The race is on: National Collegiate Cycling Championships set for May 8-10

Bike race by Micadew, Creative Commons license.

 

The 2015 Collegiate Road Nationals is coming to the Asheville area this weekend, May 8-10. The three-day championship event is expected to bring together 400 riders from 115 schools across 48 states. Motorists should be prepared for some road closures.

collegiate road bike champioships headerThe event is presented by USA Cycling in partnership with the Asheville Buncombe Regional Sports Commission. The town of Marshall will host the weekend’s Road Race and Time Trial events. The Road Race loops along Old Marshall Highway following the French Broad River to Alexander and back to Marshall via Marshall Road, Jarrett Farm Road and Bailey’s Branch Road.

Saturday’s Criterium will lap Asheville’s South Slope, with races running from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Category Crit races are open to nonchampionship racers on Saturday as well. The course loops on Hilliard, down Coxe, back up on Millard, Buxton and South Lexington.

Organizers say, “Come on out and support our country’s up-and-coming cyclists!”

For a schedule and course maps are available here, and to volunteer go to here.

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About Jeff Fobes
As a long-time proponent of media for social change, my early activities included coordinating the creation of a small community FM radio station to serve a poor section of St. Louis, Mo. In the 1980s I served as the editor of the "futurist" newsletter of the U.S. Association for the Club of Rome, a professional/academic group with a global focus and a mandate to act locally. During that time, I was impressed by a journalism experiment in Mississippi, in which a newspaper reporter spent a year in a small town covering how global activities impacted local events (e.g., literacy programs in Asia drove up the price of pulpwood; soybean demand in China impacted local soybean prices). Taking a cue from the Mississippi journalism experiment, I offered to help the local Green Party in western North Carolina start its own newspaper, which published under the name Green Line. Eventually the local party turned Green Line over to me, giving Asheville-area readers an independent, locally focused news source that was driven by global concerns. Over the years the monthly grew, until it morphed into the weekly Mountain Xpress in 1994. I've been its publisher since the beginning. Mountain Xpress' mission is to promote grassroots democracy (of any political persuasion) by serving the area's most active, thoughtful readers. Consider Xpress as an experiment to see if such a media operation can promote a healthy, democratic and wise community. In addition to print, today's rapidly evolving Web technosphere offers a grand opportunity to see how an interactive global information network impacts a local community when the network includes a locally focused media outlet whose aim is promote thoughtful citizen activism. Follow me @fobes

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One thought on “The race is on: National Collegiate Cycling Championships set for May 8-10

  1. Burnsey

    The Criterium Race is by far the best spectator event in cycle racing. The riders run a short circuit and pass by many times as they race to the finish.

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