Matt Roy – Page 2 – Seven Cycles

New Bike Day

New bike day is a special day, even if you spend all day, every day building bikes. Our own Bradford Smith, Drifter extraordinaire, built himself a new bike a few weeks ago, and he’s got that little kid gleam in his eye ever since.

Never one to dream small dreams, Brad’s idea was to put together a machine he could race cross country on, and by “cross country” of course we mean literally across the country. The Trans-Am Bike Race leaves June 6th from Astoria, OR and ends in Yorktown, VA.

Here he is the night of final assembly in the MM Racing service course with good friend Matt Roy, master mechanic and cross-country racing accomplice.

And here is the bike below, ready for a shake out ride, packed for travel. Stay tuned for a lot more updates on this particular adventure.

Matt and Mo Bruno Roy’s MMRacing Season Wrap

Matt and Mo do a great job of documenting the fun they have on the race course and on the road, and they’ve just posted their 2014/15 Cyclocross Season Wrap Up.

Here is a quick excerpt:

Wednesday was race day #1 and I was feeling ready to go in a competitive field. The number of single speed women had doubled from the year before and as the defending champion, I was going to have a hard race on my hands.

Bounce over to MMRacing and read it all.

Behind the Scenes with MM Racing

By now, you know Matt and Mo as two of our favorite sponsored-riders. We have written about their exploits recently here and here. What you might not know about Matt and Mo is that together, under the banner of MM Racing, they are two of the savviest riders/racers in the game.

Matt explains, “MM Racing is really about being our own title sponsor, our own sports marketing company. In 2008, when we teamed up with Seven Cycles and secured product sponsorship for bikes and clothing, we still found ourselves without a title sponsor. At that time, we realized that we were actually our own financial “sponsors” and created our own team name using our first initials. For the next two years, MM Racing served as a place holder or “Your Name Here” for potential title sponsors. In 2010, Bob’s Red Mill filled that spot for us. We remain our own team managers and organizers, now using the moniker MM Racing as more of our sports marketing vehicle via social media, website and e-newsletters.”

“As privateers, we do all of our own marketing,” he explains. “I think a lot of athletes at the elite level just want to focus on training and racing, and we get that, but if you’re not packaging and marketing what you do, it can be hard for sponsors to justify supporting an athlete. Historically, we pay attention to marketing trends and changing the way we approach potential sponsors year-to-year based on current trends and things like laying out ROI for our sponsors. We understand that sponsorship works on two levels. On the one hand, and most importantly, you have a relationship as people. You essentially become teammates with your sponsors, and then at the same time, it’s a professional business relationship, and both aspects have to work for the sponsorship to be successful.”

Mo says, “We have never approached companies for sponsorship we don’t personally appreciate in some way and believe in. The real benefit to our approach is that we get to develop genuine relationships that are part teammate, part professional business. Some athletes may be comfortable with anonymous sums of money from a sponsor, but that’s not what we’re about. We want to be part of a team and show off our teammates. Our approach is akin to our lifestyle. We don’t need a lot, we’re not interested in getting lots of “stuff” for free, we want to be connected to what our sponsors do and who they are on a personal level.”

Both Matt and Mo worked in pro-cycling, Mo as a soigneur and Matt as a mechanic, before getting together, so they both knew what it took to run a tight ship, but all the work of running the team can be a big stress point in their relationship.

Mo says, “We both put so much time, energy and effort into all aspects of our team and our races that when it doesn’t go well for one of us, it doesn’t go well for both of us.”

MM Racing divides their season in interesting ways, too. August through February is Mo time, with cyclocross and mountain bike races dominating their days. March through September is Matt’s time to reel off randonneuring events and other long, meditative struggles against time and distance.

They are in a unique position of being life partners, teammates and running a sports marketing company together. During Mo’s cyclocross season and Matt’s summer Ultra Endurance season, their tasks read like a list of resume qualifications. Matt’s job includes Team Mechanic + Manager, Logistics Coordinator, Social Media/Newsletter/Website Designer + Curator, ultra endurance cyclist. Mo’s jobs include Sponsorship and Marketing liaison, Social Media + Newsletter Content Writer, Soigneur, cyclocross racer.

