Swami’s: The Gurus of Cycling

The introduction to road racing that most entry-level bike racers get is unsparingly short at best, and bloodily tough at worst.

If you are lucky, you'll drop 30 dollars to sign up for your first criterium, desperately hang on for three laps, then get unceremoniously guillotined off the back of the peloton. 10 bucks a lap and you're done. 

Then again if you are unlucky, you'll hang in there to the last lap. Then you'll stack it when someone 30 riders back panics in the sprint, and turns your 20-rider-wide phalanx of riders into a cartwheeling, skin, Lycra and carbon-fiber smoothie.

Swami's Cycling Club, based in North San Diego County, exists to help ease this rough transition into the risky yet exhilarating, gratifying and wholly addictive world of bike racing. Maybe you've seen them riding in formation along the coast - Swami's riders in their fetching blue outfits, featuring a green Taj Mahal set against a starry midnight sky and their incomparably cool motto: "Swami's: Gurus of Cycling."

Founded in 1989 in Encinitas, Swami's has some 150 members. According to club president Albert Bajaras, about 30 of the club's members are regular racers, while the rest just love to ride and be part of a supportive community of cyclists. 

"We are a very non-exclusive club," Barajas says by way of explaining the club's openness to new riders. Anyone can join by going to www.swamis.org and sending in an application. While supporting hard training and solid bike racing by bringing together like-minded people are core club values, Barajas makes it clear that "we are a very social crowd - coffee is very much a part of our culture." 

Swami's isn't the biggest cycling club in town (the San Diego Bicycle Club has over 400 members) but its reputation exceeds its size, thanks to the famous Saturday Swami's Ride. The 45-mile hammerfest takes riders up the coast from Solana Beach to Leucadia, where it turns inland and blasts off in the hills of La Costa and Elfin Forest before regrouping in Escondido and returning to the coast via Del Dios Highway. 

The ride got its name from Swami's, a now-defunct Encinitas bike shop where it used to start. In its earliest incarnation, the ride was called The Horny Toad Ride after a group of early San Diego triathletes - some who participated in triathlon's first races on Fiesta Island in the 1970s. 

Many Swami's members meet at Nytro Bikes on the Coast Highway in Encinitas at 8:00 a.m. and hop on as the ride heads up the coast. Nytro sponsors the club, and the shop has a mechanic, bagels and coffee on hand for club riders who might need a bite or a spot of mechanical attention before jumping into the ride.

In the past, the Swami's ride spit out a good chunk of riders when it hit the infamous Dump Road, a steep lane that climbed past the now-closed San Marcos landfill. While the once-rural Dump Road has given way to stoplights, tract homes, and a flatter four-lane road, Swami's remains one of toughest group rides going in Southern California. Over the years its attendees have included Lance Armstrong, Olympic medalist and Belgian National Champion Axel Merckx, Tours of Spain and Italy winner Toni Rominger, and Astana pro cyclist and Tour de France veteran Chris Horner. 

In fact, Horner, a San Diego native, got his introduction to bike racing with Swami's. 41-year-old Dave Thile of Encinitas raced with the team in 1991 when Horner was a category three Swami's rider. Thile, a Swami's ride regular to this day, recalls that ascending the dump road - "it was quite a pitch" - with the 19-year-old Horner drilling it at the front, "was a nightmare. It was pretty intense." 

In 2007, the Swami's club renewed its efforts to nurture greats like Horner when it started a development squad for young riders. Development squad co-director Chris Daggs (reached the night before hopping a plane for two weeks of racing in Belgium) says the club initiated the program because "Swami's was needing a youth movement. We wanted to bring in younger riders." Along with 33-year-old co-director Marc Yapp, Daggs, 34, provides racers in their early 20s with structure and guidance of the sort that they say they lacked when they started riding two decades ago. "The focus for us," says Yapp, "is to give back to some of the younger riders. We saw a real need for mentoring, for providing the sort of guidance we couldn't get when we were coming up." 

Riding bikes generously provided by club sponsor Cannondale, the development squad focuses on Southern California events. Of the relationship between the Swami's club at large and the development team, Yapp notes that belonging to a larger club gives the young racers a sense of identity and responsibility. The development squad riders, several who started racing while at UC San Diego, "are always rooted in and tied to the club." According to Yapp, knowing that the larger club's expectations and hopes are riding on their shoulders gives the development squad a greater sense of responsibility and belonging. 

One way Swami's helps ease new cyclists' transition into competitive cycling is by organizing informal club races. Club director Steve Masterson, 43, explains that the club races "are a nice introduction to bike racing" that get riders into the sport in a supportive, non-threatening way. Races are divided into three groups based on experience and riders get an opportunity to feel what it's like to race and learn tactics without the pressure of trying to do so in a sanctioned USA Cycling event. Mentoring new riders and making bike racing welcoming and fun in a low-key environment is "one of the most important things we do," says Masterson. 

For more information on Swami's, including how to join and a list of other weekly Swami's training rides, check out www.swamis.org.