Author | Sammi Rowell |
Imagine the wind rushing through your hair, gliding down the road on a sunny day! For Scholars Guild’s very own David Heath, he doesn’t have to imagine. At the young age of eight, he got interested in the sport of cycling, but didn’t get started until later. Now, he averages about two races every month. Over the five and a half years he’s been cycling, David has traveled to numerous places. His favorite out of them all is the Netherlands. He and his family stayed there over the course of three weeks competing in cycling races over the weekend, completing six races through the whole trip! If that doesn’t blow your mind, he cycled 140 miles in just nine hours! I, personally, was stunned and know I’d be exhausted if I tried to accomplish that feat in one day, but he did it in a couple of hours.
David isn’t the only one though, his sister, Megan (18), brother, Stephen (13), and dad, Bob, are all involved in cycling! Although his mom, Cindy, doesn’t cycle, she’s there to back them while they’re pursuing their dreams! David strives to be a cycling coach after becoming a professional cyclist until in his mid-twenties. He looks up to a young professional cyclist named Peter Sagan. If you haven’t heard of him, which I hadn’t either, Sagan is a Slovak professional road bicycle racer for UCI WorldTeam Bora earning several points to boast on, including: points in the 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 in Tour de France, winning the points competition, but not the timed one.
Beyond just dreaming to be a professional cyclist, David endures a grueling training regimen which includes biking about two hours a day and a total of nine hours over the weekend. Taking Friday off, that’s a total of seventeen hours a week, minus cycling races. In just this past year he’s flown to five different places and driven to several more all for cycling, including a recent trip to Norway for his sister’s competition. He has won around forty to fifty races, which is no small feat, but placed second in the National Time Trial. National Time Trial cyclists bike 20.1 miles (32.3 km) and winners are awarded with a symbolic cycling which is red, white and blue. When asked what he loves about his sport, he responded, “I think that there are a lot of adrenaline rushes in cycling, and I think that’s the really fun part about it.”