LIFE vs TRAINING vs RACING

From startline to finish line and beyond, a Nats champ stays grounded.

With Shannon Koch

INTRODUCTION

Though a crash ruled her out for the US Pro National Championships (and derailed her mid-season goals), Kingdom Elite Racing’s Shannon Koch has come back to finish 2024 strong. In addition to a string of wins and podiums on the crit circuit, Shannon also repeated at the Master’s Nats crit and bagged the one that got away last year with a second gold in the Master’s Nats road race.

Shannon’s schedule is capital-H Hectic. She balances a full-time job, 10-15 training hours per week, and traveling for races – a schedule that many dedicated endurance athletes can relate to, even if we don’t have her palmarès. Despite living a life that seems to never stop, Shannon did at least slow down enough to answer some questions for us about her success at Master’s Nationals, her approach to the training vs racing vs life equation, and how her team’s foundation in faith and positivity helps her maintain perspective on and off the bike.

DOUBLE GOLD

To start our conversation, we asked Shannon to detail past wins, and she promised a “quick summary.” Here’s the abbreviated list, only including National and State Championships:

“After this year's Master's Nationals I now have eight National Championship titles, which include four during my junior days, one Elite Team Pursuit title on the Track, and now three as a Master. I have far too many State Championship titles to count at this point across crit, time trial, road race, and track.”

We could go on listing her wins, but we only included those as an opening to celebrate her addition in July of two more golds at Master’s Nats. Coming into any National Championship with winning crit form and winning RR form is a big enough achievement to celebrate without every other laurel she’s collected. That’s especially true considering her disappointing bronze in last year’s master’s nats road race. (Shannon didn’t use that exact word herself, but it’s clear that she wasn’t satisfied with the third step.)

“Having gotten third in the road race last year, I was after that top step for sure,” she remarked. “It was always a goal for me to go back and try to repeat in the crit but also to redeem myself in the road race.” Focusing on the road race makes sense – in our conversation, Shannon confirmed a past preference for road over crit.

“In the past, before I took a long hiatus from racing, I actually preferred road races to crits,” she told us. “It wasn't until I started back and my coach helped me realize I have the physiology for shorter events that I found a love for crits.” That crit-friendly natural talent – and a year spent focused primarily on the short, punchy efforts of a crit – also paid off in the road race.

“I knew I had a decent shot in the road race if I could weather the attacks and make it to the last climb with the lead group,” she said, noting that there were definitely attacks. “The race was incredibly aggressive right off the line, but I knew I could rely on my good three-minute power to get over that climb and still have a reserve to sprint if necessary.”

TRUST THE PROCESS

Amazingly enough, Shannon was once advised against this exact approach to a race in what she recalls as the worst coaching advice she’s ever received. To wit: “That I couldn't sprint and that I wasn't a very explosive rider. I’ve learned that’s very much not the case.” Understatement every bit as dry as her final kick is explosive.

That advice is, unsurprisingly, a far cry from the coaching she’s getting now, and Shannon’s current perspective on that bad advice is either indicative of how much she’s grown as an athlete or how centered and grounded she’s always been. “Even if you do identify something as a weak point,” she said, “that just means it's something that needs some extra attention. We should always be looking to work on the chinks in our armor and improve ourselves as well-rounded athletes.”

Regardless of whether that healthy perspective was inherent or learned, Shannon makes a point of maintaining it, even – or especially – when things aren’t clicking.

“There are periods in any training plan where you go through slumps and don't feel your best,” she said before sharing what may be her best piece of training advice. “My coach always tells me to trust the process,” she went on, explaining that “trusting the process will get me where I want to be when I want to be there. That allows me to continue to show up each day and simply focus on accomplishing the work in front of me.”

