91����Ƶ 50 bicyclists set foot to pedal under the gaze of Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C. on the morning of May 22. Their final destination was the tiny town of Damascus, Virginia – 550 miles away on a route that snaked through the mountains, forests, and rivers, hugging Virginia’s western border. 

Just over 55 hours later, 91����Ƶ (91����Ƶ) alum Abe Kaufman ’04 rode past the finish line – beating the previous record for the TransVirginia 550 Bike Route by 18 hours. He said it was the “longest and most challenging route” he’s ever done. 

“The route was very challenging!” Kaufman said. “Not only the distance, but also the elevation gain and sections of technical gravel and dirt roads. There was even a little bit of rocky singletrack that was especially tricky, but fun, with a loaded gravel bike.”

The route, which prides itself on showing off the best of Virginia’s backroads, gravel trails, and mountain paths, was designed by David Landis ’04 in 2017. Since then, it’s hosted four “Grand Departs” starting in 2019 – events in which riders can either race for the fastest time, or “tour” non-competitively. 

Landis has been mapping innovative trails since 2007, when he started working on a 40-mile hiking route through Galilee, Israel, dubbed the Jesus Trail. 

Read more about how David and Anna Dintaman ’05 Landis created the Jesus Trail.

Landis said that, despite being located oceans apart, there were a lot of similarities in designing both routes, such as providing a great experience that “flows” between local communities, and making sure those traversing the trail can access food, water, and places to spend the night.

He also wanted travelers on both the Jesus Trail and TransVirginia Bike Route to be able to “step into a story or narrative, whether walking where Jesus walked or crossing the state of Virginia from the nation’s capital to the southern border.”

The TransVirginia 550 passes close to Landis’s home of Harrisonburg – through Rockingham County over Reddish Knob. That stretch is Landis’s favorite, with “some of the most challenging and beautiful sections of roads deep in the George Washington National Forest along the state line with West Virginia.”

For Kaufman, the most memorable section of the route was about 200 miles south of the knob, “riding under the moonlight on the second night, outside of Pulaski and listening to the whippoorwills calling out to each other. It was a truly special experience!”

Julian Bender ’09 toured the route, embarking with the Grand Depart riders and taking nine days to finish. He also switched between the TransVirginia 550 and the alternate 520 route, which stays on more maintained surfaces. This route intersects the 550 in several spots for riders to ‘level up’ or ‘down.’ 

“It was doable but still the toughest bike ride I’ve done, mile for mile – including a 5,000-mile ride across the U.S. some years ago,” Bender said. 

Sweat and struggle aside, though, he listed off several highlights of the trip: hitching a ride across the Potomac with some fishermen when the normal ferry was closed; waiting out a thunderstorm in a tiny town’s combination post office, fire department, library, and food bank; and alerting a farmer that one of his cows had just given birth. 

He also loved the communal aspect of the Grand Depart.

“Throughout the ride we kept crossing paths with other riders, trading stories, and getting word of the route ahead – very helpful when nobody has cell phone reception to check on trail conditions!” said Bender. “For someone who’s interested in doing the route but wary of riding alone, joining a Grand Depart would be a great way to find potential riding partners.”

The first 215 miles of the 520 are also designated as their own route, taking cyclists from Washington, D.C. to Harrisonburg over rail trails and across the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River. 

Cross-country and track coach Joanna Friesen claimed the women’s record for the 215 on May 22, completing the course in 18 hours, 50 minutes.

Friesen is no stranger to intense bike trips – last year, she and three 91����Ƶ alumni traversed the entire Blue Ridge Parkway. And shortly after the TransVirginia, she began leading a Climate Ride all the way from Seattle to Washington, D.C. Landis was a co-leader for half the mileage; the ride, which includes several 91����Ƶ students and is sponsored by the 91����Ƶ-based Center for Sustainable Climate Solutions, is now about halfway across the United States.

She said the decision to bike the Transvirginia 215 was a last-minute decision

“I didn’t have any doubts about completing it. The challenge lay in the distance and long day of riding that it took to do it,” Friesen said. “I loved the route.”

On July 16, an 91����Ƶ coach and three alumni began biking uphill. For 20 miles. And that was just the first day of a 500-mile trip, traversing the Blue Ridge Parkway from its southern end in North Carolina to where it becomes Skyline Drive in Afton, Virginia. 

“For a cyclist it’s pretty tantalizing,” says Joanna Friesen, who organized the trip with three cross-country alumni (Friesen, a seminary student, is an assistant coach for the team). Friesen, Hannah Chappell-Dick ’16, Michaela Mast ’18, and Abigail Shelly ’20 biked about 50 miles a day for eight days, although in one long haul they pounded out 85 miles.

“It’s been on my radar for awhile as a beautiful long road, perfect for a week’s touring with no stop signs or traffic lights,” Friesen says. She’s started blogging about the experience on her website . We’ve reprinted her entry about day one below; check out the blog to read more about their journey.

Continuous Climb: Day one on the Parkway

on mine and my friends’ unsupported bike tour on the Blue Ridge Parkway from July  16 – 24. Day one was 19.21 miles with 4,508 ft of elevation gain, it took us 3:42:12 to complete at an average speed of 5.2 miles per hour. SLOWWW GOING. In addition to our bikes we each carried 40-60 pounds of additional gear (tents, cookstoves, food, everything we needed and some extra). I had decided while packing that this was the ordained time for me to finish “The Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, turned out to just be more weight to carry. My brain got too fried for Russian Gulag literature. 

