She’s tried to qualify twice for 745-mile ride in France. This Middle Ga. woman won’t give up
Connie Swinson, 64, has one more chance to do something that she has been training to do since June 2018 and something that few women have done.
The Middle Georgia woman will head to Raleigh, North Carolina, to compete in a June 8 qualifying race for the Paris-Brest-Paris Brevet, a 1,200 kilometer cycling event in France. That’s about 745 miles. If she qualifies, she will be one of a few women in the event held in August.
Swinson has trained five days a week, indoors and outdoors, under the guidance of her coach, Jordan Cheyne. She’s tried to qualify twice before. The last time was during a 600 kilometer, or 373 mile, ride last month from Griffin to Thomasville and back.
“When I didn’t finish the last race, it was kind of like, man, that stung,” Swinson said. “It wasn’t good, and I didn’t want to quit. I wanted to keep going. I wanted to be successful in what I was trying to do.”
To qualify for the French event, Swinson has to complete a series of sanctioned cycling events this year at different levels. She’s already completed the first three qualifying races: 200 kilometer, 300 kilometer and 400 kilometer. The last is the 600 kilometer race.
The Paris-Brest-Paris Brevet, called the PBP, is a “grueling test of human endurance and cycling ability,” according to Randonneurs USA, a cycling organization.
Thousands of cyclists from all over the world will participate. Fewer than 7% of the participants will be women.
If Swinson makes it to the August ride in France, she and her coach said that she will be the oldest North American woman to have completed the PBP Brevet.
What started as a way for her and her husband, Hardy, to get some exercise turned into a way for this “Georgia girl” to show off her competitive spirit.
Beginning the journey
Swinson, who now lives in Cochran, graduated from Dodge County High School and met her husband while they were both attending college . When they married, they moved away from Georgia for about 25 years.
During those years, she worked as a secretary, a registered nurse and a piano teacher. They raised four children.
The couple moved back to Middle Georgia to care for their parents, all of who passed away in recent years. With an empty nest, Swinson discovered the world of cycling.
“My husband and I, we always had bicycles and we always took the kids for bike rides, but nothing like this. In the last five years, I started riding a little more, and he has ridden in the PBP a couple of times,” she said.
“It just looked like fun. I wasn’t able to go before, so I thought, ‘Why not? I’ll try it.’”
Outside of cycling, Swinson has a list of other hobbies, including quilting, playing the piano and violin, and serving others.
Running used to be on the list of things the couple did together, but she stopped because of her knees. He stopped because of his ankles.
“I’ve run a couple of marathons about 15 years ago. My husband cycles. He can’t run. He has problems with his ankles, so we weren’t really doing anything together,” Swinson said.
Training: Challenges and successes
Cycling became that thing the two of them could do together. When Swinson started training for the PBP, her husband helped her find a trainer.
He found Cheyne, a 27-year-old professional cyclist and coach in British Columbia. Cheyne had posted online that he was looking for a project. Hardy Swinson responded.
“He just wrote him and told him my story, and Jordan decided that he would take me on,” Connie Swinson said.
Cheyne started officially training her on Jan. 1, 2019.
“When I started with her, she wasn’t training in a formal way,” he said. “She didn’t have a structured training plan. I think the longest she had done was maybe 200 miles, and she said that had been quite difficult, so going to the Paris-Brest-Paris, which is 750 miles...It’s 1,200 kilometers, so that was a big step up.”
Their primary training program is Zwift, a digital platform that’s like online gaming for cyclists. Cheyne gives Swinson workouts to do that help her build strength and endurance.
Swinson’s main focus before the June 8 race is to get acclimated to the heat.
“One of my concerns with the Raleigh ride is that it’s going to be really hot. We’ve actually got these cooling shirts, and so we wear long sleeves. You just put one on, and they keep you fairly cool. So we’re trying to prepare to deal with that,” she said.
Swinson has had a few challenges to accompany her training, including riding uphill and riding at night.
“The biggest improvement for Connie has been her confidence. She has gotten a lot stronger with her trainer, and, in fact, she’s stronger than I am and she wasn’t when she started this. That has really improved,” Hardy Swinson said.
“But then her confidence to ride nights, her confidence to ride hills and her confidence to ride through towns like Gainesville, Florida, during rush hour, things like that that she wouldn’t even consider doing when she first started. She’s just grown to where now, she’s fearless.”
Because Paris has hills, Swinson will focus part of her training on hills if she qualifies for the PBP Brevet.
Advice and Support
She encourages older people that want to try cycling to join a group and ride with them. She also advises people to experience life and try new things with someone they can lean on.
“For my music, it’s my daughter. When I did my marathons, it was my sister. The bicycling, it’s been my husband,” she said.
Through everything, Swinson is glad to be back in Georgia.
“I am a Georgia girl. I don’t think about that because I’ve spent a lot of time away from here, but we came back here, and we love Middle Georgia,” she said.
What it Will Take
To qualify, Connie Swinson has to complete a series of sanctioned cycling events in 2019 at different levels: 200 kilometer, 300 kilometer, 400 kilometer and 600 kilometer. She has already completed the first three qualifying races.
If she gets into the race, she will have a 90-hour time limit to get from the southwestern side of the French capital to the port city of Brest on the Atlantic Ocean.