Athletes

Jordan is a former elite rower who turned to bike racing in the fall of 2007. He won two national collegiate rowing championships at Harvard, as well as competing in the A-finals at the Lucerne World Cup Regatta. He has been a full-time member of the U.S. and Danish national rowing teams. After training with Coach Cummings, he won the Cat 4 races at Johnny Cake Lane, Turtle Pond, and Tour of the Battenkill before upgrading to Cat 3 in the spring of 2008. As a Cat 3 he took 2nd in the Giro di Coppi. His goal is to upgrade to Cat 2 before the end of the 2008 racing season.

"When I started with Peter, I had already spent several years doing 20-25 hrs/wk of training in a systematic, periodized fashion. However, all of that training had been directed at one event--i.e. same distance, same intensity, all the time with no hills and essentially no sharp accelerations or frequent sprints. Particularly since I choose to focus on road racing rather than time trialing, it has been necessary for me to re-train my body to be more versatile. It has been necessary for me to pay more attention to training all of my energy systems to be able to perform on varied terrain over varied distances. Peter has taught me how to train for so many different types of efforts simultaneously. For me, the biggest challenge has been to improve my ability to accelerate sharply and to do repeated, hard 30-60 second efforts without compromising my ability to lay down solid, consistent power for 10-20 minutes and without allowing myself to become de-trained for the longer rides of 4-5 hours. Peter's feedback and guidance has been invaluable in my efforts to balance all of these different demands. I have also found it more difficult to maintain consistent energy levels day-to-day in cycling than in rowing (despite similar overall training volumes), and Peter's ability to structure my training and predict when I will need to back off or ramp up the volume and intensity has been extremely helpful in this respect, too."

"The other area where working with an experienced cycling coach has been extremely helpful has been in learning how to race more intelligently and more efficiently. Unlike rowing, road racing involves making numerous decisions about tactics and positioning throughout the race which can be as determinative of one's result as the pure fitness one brings to the race. I have found a quick phone conversation with Peter post-race to be as valuable as many hours of training because of the racing insights and experience he's able to offer. I think that being able to talk about my racing experiences frequently with Peter has allowed me to gain practical racing maturity in one season that would have taken many years to develop on my own."