Double Irish national champion Maria Larkin has followed a long and unusual route from life in rural Mayo to working for one of cycling’s biggest companies and racing the cyclo-cross world championships. She tells Shane Stokes about that journey.
Having taken her second consecutive national cyclo-cross championship title last weekend, Maria Larkin is very much looking forward to what will be her second world championship participation in the discipline.
The Chicago-based Mayo woman rode the world cyclo-cross championships four years ago and was named by Cycling Ireland on Thursday as part of the team for the cross worlds in Fayetteville, Arkansas at the end of this month.
“I’m absolutely delighted,” she told stickybottle on Thursday evening. “It was a goal of mine for the whole season, so I’m really happy. I’ll be representing Ireland and it’s also going to be kind of like a home race for me, even though I’m not local to Fayetteville, I’m local to Chicago. I’m really excited for the race.”
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Larkin made her worlds debut in Valkenburg in 2018, joining the-then national champion Lara Gillespie plus several male riders on the Cycling Ireland team. Gillespie was only a first year junior but competed in the under 23 event, while Larkin raced the other senior women, placing 39th. She believes that she can build on that now.
“It was such a kind of eye opening experience,” she says. “I felt like at the time I was an experienced rider, but I look back now and say that I didn’t know anything back then. I’ve deliberately chosen not try to go to worlds since then because I work full time and it’s a lot to go back to Ireland and then to go on to worlds in Europe. That takes a lot of time and money.”
However, the fact that this year’s worlds is taking place on American soil changes things for her. “This year, because it’s in Fayetteville, it’s very special. I know it’ll be like a home race in a way for me because I’ll have so many friends there, so many people from the American cyclo-cross scene will be there. So I really wanted to go and represent Ireland at that race…it will be fantastic.”
Larkin has done several races in the US in recent months, including UCI World Cups in Iowa City and Waterloo. She satisfied Cycling Ireland’s selection criteria with strong rides in two other races: she placed 20th in the C1-ranked Kings CX Cincy Cyclocross in Cincinnati on Oct 23rd, finishing on the same lap as the winner, and was eighth in the C2-ranked Major Taylor Cross Cup one week later.
And while she decided not to compete in the World Cup in Fayetteville in October as it would have taken so much time to do, she watched the event and studied the course for the worlds.
“It is fairly hilly,” she said. “I don’t know what the weather is going to be like there. It was a crazy weather situation there in October. If it’s dry, it could be like a fast American track which would suit me because I have a lot of experience of that. But then I obviously have the experience from racing in Ireland and from doing Valkenburg. So if it turns into that very wet, soupy (course)…
“Hopefully either way I’ll have some experience at this point,” she said, laughing. “When I got through that I knew I was going to be okay”
Last Sunday’s national cyclo-cross championships gave a fine example of Larkin’s strength. She has been back in Ireland in recent weeks and took victories in two earlier races, then distanced her rivals in the championships itself.
She pushed ahead early on with Darcy Harkness (VC Glendale), and while she was delayed when she tangled with a rope barrier, she ended the opening lap clear of all of her rivals. She then extended her lead and finished far in front of Harkness and the bronze medallist Roisin Lally (Scott Quanta).
“I’m really, really happy,” she said in a post-race interview. “When you are coming up to the race it is quite stressful. Anything can go wrong in cyclo-cross, so I was really happy to pull it off.”
She elaborated on her mishap to stickybottle, and admitted it was a moment of high stress for her. “It was one of those blue ropes,” she says. “I think sustainability in Ireland is way ahead…in America I would just have broken the tape! But because it was rope I got tangled in it. My handlebars got stuck under it, I actually went over the handlebars and crashed. And the white plastic stake came out and hit me right in the helmet, cracked me in the helmet. It didn’t hurt or anything, but it was kind of spectacular. I got stuck a bit. I thought for a second ‘oh shit, this is bad.’”