MAINTAINING PERSPECTIVE

Though she lives by the process, Shannon’s 2024 hasn’t been all about a myopic focus on checking the next box and then the next box and then etc., etc., while simply trusting that daily diligence will lead to success. To trust, she’s added faith, something she foregrounds as a positive change with her switch to Kingdom Elite Racing in 2024, a competitive outfit that describes itself as primarily “inspired and motivated by our foundation in faith.

“The team's shift to a faith-based mission this year has really allowed me to focus on the big picture of what we are trying to accomplish,” she told us, describing an entirely different idea of perspective. “In doing so, it has provided me with a peace before events that I haven't had before.”

When we think of pre-race rituals in a purely athletic sense, we typically imagine meals (for evening races, Shannon prefers carb-loading at breakfast and lunch with a pre-race dinner of rice, eggs, avocado, and sometimes chicken) and other nutrition or warm-up strategies. After all, the science of nutrition and measurable performance boosters are in our DNA.

Shannon goes further, pushing beyond science into faith. “We always pray as a team before the start of a race,” she said, explaining that that meditative exercise “really calms the nerves and grounds us all before ‘going to battle,’ so to speak.”

It also puts her cycling career into perspective, reaffirming a “commitment to representing the team’s mission of excellence, faithfulness, and integrity well, not only off the bike, but in the races themselves,” she explained. Maintaining that broader perspective about racing has added a new lightness to her approach, helping her maintain calm and even levity during competition: “Remembering to have fun with it has really been a game changer in terms of removing those pre race jitters.”

LIFE vs TRAINING vs RACING

A broader perspective can only help if you’ve actually prepared yourself to win, and trusting the process doesn’t matter unless you’re fully committed to that process. Shannon is.

Like most of us, Shannon loses most of her week to a full-time job, wasting 40-45 hours doing something wholly unrelated to cycling. Early training rides, cramped schedules – she’s no stranger to the hardships of “trusting the process” while managing life, work, and everything else that interrupts time on the bike.

“My on the bike training can range from 10-15 hours a week, depending on whether it's a race week or we're at home,” she said while we worked the numbers to realize that Shannon’s 50-60 hours either working or riding amounts to ⅓ of a week. Of that considerable chunk, the 10-15 hours she spends on the bike are spread out over 6-7 days, and involve crit-specific work like Zone 2 sessions with late-ride intervals.

“Duration & quantity of the intervals will vary based on time of year or if it's a race week, etc., but it keeps me sharp & the engine turning during the season without experiencing that burnout from too much intensity day after day.”

On days that call for embracing intensity, Shannon takes advantage of fast group rides. Apparently, such rides are helpfully common in Florida, and she credits them with “getting some race pace simulation and keeping the competitive juices flowing.”

Fully ⅓ of her week is spent earning a paycheck or preparing to earn primes, and that’s just work and the bike. She’s also a regular gym-goer, and – even though she focuses more on a maintenance program during the season – any workout worth the trouble is eating up even more time. All told, that feels like a burnout pace for any typical adult, but elite athletes also need elite downtime in order to properly recover. So of course we asked about sleep.

“As busy as I am it can be a challenge getting the amount of sleep I WANT to get,” she candidly admitted, with heavy emphasis on ‘want,’ “but I do try and catch up whenever I can.”

COMPETE, FORGET, REPEAT

Inevitably, any athlete’s life is defined in part by their losses – lost sleep, lost races, and weeks or months lost to crashes and injuries. Shannon’s 2024 campaign was no exception.

“Unfortunately, a crash in the crit at Pro Nationals caused me to have to reassess my goals for the remainder of the year,” she lamented. “I wasn't able to be at my best during that particular block. However, I was certainly happy to come into Master's Nationals with some good fitness and back to my old self again.”

That resilience – bouncing back from the losses – is even more important than the losses themselves. To illustrate the point, Shannon shared one last piece of advice she was given by a friend who races motosports.

“Have a short memory,” she said. “Not only after bad races but also good ones. Focusing on what's ahead of you (and not behind you) keeps you positive, motivated, and pushing for that next goal.”