Cal Poly’s Wheelmen Club, the campus cycling and racing team, will ride its way to help find a cure for cancer in Cool, Calif., next month. The club has put together four teams to compete in the Coolest 24 Hour Race Against Cancer on May 5 and 6.
The event is the only 100 percent nonprofit, 24-hour mountain bike race in the nation. The inaugural race raised $30,000 for cancer research last year, and this year the group hopes to raise $70,000.
“The cool thing about this race is that the race promoter is doing it for free,” mechanical engineering junior Kevin Moynihan said. “The venue is free. There are no costs, and therefore, 100 percent of the $500-per-team entry fee is being donated to the UC Davis Cancer Research Center.”
The race has both solo and group divisions of two, four and five, but the collegiate competition, which is also the West Coast Championships of 24-hour racing, requires groups of five people, with at least one being female. The Wheelmen Club, taking four teams, will have 20 riders and raise a minimum of $2,000.
The club will group the teams with their strongest riders on one “A” team, so it is hoping to do well in the race, which it won last year.
“The A’s are definitely going to be trying to compete for first place again this year,” said graphic communication senior Ryan Tarver, one of five members of the A team. He will be joined by Jesse Palmer, Matthew Goebel, Jeff Kendall-Weed and Julia Smith.
The teams are training for the event by riding with others who are at their same training level for now, and in a few weeks will train with the teams they’ll be competing against. The teams will also start doing night rides because the race will require them to ride through the night, Tarver said. The race is a relay system in which each lap is about 12 miles and will probably take close to an hour to complete. Each rider typically goes between one and three laps at a time.
“The thing about the race is, if you have people racing four or five laps in a row, and then not racing for the rest of the day, by the fourth lap they’re really tired,” Moynihan said. “We do sprint distances, then they have an hour or two to recover, eat some food, then go out again.”
Cal and UC Davis are expected to be the team’s biggest challengers in the event this year.
“Last year Davis was our biggest competitor – after 24 hours it came down to just 10 minutes at the end,” Tarver said.
This is the only 24-hour event that the Wheelmen Club competes in because it is expensive and such races rarely have collegiate divisions. The club is currently at the apex of its road season and will gear up for mountain biking season after summer.