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  FixedGearFever has known Angie Coggan for years. We met her back when she was training in Colorado Springs. She came, she went, she scored some impressive wins here and there, always focussed on the pursuit.
Angie managed to pull off a national championship along the way. Finding herself with little support from USAC, not being selected for bigger events, Angie walked away from the sport for a while. Well, not completely! She stayed with her boyfriend, now husband, Andy Coggan.
Well look who's back! Angie is back racing pursuit and doing pretty well! We decided to find out what she was up to. What was going on in her life and what her plans for the future are! Welcome back, Angie!
Name?
Angie Coggan (formerly Angie Vargas)
Age?
36
Team?
I decided to race unattached this year so I could do things exactly how I wanted. I did have lots of people who helped me out along the way though. Gerard Vroomen at Cervelo provided one of their new P3C track framesets, John Cobb helped me with my position at the Texas A&M wind tunnel, Josh Poertner at Zipp came up with some Vuka aerobars for me, Russ and Adrienne Murphy of Mesa Cycles in St. Louis sold me other stuff that I needed at cost, Colby Pearce helped me get some training time on ADT and provided lots of encouragement, Dave and Dalene Jordaan were my hosts while I was in LA training – heck, Dotsie Bausch even hooked me up with nice new Smith sunglasses! I really owe all of these people huge, huge thanks, so I hope you don’t mind me taking the space to do so here.
What is your favorite event, and why?
Oh, no question: the pursuit, or for that matter, really any time trial. I like such races because there's not really any luck or even much strategy involved, it’s just you versus the clock. The new 3 km team pursuit for women also sounds like it would be a very fun event to try, although I haven’t actually had the chance to ride one yet.
What is your favorite track, and why?
Again, that’s an easy one to answer: Trexlertown, because I have such fond memories of training and racing there.
Who is your coach?
I would describe myself as self-coached, although Andy obviously helps me design my training program and provides his technical expertise.
How did you get into cycling?
I’ve always been physically active, but after graduating from college I worked in New York City for a few years, during which time I really got into inline skating. The skating led to a few trips to Georgia to do Athens-to-Atlanta (an 86 mile road skate), which in turn resulted in me moving there to get away from the cold. Once in Atlanta, some friends suggested I buy a bike to cross train and after my first road ride, I was done with inline and never looked back. In 1999 I was picked up by the Cox-Atlanta Velo women’s development squad and at the end of that year, our team coach, Bobby Livingston, told me that I needed to try the pursuit – that that was my event. I’ve been hooked ever since.
In 2002, you won the Elite Women's Pursuit Title, but you then disappeared - what happened?
I think I was just burnt out at that point. The federation wasn’t really supporting women’s endurance track cycling then like they are now and I wasn’t sure what my future was going to be within the sport. I also wasn’t really sure I could swing another year of it financially – track cycling is great fun, but there aren’t too many Americans actually getting paid to do it!
Do you think the new qualifying procedures are superior to the qualifying procedures in the past? Do you think they could be improved upon?
I really like the much more objective qualifying procedures that USA Cycling has in place now – in fact, reading them is part of what motivated me to start training again in March. I can't speak to the sprint times, but I feel like the pursuit and mass start time standards are very fair in that I think they should be relatively hard, but not impossible to attain. I was definitely thrown for a loop when I found out on the start line that the wind up for the mass start test was only two laps rather than three, but having not practiced for that at all, I wasn't disappointed in not being able to meet the time standard.
At Elite Nationals, you only raced the pursuit. Why not also compete in the mass start events?
Having been on a track fewer than a dozen times in five years and having done no mass start racing on the track and two local circuit races on the road, I didn't feel like elite nationals was the time to jump back in! I do enjoy the mass start events, though, but without a local track to train on, it just wasn't feasible.
It seems like getting back into the pursuit game with Sarah Hammer leading the charge would be a significant challenge. Do you have international ambitions at this point? Any thoughts of just having fun in the masters ranks?
I think Sarah is absolutely great for women's track cycling here in the US. I'm a bit of a realist and beating Sarah at this point never really crossed my mind. One of the great things about the pursuit is that not only can you race to win, but you can also race to ride a personal best (which I didn't even come close to, unfortunately!). Honestly, my goal was to meet the pursuit time standard so that I might get the chance to race internationally, and based on the power I'm putting out and what I've done on the track in training, I should be capable of doing so. For whatever reason, though, I’ve been having trouble putting it all together on race day.
In your time off, you got married, had a couple of kids, now you are back racing. How has all that changed your life?
The cliché is that having kids will change your life in ways that you can’t possibly imagine (both good and bad), but it’s really true! I think, though, that’s especially the case if you’re an athlete, because being an athlete is actually a very self-centered lifestyle. For example, my weekends used to consist of riding my bike for 3-4 hour starting around mid-morning, then just hanging out and recovering for the rest of the day. Now, I have to get going earlier and work at it a bit to squeeze in rides, and my “recovery” afterwards consists of chasing the kids around at the park, zoo, etc. Sleep is another issue: it seems that just as one kid decides to start sleeping through the night, the other kid decides that it’s time to torment us at 2:00am! For our trip to Nationals I did insist that I get a hotel room to myself for the first couple of nights…I think that may have been the highlight of the trip!
What's it like being married to Andy? Does he analyze everything? Do you know the drag coefficients of your kids?
Being married to Andy is great. He’s really a phenomenal dad and husband. He does go crazy analyzing things, but I’m pretty analytical, too, so I’m always interested to see with what he’s come up with (and I’m amazed at how often his predictions are correct!). If the kids would cooperate long enough for him to calculate their drag, I’m sure he’d be out there testing it! As it is, our 3 year old doesn’t like riding her bike because she says it goes too fast, so I’m not so sure we have ourselves a future bike racer anyway.
Have you employed any parently training techniques like trailers and such?
We do have a trailer, but our son is just now old enough - 13 months - that I’d be willing to take him for a spin in it. What I have done a lot of, though, is ride indoors while he naps and our daughter sits beside me and watches TV or a video (which is a huge treat for her because doesn’t get to see much television). In fact, nearly half of the training that I did this year was either on a Velodyne ergometer or on rollers! On a couple of other days each week, I’d hire a babysitter to watch the kids while I trained on the road, and of course on the weekends Andy was home, so I’d also get to ride outdoors then. This actually worked quite well up until it was time to start doing the really high intensity, pursuit specific training needed to “ice the cake” – at that point I think the fact that I was training all by myself and without access to a track really hurt me. (There is actually a track in St Louis, but it’s not in great shape, so the next closest track is Indianapolis 4 hours away.)
Do you plan to race again next year?
I haven’t really decided yet. On the one hand, I am rather disappointed with the times that I rode this year, I know that I’m capable of going a lot faster, especially now that the US has the ADT Center. On the other hand, though, without a change in my training environment I’m not sure that I can achieve my goals, and my racing does put extra stress, both financial and otherwise, on our family. So again, I don’t know.
What do you think of FixedGearFever?
I love it! It's the best source for track cycling information!!
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| Posted on 10/17/07 @ 12:51:05 AM by Scott |
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Average Score: 4.56
Votes: 16
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