By George Calver, Standard Correspondent
READING – What began as a backcountry-road bike race three years ago with a starting venue in downtown Woodstock has evolved into a new race, with a new starting site, and a new and more challenging course.
Local attorney and avid cyclist Peter Vollers came up with the idea of organizing a European- style gravel cycling event a few years back when he was running the biking program at the Killington Mountain School.
“It was getting dangerous out there—there were a lot of cars—so we started to do more biking on the gravel roads,” said Vollers.
Pave cycling (based on the French word for cobblestone) with mountain bikes, hybrids a combo of road and mountain bike with narrower tires), and bikes specifically designed for gravel roads has become a “whole new movement,” according to Vollers. He explained, “People are getting off the pavement.”
For the past two years, Vermont Overland, an organization dedicated to four-wheeling and biking, has held a late summer race starting and ending at Suicide 6. However, this year, a race called The Overland will be held on Sunday, Aug. 26, with a 9 am start time, and will benefit the Reading-West Windsor Food Shelf.
Vollers has volunteered his farm on the Bailey Mills Road in Reading as the starting and finishing point for the race that will cover 45 miles of “Vermont Pave” (a combination of class 4 gravel road and unmaintained ancient public roads), coursing through Reading, West Windsor and Weathersfield.
The Select Boards of Reading, West Windsor and Weathersfield readily approved the use of their public roads. The town of West Windsor, the home of Sports Trails of the Ascutney Basin, was particularly welcoming.
How popular is the gravel roads movement?
According to Vollers, registration opened at 10 a.m. on New Year’s Day, and within four hours 500 riders (the maximum) had registered.
Here’s what is in store for the riders, who will range from highly competitive bikers to relative novices: 45 miles of dirt roads with a couple of connecting sections of paved road, featuring 6,000 feet of climbing over eight sections of Vermont backcountry. And, needless to say, the scenery will be magnificent.
Vollers expects that the first climb up Jenne Road will separate the hard-core riders from the rest of the field, and that over time, separate groups with more or less equal levels of conditioning will form. And he projects that the winner will finish in about two and a half hours. Of course, the real winner will be the Reading-West Windsor Food Shelf. Vollers, who has been a volunteer at the food shelf since he and his family moved to Reading about two years ago, said that the organization has been guaranteed at least $5,000 from the race.
Sara Norcross, a member of the Food Shelf Board since 2009, is very grateful that the volunteer group’s $46,000 annual budget will be enhanced by the Overland race. About sixty households in Reading and West Windsor are registered with the food shelf, and she estimates that approximately 35 households seek benefits on a regular basis each month. According to Norcross, many are elderly or disabled. She added,” I don’t know what people would do if we did not exist.”
For those interested in what is described at Vermont Overland’s website as, “a 23-mile epic mountain bike/ fat bike adventure … involving ridiculously steep climbs and crazy rocky, muddy descents as well as roads that look more like riverbeds that trails,” that race is slated for Sunday, July 1, 2018. The race will also start and end at Peter Voller’s home on Bailey’s Mill Road in Reading. But that’s a whole different story for partially mad people!
This article first appeared in the January 18, 2018 edition of the Vermont Standard.