Dave, 39, who is originally from Boston, began competitive cycling when he was 12. He later earned a cycling scholarship to Penn State, where he was a four-time collegiate national champion in track racing.
He finished third in the collegiate world championships in Spain. As a college freshman, he began training with the U.S. national team in Colorado Springs with his sights on the Atlanta Games. In his specialty event, the one-kilometer time trial, a 0.62-mile sprint that lasts just more than a minute, he would serve as an Olympic-team alternate.
Dana, 45, a Macon native who had a swimming and diving background that landed her a scholarship to Georgia State University, hurt her ankle when she was in her late 20s and she turned to velodrome cycling. She, too, wound up an Olympic alternate in her event, the match sprint.
Dave, now working at an ad company in Macon — he and Dana moved here from California in 2006 — says of the cycling grind, “You have to be very selfish, and I don’t want to be selfish anymore. So I still go out and I take that one hour of time to exercise now, and that’s for myself and that’s great, but then I’m very satisfied to go home and then share the rest of my life with my (7-year-old) son and my wife.”
Now that competitive cycling is a thing of the past for him, he says he still has ways to keep himself motivated. And, he adds, “There’s really nothing wrong with a little vanity sometimes, just saying, ‘Well, I’m doing this because I want to be in good shape and I want to look like I’m in good shape.’ ... The vanity will bring out the discipline in you to want to stay regimented and do those kinds of things. For Dana and I, it’s very disciplined for us to go to bed at 9 o’clock at night during the week.”
Dana, once a member of the U.S. High Diving Team that performed all over the globe and did summer shows at Six Flags Over Georgia, among other theme parks, says that when she and her husband moved back to the South, they enjoyed the local food perhaps a bit too much.
Dana, once a personal trainer whose college degree was in exercise science, says, “I have to admit, I put on weight. But I just lost 30 pounds this year. ... I said, ‘You know what? I’m tired of living his way.’ I kept picking up a 30-pound dumbbell at the gym, reminding myself of the weight that I was losing. ... I had to get back into my clothes.”
She recalls her days as a workout coach when she “would have clients who were in middle age, which I am now, and I would just look at them and say, ‘It’s so easy, why can’t you stay in shape?’ ”
“I was always frustrated with my clients,” Dana said, “and that motivated me to train them and — not push them because not everybody’s an athlete — but it motivated me to teach people that anybody can stay in shape. It’s really up to you to motivate yourself.”
Dana, now a sales representative for a conference-call company, says her early morning jaunts to the gym are the best way she knows to fit fitness into her parenting and professional routine.
“If I don’t do it at 5 a.m., it doesn’t get done,” she says. “That hour of the day to go work out, it’s awful. But if I don’t do it, it doesn’t get done.”
The same goes for Dave.
“It’s much easier for me to get up early, get that routine done in the morning and then whatever the day gives me at work then I’m OK with it,” he says. “It’s very hard to just start off the day by just going to work and then being at work for eight or nine hours and then saying, ‘Well, I’ve got to go exercise now for another hour and a half or two hours.’ ”
To contact writer Joe Kovac Jr., call 744-4397.
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