I am very excited to be writing a diary for NashvilleCyclist.com this season! Tim Hall and NC.com have been very influential in my cycling development and I hope that NC.com readers will enjoy my diaries as I ride my first season as a professional.

Tim asked that my first diary detail who I am and my cycling career so I will start with that.

I am 25 years old and grew up skiing and playing soccer in Alaska. At 18 I moved to Nashville to go to Vandy. After my freshmen year I went home to Anchorage for the summer and my step brother Marc started taking me along on mountain bike rides. I started racing immediately and fell in love with it. I was not even aware of road cycling that summer. At the end of the summer I entered the AK Soggy Bottom 100 mountain bike race and finished in 13.5 hours.

When I got back to Vandy for the start of my sophomore year I started pledging a fraternity. As soon as I quit that (I lasted about a week), I asked my parents to send me my mountain bike. I looked up the Vanderbilt Cycling Club and showed up for a ride with a full suspension bike and 2.3" knobby tires. Club president Mike Puchowicz was the only rider to show up and he took me out for a ride on the road. A few more rides like this with other people and it became very clear that I needed a road bike! I picked up a Bianchi from Gran Fondo and that spring I started racing collegiate in the South East Collegiate Cycling Conference. I also did some USCF races on the Cumberland Transit team before heading back to Alaska for the summer and mountain bike racing. I also started working with Colin Izzard of Carmichael Training Systems and began to understand how to train properly.

The next fall I got back to Vandy and it was time for the SECCC mountain bike season. I think I did every race of the season which meant a road trip every weekend for 2 months until nationals in New Mexico. Two of those weekend trips were to Florida. That season was when I got to know Tim as he was coaching the Cumberland University team and I was racing against them each weekend. He asked me to join his new team, NashvilleCyclist.com p/b Bike Pedlar for the 2007 season. I had just upgraded to cat 2 and my resume had been turned down by the Juris / More Partner Income development team so I was excited and motivated to be riding for a well supported and well organized team. I was excited to learn from more experienced riders like Gray Skinner and Torsten Lyon, both of whom had already achieved a lot in the cycling world.

On a team ride early in 2007 I was talking with Gray and he mentioned the Cycling Center in Belgium. I immediately went home and looked it up. What I found was a pay your own way program for racing in Belgium. As I was researching the program I thought that maybe I would apply, but that it was unlikely that I would be accepted. I had the program in the back of my mind all through the 2007 season and tried my best to get results that I could show them on my application.

I finished up at Vandy in May 2007 and spent the summer in Nashville racing for NC.com and working for Shannon Williams at Nashville Bicycle Co. In August I was accepted to graduate school at the University of Arizona in Tucson and packed up and drove to the desert. I upgraded to category 1 and sent in the 30 page, painfully detailed application to the Cycling Center and was accepted. I took the spring semester off from school to train and went over to Belgium in early March 2008.

The racing in Belgium was something I was not really prepared for. I was finishing about half my races, which is more than a lot of guys can say, but I was getting throttled in every race and not having the success I would have liked. I stayed for 4 months and then went home to Nashville for a break. Upon returning to Belgium, I was turned away at the border and deported back to the United States. I did not have a proper visa and therefore had over stayed and was not allowed back to Belgium until September. I went home and regrouped, went to the Cascade Classic in Bend. That was my first NRC stage race and I got throttled. I then went home and won the Soggy Bottom in 10 hrs 45 minutes.

I sent out a few resumes in the fall of 2008 but didn't find a new team, so I went to Tucson to train for the winter and planned to return to Belgium after Tour of the Gila. I worked with Dr. Rick Kattouf from Greenville, SC and together we got my weight down to 155 lbs. When I started racing I was around 190lbs. At 155 I was racing well to start 2009 and was flying when I went to Belgium. I got some pretty good results there but then lost half of my trip due to a nasty ear infection that I think was caused by a head first crash into a ditch filled with cow manure. When I came home I moved to Park City, Utah and joined the Cole Sport team. I did a few big races with Cole Sport and then last fall my new coach, Rick Crawford, started talking about a new team he was putting together. As the fall progressed and the stars aligned, I was offered a contract to race for the Bahati Foundation Pro Cycling Team which was a dream come true.

So here I am in Tucson, living with several other cyclists and training like a maniac so that I can make the most of my first season as a professional. In my next diary I will talk about training and more about the new team. I hope everyone enjoys my diary entries on NC.com and feel free to send any questions/comments to eghyde@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading,

Evan