Mo says, “We work very differently at most tasks and our approach to training and racing but I think our strengths and weaknesses are complimentary. I admittedly can’t multitask very well and that is Matt’s specialty. Matt can juggle five balls and pick up three more without ever dropping one while remaining objective, linear and analytical. It’s essential to managing the mayhem that can come his way during a muddy cyclocross race or unplanned bumps in our travel plans.I can get a little wishy washy in the emotions of things and can do that fake juggling with only two balls. When it comes to my cyclocross racing, I often need time to process the emotions of the day (both good and bad) before I can objectively talk about or analyze a race. Matt can stay the course and compartmentalize tasks and emotions when needed to always be 100% on the job. However, when I am a soigneur my emotional empathy or intuition can end up being the difference between checking things off a list to make sure riders have what they need or just knowing that the thing that might boost their spirits at mile 120 in a 50º downpour is a surprise egg and cheese sandwich.”

Matt adds, “When it comes down to it, we’re really lucky we get to do all of this together.”

Matt Roy and the Art of Endurance

Matt Roy is a different kind of bike rider. Most of his exploits transpire in the middle of the night, alone or with a single partner, down a road not likely to show fresh tire tracks. He’s an ultra-cyclist and the other half of MM Racing with his wife and current single-speed cyclocross World Champion Mo Bruno Roy. High points of this season, for Matt, included completion of a full brevet series, 200km, 300km, 400km, 600km and 1000km. He rode from Bremerton on the western shore of Puget Sound near Seattle, down the Oregon coast and up to Crater Lake in Oregon, and then beyond that to Klamath Falls, a three day, 625-mile odyssey undertaken with close friend David Wilcox.

Riding a bike for three days is not a thing that most cyclists, even the most ardent feel inclined to do. The thing that’s hard to fathom is how you avoid the late night crisis of confidence and keep riding. Matt says, “Part of it is built on desire. Part is practice. You build up to it in palatable chunks, basically four hour units. You can ride for four hours, and then stop and assess what to do next. On the way to Crater Lake we were super-tired, but we were never not having fun.”

He laughs when he says, “All great art requires suffering. Seriously though, there are peaks and valleys both mental and physical, but if you didn’t fall asleep on a picnic table in a park at 2AM because you were so tired, they wouldn’t be worth doing. What keeps me going is that you see so much cool stuff over the miles. Nature changes so much from place to place, from urban to boreal forest to farm land to rushing rivers.”

If the Pacific Northwest provided Roy’s high point, the Green Mountain Double Century served as counter point. He was riding the GMDC with the aim of setting a new solo rider course record. He was, he says, “racing to prove something to myself,” and after 13 hours of hard work he was on track for a 15-16 hour finish. In spite of the rainy morning, the roads were fast and dry.

And that’s when it happened.

“I had just gone up Tate Hill Road,” he says, his tone foreshadowing the crash to come, “basically a wall of a road, so steep, and I was thinking ahead to the next flat section, the next 30 miles, bombing down Chunks Brook Road, and I just hit something. My right hand came off the bar, and I swerved into the sand at the edge of the road, and the front wheel went out and I flew. I ripped both levers off the handlebar. I laid there. I was sure I had broken something. My elbow was wrecked.”

At this point, Mo says, “I went into paramedic mode. I saw his elbow and knew it needed a dozen stitches. We cleaned him up, put him in the car, but the thing about GMDC is that it gets into all these remote corners of the state. Phones don’t work a lot. Eventually we found our way to the hospital in Bennington. It took them an hour to clean out his elbow, and he ended up with 16 stitches, four of them internal.”

The crash left him with severe whiplash. Some weeks later he saw a chiropractor who performed a “life-changing adjustment.” His elbow had hit the ground so hard in Vermont that 1000km into his west coast ride, a small abscess formed and later gave up a further small handful of rocks and soil. Can you imagine it? And he was “never not having fun.”

The crash cancelled a lot of Matt’s plans, but if anything, that seems to have made him more intent on finding a different way to ride.

He says, “I have this amazing bike (Seven Evergreen PRO), and I want to sort of throw as many stupid ideas at it, as I can. I rode the length of the aqueducts between Waltham and Wachusett. I want to do more adventurous, absurd riding, rather than structured events. I’m finding those unique adventures far more attractive now. I want to make some wrong turns, plan less. Mo and I have both said, ‘Let’s make more mistakes.'”

