Nicholls State University’s cycling team traveled this past weekend to Wichita Falls, Texas, to compete against collegiate cycling teams where Catherine Gauthier, dietetics junior from Quebec, Canada, was crowned as the 2014 Women’s C Conference Champion for the South Central Collegiate Cycling Conference.
Gauthier is a Division C cyclist, which means she is a new cyclist. She competed in the race against a combination of Division B and C cyclists. She placed second, beating everyone in her division and all but one Division B cyclist.
“I am proud of her, because she put in a lot of hard work and got a reward from it. And she found a sport that she enjoys a lot which is my main goal,” Scott Banville, English proffesor and cycling advisor, said.  “My main thing is that people enjoy cycling and Catherine enjoys cycling enough to put the effort into it and she sees the results of putting in hard effort and riding her bike a lot.”
Gauthier trained all fall, where she went bike riding three mornings during the week at 6 a.m. During the Thanksgiving break, she was preparing for the season in March, where she biked five times a week, even setting up a place in her home in Quebec to practice. She said it was too cold for her to practice outside at home, so she would set up a bike inside to make sure she kept training for the season.
She is a former Nicholls’ tennis player, but she decided to try cycling where she had to learn all new processes and mental stability. She said that Banville taught her a lot of the techniques, such as when to let others do most of the work in the group and when she should do the work.
Gauthier said the way to train better is to ride with faster people, because they will make you faster. She said the ways she trained to move at a faster pace was to ride with one of her teammates. She also rode with the Bayou Cycling Club.
When competing in the race in Texas, the winds were at a constant 25 to 30 mph, and the temperature was 90 degrees.
“I stay focused, I did not think about the wind,” Gauthier said. “I had to do what I had to do. I kept thinking that it was hard for me with the wind in my face, but then I also thought that it had to be hard for the other girls, too. So I just did not think about the wind. I just concentrated on my bike and just pedaled.”
Gauthier competed in four races between March and April, where she placed second in Division C for the first and second race. The third and fourth race is when she was the winning cyclist of her division.
This is the cycling team’s third year competing against different collegiate teams and the nine-member team train at least three times a week to work on faster riding so they can place like Gauthier did at the Conference Championship.
Jordan Stadler, history senior from New Orleans, said that cycling is 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical. He said it takes more of determination and the mindset to finish a race than the actual muscles used to cycle.
Gauthier said she is now placed in Division B for next year and she will start working on strength and power in her legs to prepare for the next season. She said she still needs to ride, but she will ride less.
Her future goals are to go into Division A and then head to nationals.