OFF THE RECOR D

Kat Statman:

From the Cyclocross Course to the Courtroom

From mid-September to mid-December in any given year, you can find Kat Statman—a litigation associate at Baker Donelson in Houston—tearing through 10 to 20 cyclocross races, right on the heels of the eight to 12 mountain bike races he completed since March. As he puts it, the racing season helps him “handle the day to day stress of work and stay sane” and hone his “ability to make decisions in stressful situations,” such as “mak[ing] tactical decisions on the fly at high speed while accounting for a variety of variables around you and while your heart rate is at or near its maximum.” If that’s what he signs up to do in his spare time, it’s no wonder he finds it “easy to stay calm, collected, and rational” in his everyday practice.

While originally a competitive swimmer from second grade through high school, he also taught mountain biking to middle school students during a summer camp in the Black Forest. Without a swim team to call home in college, he picked up mountain bike racing his sophomore year. His achievements in that regard led him to join the collegiate cycling team, work with a professional mountain biker and coach in upstate New York, and branch out into cyclocross between the mountain biking season and off-season training.

So, what’s cyclocross? “Cyclocross is a little hard to describe. It’s sometimes described as steeplechase on bikes,” though Kat isn’t entirely on board with that description. Rather, it’s a hybrid, is high intensity, and lasts about an hour on a two- to three-kilometer course. A cyclocross bike looks like a road bike, but has wider, knobby tires for racing on mixed terrain. Yet the bike won’t always be all you need to finish the race: sometimes a cyclocross event “can involve running due to a variety of course conditions that are not rideable, be it long sections of sand on a beach, a set of stairs, a set of 40 cm wooden planks in the middle of the course.” And in those scenarios, Kat must not only run, but carry his cyclocross bike at the same time.

It’s no wonder that the sport—developed in France in the early 20th century—was originally designed for road bike racers to keep their fitness in winter with the added benefit of crosstraining through running.

Kat balances his practice with the demanding race schedule he keeps through early morning training sessions, with the commensurate early retirement in the evenings. He is sure to account for his work obligations and the ever-present emergencies that arise in litigation when he and his coach develop his annual training plan. He plans five to six training rides per week, ranging from one to six hours (the latter falling on a weekend), with one to two short runs per week as the cyclocross season approaches. All told, his training takes up about eight–14 hours of his week. And during the travel for races, he’ll take advantage of riding shotgun to work in the car and “keep [his] mind off of the upcoming race to keep from overthinking things.”

Having raced competitively for 15 years, Kat has racked up an impressive set of achievements. He is most proud of the moment he became “pro” as a mountain bike racer (that being the highest category achievable) after the season in which he won the expert 19–29 age group National Mountain Bike series, capped off in Brian Head, Utah. He also is proud of winning his first “pro” cyclocross race in the fall of 2010 in Texas before going to law school, followed by finishing on the lead lap at multiple national-level races during his first year of law school against the best cyclocross racers in the country.

While Kat is deliberate in his planning, and has built up an impressive foundation of fitness, consistency, and expertise in the sport, he insists that “none of it would be possible without [his] wonderful wife to help keep [his] head on straight.” And throughout it all, he’s had the pleasure of meeting people from all different walks of life and backgrounds, from engineers to business owners, in-house counsel to architects, and so on. Kimberly A. Chojnacki is a litigation associate at Baker Donelson in Houston. She represents corporate clients in eminent domain proceedings, complex commercial litigation, and insurance defense disputes. She is an associate editor of The Houston Lawyer. By Kimberly A. Choj nac i Kat Statman says cyclocross sometimes involves running as well as biking, depending on the terrain. Photos©HardcorvTM

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Small Firm Champions Coane & Associates Frye, Benavidez and O’Neil, PLLC Fuqua & Associates, P.C. Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP Givens & Johnston Katine & Nechman L.L.P. Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP KoonsFuller, P.C. MehaffyWeber, P.C. Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP Shortt & Nguyen, P.C. Squire Patton Boggs (US) LLP Trahan Kornegay Payne, LLP

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