Lecture Man and his sidekick Pizza Boy fight crime, and ride bikes.

Do you think that the life of a cyclist is all riding and relaxing? Not for the riders of Team TIAA-CREF/5280. Dan Bowman and Timmy Duggan give us a look inside the fun and games they have to go through to ensure they can make it to the race on time...

Lecture Man Vs. The Evil Professor

A lot of people ask me how I am able to manage school and racing this semester. Well, I go to Fort Lewis College and most of the professors are pretty cool about me missing a few weeks here and there. The minimum requirement to be a full time student is 12 credits and that is what I am taking. I met the requirements with 3 classes, Marketing, Computer science, and Earth Science.

The marketing is pretty much a review for me. I took the whole class a year ago and in the last two weeks I had to leave, but the professor wouldn't help me out. He thought he'd be a nice guy and let me drop the class without failing me. I got a more reasonable teacher this time. I went to talk with him at the beginning of the semester and told him that I race bikes. He said, "really, I used to swim with the British National team………" He went on for a good while tooting his horn, but in the end he said just let me know when you are leaving and we can work it out.

Computer science is another easy requirement that all of us business students have to take. The teacher is an old hippie and said you don't even have to come to class as long as you get the assignments in on time and sign in on his website. Easy enough, I bring my laptop on trips to play video games; I can sign in with it too.

The last class is Earth Systems Science. This is a requirement that I have put off for eight semesters. The reason I put it off was because there is a lab that I need to take as well as the lecture. This class has more work than any of my upper division business classes. I swear they make freshman classes harder to scare away the slackers. Earth Science would pose the biggest problem with missing class, but the teacher is super cool. He rides bikes, himself and thought that it was cool to have a student that travels to all of these big races that he reads about. He emails me the weekly quizzes and doesn't mind if the assignments are a few days late. He even is letting me do my group presentation a week late!

So anyway, I have had some rough professors in the past and I wouldn't be able to race this much without them. I used to miss at least a week of class per semester, this Semester I will miss three weeks of class and a day of finals.

I might even boost my GPA… no, probably not.

Dan Bowman

Pizza Boy Vs. Pizza The Hut

Along with the incredible support from my team, TIAA-CREF/5280, and the tens of thousands of dollars from endorsements and prize money of course, I aid in the funding of my living and bike racing expenses as a pizza delivery boy for Pizza Hut, which I've been doing since high school. And no, I don't deliver pizza to people on my bicycle. That's the first question everybody asks me. Pizza is only delivered via bicycles in Mexico I think. Fortunately, we live in America, so I rally my green Subaru wagon around at night in all kinds of crazy weather to transport the joy of pizza, breadsticks, and soda to people's door steps for minimum wage and meager, although sometimes pretty good tips.

Yep, 3 or 4 nights a week right after training I come home, and like Superman, slip out of my sweaty cycling clothes and into my stylin' Pizza Hut uniform, slap the lighted sign on the roof of my car and complete my transformation into Pizza Boy.

I find a lot of motivation in the fact that just like Lance and the Postal team, I deliver too. Sometimes it is difficult to be smiling and happy giving somebody a pizza that you would give your left arm to be eating right now after finishing a 6 hour ride through the mountains 20 minutes previously, subsisting on Gatorade and Clif Gels since 9 in the morning. Perhaps if I finished riding sooner I might have time to take a shower and deodorize maybe I would see the tips increase? But somehow I manage, because really it's a pretty kick ass job for a bike racer. I work in the evenings, so I have all day to train, and I get to sit down most of the time except for when I am in the restaurant answering phones, cutting pizzas, washing dishes, or taking the trash out. Also, my manager, Dewayne, totally rocks because it seems like every other day I'm asking for more time off to go race my bike, and he is super supportive. In fact, the day I returned to work after coming back from a three week absence while at Redlands, I slapped the poor guy with a list of the dates I would be gone again in only a few weeks.

I'm lucky to have a job when I get back because I will be gone from mid April to the end of June! Maybe by the time I get back the pizza aroma will be gone from my car. Lucky for my bike racing career, I can now successfully resist all the free pizza, but occasionally I allow myself to give in. Twenty minutes after a six hour ride you can eat anything you want, right? If you order pizza, call the Gunbarrel Pizza Hut and make sure I deliver it to you, just don't forget the fat tip! Remember, I'm just a poor little bike racer!

Timmy Duggan