If You're Not First, You're Definitely Not Beau Guenther

Guenther finishing out a race.

Whether it's on road or gravel, through thunderstorms, blizzard or mud, Beau Guenther will race. A twenty-year-old from Putney, Vermont, Guenther has been racing bikes since he was 6 years old, and hasn't looked back. 

“I was never super interested in traditional American sports as a little kid, not because of the sport, they were just so normalized. I always craved something that other people wouldn’t, or couldn’t do, and cycling is about as brutal as you’re gonna get from an endurance standpoint,” Guenther said.

Guenther going through the mud.

Guenther is a sponsored athlete. He rides for West Hill Bike & Ski, a local Vermont bike shop, located right in his hometown in Putney. Guenther has taken a semester off of school to focus fully on racing. When Guenther races, he participates in what he calls three disciplines. These disciplines are the defining factors for his races.

“Road cycling and Gravel are effectively the same thing, one on road, one on dirt road,” said Guenther. "Both require high levels of endurance–especially road–sometimes having back-to-back 70-100 mile race days. Main Difference between the two being, road racing is a chess game, and a team sport. It revolves around your ability to evade the wind, by riding in the slipstream of your teammates, and your competitors. You work together as a team to launch riders up the road, and chase other riders back. I’m a climber, so my team will take the wind for me on the long mountainous days, whereas I’ll work for my sprinters on the flat, fast days,” Guenther said. 

The last discipline Guenther races is Cyclocross.

“Cyclocross is my main discipline, and it’s like nothing else. You have a road bike, with knobby tires, on a technical dirt track, with pitches so steep you have to carry your bike and run. It was invented in Belgium, as a way for road cyclists to train in the winter months, but now it’s some riders' whole career. It’s by far the greatest discipline from a spectator’s standpoint, with almost all of the course being visible from wherever you stand. And It’s fast.” Guenther said. “And really hard!”

Guenther locking in for the finish.

  Guenther races all around the New England area going as far as Philadelphia. Guenther recently competed at a national race in Kentucky.  

“Racing takes hours and hours and hours of dedicated volume training, to prepare you for the distances you have to race. This summer I averaged about fourteen to fifteen hours a week, with some eighteen hour weeks. Most of my focused training rides are long, sixty to one hundred-plus miles, at a mostly easy pace to build endurance, with harsh threshold efforts up basically every climb to build strength. I usually end a ride with sprints when my body is most fatigued to simulate a race scenario,” Guenther said. 

Guenther enduring mud.

“Training for Cyclocross is quite different, it utilizes the fitness you’ve built all summer, and is more about bike handling. For training, I practice with the local riding community every Wednesday, at the West Hill shops permanent Cyclocross course. And I’ll do about 8-10 hours of training per week,” Guenther said.

Guenther plans on racing until he physically can’t do it anymore or until he doesnt love it—neither of which he expects any time soon