Keep On Rolling Mary Verrandeaux’s love of cycling is taking her to this year’s USA Cycling National Road Race Championship for Women.

Mary rode her first race alone. She had never seen a cycling race before, but there she was, lined up and ready to go. The gun sounded and she remembers, “The girls took off, and I was just standing there.”

She lost at the starting line and rode the entire race by herself. But that never happened again.

Mary Verrandeaux, 54, is a woman with two loves: cycling and painting. She grew up riding horses, but once she attended college in Sarasota, she started looking for a new way to stay fit.

“I tried running and hated it,” she says. “I had my dad’s old bike for riding around in Sarasota while studying art at Ringling College of Art and Design, and I fell in love with cycling.”

One year later, Mary decided to start racing. She walked into the local bike shop and asked the two guys working there about racing bikes.

“They both laughed at me until a few months later when I was drop-

Los Angeles to train for the 1984 Olympics. Just two weeks before the Olympics, she crashed her bike, fracturing her skull. She’s been injured many times as a cyclist, but this was the worst.

“You know, that’s the downside of cycling—when you hit the pavement,” she says. “And it’s not very forgiving.”

After two months of recovery, Mary moved back to Ocala and started her own advertising agency, Verrandeaux Visual Communications, Inc. She ran the agency for 21 years until she sold it to pursue painting. Now she travels frequently to horse shows to paint and bikes 30 to 50 miles six days a week to train for the USA Cycling National Road Race Championship for Women in May, a 50-mile race she’s hoping to win.

Mary has a long list of road race accomplishments and the Tour de France Feminin under her belt, but she also enjoys charity rides, including the annual Ride For The Arts that she helped create to support cycling and the local arts community.

“I hope it grows to be one of the biggest rides in the country,” she says.

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