[Note: This post on the team’s trusty trailer is by our coach, Rob Rowan, who has made various upgrades to it over the years. Thanks, Rob!]

Cycling is a Euro-centric sport. Often, the phrases that you hear when you’re watching a race are literally translated from Spanish, French or Flemish and often sound a little confusing in English. If your love interest looked at you and said, “The sensations are good” what would you think?

One of the most confusing phrases we have come across is “service course,” which roughly translates to “where a cycling team keeps its stuff.” Pro tour teams have hangar-like spaces filled with expensive wheels and full-time employees. Columbia has a trailer underneath the West Side Highway, in Fairway’s parking lot. 

Our trailer has room for nine bikes, 24-48 water bottles, three trainers, two sets of rollers, five folding chairs, one table, one tent, one pump, one bike stand, a tool kit, a first aid kit, a bike cleaning kit, garbage bags and enough Chamois Butt’r to make your rear for years. I also use it to move the team’s Normatec MVP units to the races and this weekend, plan to keep my camping stove and beloved Bialetti there as well.

We got the trailer three years ago and it was a serious upgrade from what we had before: roof racks designed for a fourteen-person passenger van. The roof racks got the bikes to the races but they were also a dance of death. Eventually they would have been removed from the van at high speed by an overpass, debris from a car in front of us, or a mechanical failure. This would vaporize the most valuable item that anyone on Columbia Cycling owns: their bike.

There is another benefit of the trailer: it allows us to store our team stuff somewhere other than Dodge Physical Fitness Center’s Ninth Circle of Hell. The storage space in Dodge is inaccessible, cramped and required team members to load everything up on a Friday night before a race and then unload everything after a long weekend of racing. The trailer is also a nice place to change into your cycling kit and can be a good place to warm up if it’s really windy. So you can see we are very grateful to Fairway for letting us park it there and to the alumni who helped us to buy it. 

The trailer, however, comes with its own set of challenges. It’s big, bulky and can be hard to drive. If sparks fly, you know that the trailer has partially detached from the van and the gooseneck hit the asphalt below. On these occasions I’ve gotten pretty good at letting the trailer gently contact the van bumper to provide a slow stop. No bikes were harmed in the making of that move.