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Senior Mary Collier and Junior Benjamin Miller cruise through the mist-covered cycling trail as they complete the last lap of their morning bike ride. Collier and Miller, both members of the SIU cycling team, will represent SIU at the National Collegiate Cycling Championships and will be competing in two of the mountain biking events this weekend in New Mexico.
For the first time ever, the SIU cycling team will be represented at the National Collegiate Cycling Championships.
Ben Miller and Mary Collier will compete in two of the mountain biking events this weekend in New Mexico.
Competing at high altitudes against riders on full scholarships, the odds are against Miller and Collier.
"We're also going to be going from 400 feet in altitude to 11,000 feet in altitude, so I'll be happy if I can breathe," Collier said. "And it will be against the fastest people in the country."
Miller and Collier have to balance going to school full-time with jobs and cycling, hassles that many of their opponents don't have to overcome.
"I have some classes that are going to be hell to get out of," Miller said.
"They wouldn't be if you were a football player," said Brendan Collier, the team captain who will be supporting the two riders this weekend.
The team has fought the odds to this point, placing seventh of 15 teams in the conference championships despite having only three people on the team while most teams had 10 members.
Miller and Collier qualified for nationals based on their finishes at the Midwest Collegiate Cycling Conference championships in Kentucky. Collier finished first in the cross country, short track and dual slalom events, while Miller finished third in the cross country and the short track.
The cross country race, the meat of the competition, is usually about 20 miles for women and 30 for men. The short track race, a series of loops around a shorter course, is more spectator-friendly. The dual slalom is like a BMX track going down a hill.
"Because it's my first year going, it's the first year I've ever qualified to go, I'm going to be excited to compete against the top guys in the nation, really," Miller said.
While SIU qualified for nationals as a team two years ago, it wasn't able to pull together enough money to go. That success helped the team to successfully lobby USG for money.
But the team is hoping that just competing in the national championships will help the team even more.
"Hopefully it will give the University and the cycling club more name recognition. I've talked to kids who have gone here four years and they'll say, 'Wow, I didn't know we had a cycling club,'" Miller said. "This is such an awesome area for cycling in general, for road riding and mountain biking, and I don't think that's well known enough."
There will also be team-building workshops taught by experts that will help the team to grow, and Brendan hopes the success and attention will help the team reach its ultimate goal - scholarships.
"Our website gets visited by a lot of people that are prospective students, and I get e-mails a lot of times just asking about how strong our team is, if we offer scholarships," Brendan said. "That's where it's at. There's a lot of good students, a lot of good riders that are going elsewhere because that's where the scholarships are."
