The lead into this year’s Grant’s Tomb Criterium was particularly tough. The challenges were both broad - the event itself faced additional hurdles that seem to increase with each passing year, and personal - as doubt whether the stress and workload as a volunteer was truly ‘worth it’ compounded. Even with a revamped team led by Liz, who did an incredible job, and support from a wide swath of individuals, preparing for the race was an intense and exhausting process. And about two weeks before the race, for the first time in my long history of behind the scenes involvement, I was ready to give up. In fact, I wound up drafting a late night Journal entry about how I couldn’t justify the workload any longer.

At the time I was particularly disheartened by the fact that we seemingly weren’t making progress on either the sport’s gender disparity (at that point in time women represented just 9% of registrants) or the abbreviated lifecycle of a bike racer (at that point in time less than 30% of 2018 racers had registered for the 2019 edition of the race) with what was supposed to be our marquee event. If I wasn’t able to drive an improvement on those two key points, which I personally view as so important to the survival of the sport, then what was I doing spending hours on Bikereg and in Google Sheets mapping out race logistics? About that point in time I told a few people that I would get through Grant’s Tomb, Orchard Beach and Bear Mountain, but I wasn’t planning on serving out my year as Director of Open Racing as I started daydreaming about shifting gears to organize gravel events instead (where I felt like the prospects for improving the status quo might be better).