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| Michael Schaub / Mountain Moon PhotographyMelissa Barker, in the middle, competes in cyclocross, an obstacle course-style race over mud, grass, concrete and other surfaces. |
Melissa Barker is 40, but she can recall exactly what her coach told her on the first day of high school cycling practice. "He said to us, 'If 20 years from now you're still riding your bike, I've done my job,'" she says.
Two decades later, she called her coach, who is still at the Holderness School in Plymouth, New Hampshire, to bring him up to date. "I said, 'Guess what? I'm not only still riding my bike, but I have a cyclocross team that's pretty awesome too,'" she says.
Barker, who had been a ski racer and soccer player before she fell for cycling after that high school introduction, has a passion for cyclocross, a down-and-dirty sport that's a little bit like cross-country bicycle racing melded with obstacle-course racing. Cyclists race around circuits of 2.5-3.5K over various surfaces (dirt, mud, sand, grass and pavement), churning uphill and flying downhill, while dismounting and carrying their bikes over obstacles several times each lap.
For the past five years, Barker, a longtime science teacher, has been the head coach of the varsity cyclocross team at Dawson School in Lafayette, Colorado, while also competing at an elite level in state and national cyclocross competitions. In January, she won a USA Cycling national championship. After finishing second in national or world age-group championships the past three years, Barker broke through at Asheville, North Carolina, to win the women's 40-44 cyclocross title.
"At the end, I was just so elated," she says. "I had been working for a lot of years and been so close so many times. It was amazing."
Read the full article here: http://espn.go.com/espnw/life-style/article/15906779/weekend-warriors-science-teacher-became-national-cyclocross-champion
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