apple picking, others recapped camping trips, and one at the start of one class that semester, Wren Capra ’28 casually dropped that she had ridden her bike from Burlington to Montreal.
Capra’s response evoked surprise, but served as a good reminder of the surreal athletic environment at Middlebury. If you’re not an elite athlete yourself, you are likely in the midst of one. In ‘Rural Geography’, Capra was that elite athlete: a back-to-back endurance mountain bike national champion and member of the Middlebury College Cycling team.
Capra is not the only nationally-recognized rider on the team. Teammate Dani Bronk ’28 earned Middlebury’s first women’s collegiate national mountain bike title with her Short Track victory in the fall of 2024 — a race in which Bronk and Capra jointly led the field for a quarter of the course’s undulating grassy loops. Yet one can only fully appreciate their dominance in the saddle by understanding their similar cycling origin stories.
Having Nordic skied since fourth grade, Capra quit her team by her sophomore year of high school due to personal and overtraining-related struggles. However, a love for being outdoors, exploring and networking her surroundings remained. Much like a teen’s sense of freedom when getting their driver’s license, getting on the bike was liberating for Capra. A Steamboat Springs native, she found joy in feeling connected to her environment and in exploring Routt County, CO, as a whole.
“[Biking] feels different from the organized sports that I’ve always been in throughout my childhood… it’s so expansive and there’s so many places you can go. I’m not confined to a Nordic trail, I can ride my bike basically anywhere. It’s freeing.”
To help bring structure to training, Capra joined Avout Racing, a Denver-based cycling team. Capra was soon taking part in the biggest races in the United States, including the Pan-American Mountain Bike Championships in her senior year. Despite the major competitions and titles, Capra's motivation for staying on the bike has remained the same. “The reason I do it is because I just want to. It’s not really results-driven.”
Bronk likewise entered competitive cycling while transitioning from another sport. Having hoped to compete in DI alpine skiing, Bronk faced a decision: either take a gap year to improve her recruiting chances or move forward and try something else. “At that point, I wanted to explore other things within skiing, but then it was summer, so I just started biking,” Bronk said.
The same zeal for exploration set in for Bronk, discovering gravel roads around her house that she never knew existed. Bronk joined Middlebury’s team once she arrived on campus, taking the national crown in the Short Track her first semester. As with Capra, though, success doesn’t define her relationship with cycling. “It’s not even my college sport; it’s just a hobby. We just go race on the weekends in the fall,” Bronk said. This perspective has helped her avoid burnout, especially as she began cycling because of the burnout she felt with skiing.
Capra and Bronk’s successes on the dirt and grass only tell part of Middlebury’s cycling story. Mountain bike and cyclocross competitions take place in the fall, while road racing occurs in the spring. The transition to the pavement brings a different ethos of competition and a shift in athletes’ personalities; part of this change was on display at UVM’s Catamount Classic road race on Saturday, April 25.
A powerful aspect of cycling is its tendency to marry immense physical suffering with landscapes of profound natural beauty. Cyclists begin the 10.5-mile race loop at the Charlotte Central School, quickly diving downhill as Camel’s Hump sinks into the horizon. Horses, chickens and sprawling farmhouses flank both sides of the road, and on the northerly and southerly legs of the course, the Adirondacks and Greens line up like spectators. The course climbs, falls and winds, and absent the antsy peloton, a gentle breeze and the distant sound of cars would put you to sleep sitting along its perimeter.
Peter Warner ’27 and Herschel Brown ’28 were Middlebury’s two competitors in the men’s field. Warner rode in the top-level 1/2/3 category, while Brown competed at the 3/4 level. In his debut road race, Warner placed ninth out of 27, finishing in just under two hours and 34 minutes. A varsity Nordic skier for Middlebury, Warner approaches cycling with the combination of a love for exploration and typical “Nordie,” house music-bumping intensity.
“Cycling is mostly for fun,” Warner said. “I get to do something hard, suffer-y.” Part of embracing long road races — the 1/2/3s had to complete six laps, totalling 63 miles and nearly 5000 feet of climbing — is making “fun” synonymous with “hard.” Brown adopts a similar mindset. “I enjoy the sightseeing, but I also just enjoy pushing myself a lot. I am definitely performance-oriented when I can be.”
Brown rode farther than most on Saturday. In addition to completing the Mt. Philo hill climb race earlier that day, Brown biked from campus — a 37-mile commute — in an attempt to finish the day with 100 miles. “All I can think about is that I’m hurting a lot right now,” Brown said. Middlebury Cycling is a team without a coach, yet it has national champions among its ranks. It’s a team that will go to nationals, but only if it can secure the funding. It’s a group of athletes who love to explore, will go to the well to do so, and have built a community of others of the same adventurous bent. In many respects, Middlebury Cycling resembles any other team on campus, yet maintains its distinctive quirk — be it on grass, gravel or asphalt.
Simon Schmieder '26 (he/him) is a Senior Sports Editor.
Simon is an avid runner and biker and enjoys spending time outdoors. He is a philosophy and political science joint major with a minor in German, in addition to being a Philly sports fan.
