Ford Games
Overcoming Obstacles on a Bicycle Charlotte Lellman ’15 embraces the quirky sport of cyclocross. BY CHARLES CURTIS
PHOTO: KATIE BUSICK
Charlotte Lellman races in a cyclocross event. Courses often feature mud, gravel, hills, and barriers to get around.
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he goal of the bicycle sport known as cyclocross is simple: Finish the set number of laps around a circuit in the fastest time possible. But the execution? That’s the complicated part. Cyclocross courses can include barriers or logs to get your bike over, trees to avoid, and gravel and mud that’s super-tough to pedal through—not to mention tight turns, and barriers that might require riders to dismount and carry their bikes while running before hopping back on again. There are sometimes hills to contend with. And the sport requires strategy. Do you get off the bike and run with it, making an obstacle easier to handle, or do you pedal through it? Something else cyclocross requires: all-around full-body athleticism. It’s a sport that Charlotte Lellman ’15 has fallen hard for—and one in which she’s already found success. In her first full year competing in cyclocross, she finished first in just her third event. (Lellman developed some of her winning athleticism at Haverford, running for the cross-country and track and field teams under head coach Fran Rizzo.) The Northampton, Mass., native, who works as an archivist at the Center for the History of Medicine at Harvard, spoke to Haverford magazine about the family connection that drew her to cyclocross and why it’s become such a huge part of her life. WINTER 2022
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