When an athlete spends months building up to an event, training hard and trying to psyche themselves up, a mishap can introduce unexpected stress.
“You have that sort of initial panic when something goes wrong,” she explains. “You’re like, ‘oh shit, this is not my day now, I’m never going to be able to get back.’ But because it was such a heavy track…if it was a fast, dusty race they would be gone. They would have 30 seconds on you instantaneously. But because it was such a heavy track, I ran pretty well quickly back and then was able to catch up to Darcy. I knew then I must be on a fairly good day.”
The rapid recovery gave Larkin the confidence to attack, but she had a period of concern soon after that. She felt like the pendulum was starting to swing in the other direction and had to push hard again to protect her advantage.
“I could feel Darcy was having a better second half on the second lap. I don’t know if it was just paranoia or if it was real, but I felt like she was coming back on me a little bit. And so on the on the last lap I think I rode the entire mud hill after the start/finish. It was really muddy and you could either run or ride.
"I just put everything into it, I think I rode the whole section. I hadn’t ridden it previously. So that was kind of my all in…that was everything I had, because once you get to the top of that hill you’re going downhill for a bit. So when I got through that I kind of knew I was going to be okay.”
Larkin ended up being more than okay, finishing one minute and three seconds clear of Harkness and a further 47 seconds ahead of bronze medallist Lally. It was an emphatic victory and one which shows the improvement she has made since she discovered the sport.
From ball sports in Balla to Chicago's cycling scene
Now 34 years of age, Larkin’s journey from Mayo to Chicago, from non-cyclist to double national champion and now-double cross worlds team member, has been an interesting one. She grew up near Balla, a small village on the road between Castlebar and Claremorris, and focussed on volleyball and Gaelic football. She used her brother’s old mountain bike to commute to training, and also had a hybrid-style bike her parents got her which she used at home.
“I sort of would ride it around the farm, kind of like cyclo-cross, but I didn’t even wonder about cycling racing. I had no concept of it,” she explains. “Like, I would see people come up the road here past the house, but I didn’t occur to me that you could even do cycling as a sport because we were in Mayo and it is just so football crazy here. I played football for under 8, under 10, under 12, and then I played senior for a combo team between Balla and Mayo Abbey.”
Larkin studied architecture in Bolton Street and when the recession hit in Ireland, she took time out from her studies to travel to the US. “I decided I would take a sabbatical and do different jobs. I ended up going to Chicago because it was the only place I could find a job. And also as I had friends there.
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“When I got to Chicago, I got like a commuter bike…I got a Raleigh road bike from the 1980s, probably the same age as me, and started riding. It seemed like the easiest way to get around the city. And I ended up plugging into the cycling community fairly easily.
"There’s a great community in Chicago, sort of on the messenger side of things, all those street races. I didn’t do too many of them, but I was hanging around with those people who do Alleycats and all that stuff. It was the time when track bikes were very in, so I ended up converting that bike to a track bike and I just started riding around. And I ended up meeting Kyle, my husband in a bike shop, which is classic.”
Larkin spent a year and a half in Chicago in 2009/2010, finished her degree in Ireland in 2012 and then moved full time to the US that same year. Her career was progressing well and so too her connection to cycling. That was partly due to a new connection in the sport. “I met a friend of mine, Daphne (Karagianis), who is currently on one of the US pro teams (DNA Pro Cycling). She was starting racing and said to me, ‘do you want to race?’ I said, ‘yeah, that sounds like fun.’ So I did.”
Larkin dabbled in competition for several years, focussing initially on track racing on an outdoor velodrome in Chicago. She began as a category four rider but Karagianis’ ambition and enthusiasm would help spur her on. Another inspiration was attending the cyclo-cross world championships in Louisville in 2013, her experience as a spectator lighting a spark in her mind that perhaps one day she too could compete in the worlds.