An elk greets us, a tenth of a mile into our northbound foray on the Blue Ridge Parkway. An elk. They were reintroduced to the Great Smokies in the early aughts. I learned this a few days later, poring over a biodiversity pamphlet as I sheltered out a vicious thunderstorm at a visitor center some 300 miles up the road. The elk was my first clue that we were going to learn how much we didn’t know this week. 

Late in 2019, I sketched out a race schedule for myself, tracing the contours of 2020: a “big year” for me athletically. It was all engineered. A part of this was my plan to ride the Blue Ridge Parkway, in its entirety, as fast as possible, supported by my husband driving a follow car. At the end of every day, he would whisk me to an AirBnb to recover, I would put in monster mileage days, and I’d see if I could do it in five to six days. This was an afterthought though, nestled amongst marathons, half-marathons, and triathlons of increasing distance and challenge. Then all the races got cancelled. My calendar was a series of dates highlighted in red, “cancelled.” All I had left in my schedule was this lone un-highlighted, un-cancelled sketch of biking the parkway. 

And then I reached out to some friends, a fellow coach, two graduated star 91����Ƶ athletes. All women, all stubborn, all strong; all looking for some kind of something to make this summer be more than a summer of loss and upheaval. Reaching out for companionship for this trek was the best impulse I’ve had this summer. We started planning in earnest in early June; borrowed gear, expert bike mechanic advice, and my own experience from my cross-country ride in 2017 heavily mined. 

And, then there we were. We drove down one of our cars, and left it by permission in the parking lot of the Great Smokies visitor center. Some chaotic packing, learning and re-learning how to efficiently pack a bike was a continued process throughout the ride, and a short roll down the highway and we were turning left onto that 470 mile ribbon that carves through the many blue ridges and smoky mountains of North Carolina and Virginia. We were off. 

Or rather, we were up. Lesson two was that all of our uneducated (why did we do so little research?) guesses around elevation were incorrect. At least personally, my rationale is that if I don’t know the specifics of a ride, it doesn’t matter, because I’ll stubbornly force myself through it anyway. Plus, I reasoned, nothing could be worse than that one day in Wyoming’s Bighorns, so I’d be able to do anything the East Coast could throw at me, I’d been out West. 

So, I told my friends we wouldn’t see a climb over an 8% grade (true) and that we wouldn’t have a climb longer than five to eight miles (not true, no idea where I got that idea from). And also, an 8% grade is no walk in the park when you’re doing 50-plus mile days hauling 40 – 60 pounds of gear. So. 

The first day began giddily, with laughter and excitement. It soon settled into the uphill grind. Twenty miles of it. Just around the bend, there was just another upward bend. As it got dark, and inched towards 8:30 p.m., we were bathed  in the soft pink light of sunset, golden rays, and soft clouds in orange light. The mountains became a deeper blue, even purple. We continued on the upward path, in utmost beauty and the still of an Appalachian mountain evening. 

And eventually, we saw a sign that there were bathrooms in three miles. We continued on, and found our way to Waterrock Knob, elevation somewhere around  5,500 feet. We set up a surreptitious camp, ate our dehydrated foods in the dark, and settled in for a restless night. I kept thinking about bears. The wind howled around the top of the mountain. Some teenagers partied in the parking lot at the top of the world. The bathrooms were closed and there was no water access. Some kind sunset-watchers earlier had humored our humble requests for water (which we needed for the next morning, we didn’t know when we would find more water). And that was day one. We started in a parking lot, and ended at a parking lot on top of the mountain.

– Joanna Friesen

This is the story of five student-athletes who, amidst nursing clinicals, cross-country practices, late nights with friends and early mornings of exams, became 91����Ƶ’s . Their story is told in the student-produced documentary film Persist.

Follow the team as they pound mile after mile on foot, bicycle, and in the water. The film was shot and produced by students in Professor Jerry Holsopple’s video production class at races, on the track, and in the pool.

Watch the trailer:

Women’s triathlon is labeled a “emerging sport” within the NCAA, so all events and championships include teams from Division I-III. This means the team regularly competed against much larger schools in their four-event season, culminating in an October qualifier for the national championships. Senior Abigail Shelly ended her season with a finish in Tempe, Arizona. 

From pre-competition jitters to simply mastering the many skills of three different sports, the film showcases how individual courage and dedication inspired the entire team. Senior Emma Hoover particularly struggled to learn how to swim competitively.

In the documentary, Hoover recalls, “we get to the point where we’re starting our swim warm-ups, and there’s this moment, where Abigail will look at everybody, and Abigail goes, ‘okay, no more negative thoughts.’ And she did it every single race. And I just felt like, ‘okay … now is the time to just let it all go, this is what it is. It’s time to work.’”

The team included Hoover, a history, social science and education major; Shelly, an education and liberal arts major; Mim Beck, a nursing major, Lydia Chappell Deckert, an English major; and Leah Lapp, a biology and chemistry double-major.

The team is coached by . 

The video production crew is Keith Bell, Mykenzie Davis, Ethan Green, Jared Oyer, and Anthony Parker.