We should all fail so beautifully.

GMDC photos by Dave Chiu.

Being World Champion – Mo Bruno Roy Interview

Seven-sponsored rider and good friend Mo Bruno Roy won the Single-Speed Cyclocross World Championship in Louisville on October 25th. We wrote about it first here. We had Mo and her MM Racing teammate/husband Matt Roy in the other day to talk about the race, where she is in her career, and what she wants out of riding her bike. This is what she said:

Seven: Did you believe you could win this race going in?

MBR: I was hoping I could. I was planning to, but I didn’t realize what it would take. Single-speed racing is full of shenanigans. People hand you bourbon shots and beers while you ride, and you can take shortcuts based on your willingness to engage in the fun. At Worlds you could skip the flyover if you chugged a beer. If you were willing to throw your bike over a four foot wall and climb over after, then you could avoid running through the sand pit.

At the start this year, none of us had shoes on. We had to slide down this giant slip n’ slide and then get on the bike and start racing.

Having said all that, I raced full gas the whole time, because honestly I didn’t know what was happening. There were racers everywhere, people I knew hadn’t passed me ended up in front of me. Maybe they cut the course. Maybe they found some other way. I took the hole shot at the beginning, and Matt says I had 30 seconds at that point, but then there were all these women in front of me. My plan had been to race hard the first two laps, and then relax and have some fun, but when I realized I wasn’t in front I went 100% to the line.

Matt: Don’t forget the feats of strength the day before. The whole thing starts the day before the race. They broke everybody up into groups of 15 led by a “colonel” who took the racers all over Louisville to stuff like a 100 meter cross course, a mass start hill climb on which you could score extra points by stopping to pick up a rubber chicken. There were trivia questions. All of it scored points to qualify for the race. It was just a big bunch of strangers roving the city in search of fun.

Seven: So it’s a whacky event. How does that make you feel about being World Champion?

MBR: The thing that is so attractive to me about Single-Speed Worlds is that there are very few rules. Ride a single-speed. Wear a costume. Don’t be a jerk. It’s just chaos, a bunch of really nice people having fun on bikes. I have taken racing seriously for a long time, and I needed to remember what it was like to have this much fun, so yes, I am totally proud of being World Champion. It also makes you appreciate the rules that govern the other elite races, that give those races structure. We complain about those a lot, but you can see what craziness takes over without that structure. I happen to be at a point in my career when I’m ready for some more craziness, so this is great for me, but I understand other people want to take it seriously. Honestly, this very well might be the highlight of my career.

Seven: This was all part of “taking it easy for the season,” but most people don’t associate World Championships, albeit whacky ones, with taking it easy. What is it you have really been trying to achieve in 2014?

MBR: World Cup racing is super hard work. You have to plan your whole life around it. There is so much expectation involved, and that ratchets down the fun level, or it changes it. You have fun, but it’s fun after you’ve finished, not right away. Sometimes it’s a long time after. So taking it easy, for me, means having fun WHILE I’m racing, actually enjoying each event, and single-speed races retain a part of the older spirit of cyclocross when events were weirder, and we were all less focused on results.

I think we need more of that spirit, and less of this sense that every race has to be pure and exclusive and elite. I have maybe been naive up until now, in thinking that bike racing was for everyone. Within the larger bike racing community we are more exclusive than I thought we were. So planning my season, I wanted to get back to a more open-minded approach to racing. I don’t think wealth should be a limiter, and that’s easy for me to say as a sponsored rider, but whether you show up on a mountain bike or need to zip tie your shifters to qualify for the single-speed race or whatever, we have to share this with as many people as we can. Honestly, if someone had suggested bike racing to me when I was a kid, there just wouldn’t have been any way, because we didn’t have any money, but cycling is really a community activity. We need to be drawing everyone into what we’re doing, and I don’t think there is any better way to do that than by making it fun, keeping it fun, and having that be our priority.

This isn’t some crusade for me to save bike racing. I’m just one person, but just like I ride a bike to work and to run errands, I can only try to be an example. As you get older, living your principles seems to become more and more important, so I’m happy with where I am and what I’m doing, and I hope it helps the communities that I live in, and either way I’m having fun, so it’s a win.