The long road to a nationals win
Fuelled by a growing passion for the sport, Larkin raced more and more in the US and became stronger. She decided to contest the Irish national championships in 2015, returning to Ireland from Chicago for the race. She immediately impressed, finishing a fine second behind Francine Meehan, someone she says ‘absolutely destroyed’ the field.
She then returned the following year and took bronze behind Beth McCluskey and Maeve O’Grady, and was second again in 2016 behind McCluskey.
The near misses might have frustrated, but she could also acknowledge the class of her rivals. “Fran won once and then Beth McCluskey came back on the scene,” she explains. “She was amazing. I kind of got passed between amazing champions for a few years. Fran had been dominant for three years. And then Beth came back, and she had been an Olympian on mountain bike. So I had no chance there," she laughed.
“Then Lara (Gillespie), of course, came up. She was just phenomenal. The depth of talent (in Irish cross racing) maybe wasn’t there in the beginning, but there was always someone who was world class. So it took a long time…I was still building myself up. Each year I was training a bit more. I wouldn’t say that I went all in to do a professional level, until the last two to three years, which is when I really had success. But it definitely took me a gradual upward tick.”
An important turning point came in 2018, something borne out of what seemed like a setback. Having achieved a pattern of silver-bronze-silver in the years before that, she finished one step off the podium in that year’s race. The disappointment caused her to really reassess things. “I was sick of it after I got fourth…I looked at everything I’d done and said, ‘this is not the way it’s going to work.’”
In response she doubled down on her training to make sure she was even fitter. She also rejigged her trips home; previously she would come back a couple of days before the national championships, ride the race, and then spend a block of time with her relatives in Ireland. After taking fourth, she made sure to come back earlier and have a longer lead in to the championships, being fresher and more focussed rather than tired from travelling.
Gillespie won again in 2019, but Larkin was much closer. The race came down to a sprint finish and while Gillespie was several lengths clear at the line, Larkin felt progress had been made. And then all the hard work paid off in 2020; she finished over a minute clear of Michelle Geoghegan in Enniscrone, taking gold on her sixth attempt.
“It was an enormous relief, because I had been focused on that as a goal for so long,” she says. “And it had frustrated me that I hadn’t managed to win, for various reasons. But I will say that when I got silver against Lara in Cork, I’m extremely proud of that race in terms of…even though I got silver it was extremely close. Like we went to a sprint.
“So even though I didn’t win in 2019, I was still really proud of that race. And I knew that if that race have gone any differently in a number of ways that I could have won. And so that really kind of drove me in 2020. I knew I could win. So when I did win, obviously I was just enormously relieved.”
Gillespie didn’t compete in 2020, missing the event. However Larkin had already beaten her before, winning the UCI cyclo-cross race held in Belfast in 2018 by over two minutes. That too was important for her self confidence. “When I won the UCI race, I almost felt like I won nationals because I’d finally won a race in Ireland. I’d finally gotten the monkey off my back. So with those two things, the Cork race (the 2019 nationals) and then the UCI race, I knew I could win in 2020.”
Setting sights on new goals
It’s two years on from that first nationals win and she’s now repeated the feat. Doing so is a big relief for her: the pandemic meant that she missed out on wearing the national champion’s jersey in 2020 and while the cancellation of last year’s championships meant that she was able to wear it in 2021, there was still some disruption to the calendar. She will relish the year ahead in the Irish colours and will hope to be able to show it off in a wide number of events.
Larkin didn’t grow up around cycling as a sport, coming to it late, but she is steeped in it now. She works for one of the biggest bicycle companies in the world, using her architectural background in her job of store design for Trek. Her husband Kyle is a cyclist and also acts as her bike mechanic at races, and he works in the electrical engineering department of another huge industry company, SRAM.
She wants to keep improving and plans to set new targets. “It’s hard to think of a new goal. Like retaining the title was obviously a goal for this year. And winning the title was a goal for so long. It kind of drove my training and everything for quite a long time. And so finding a new goal, I don’t think I’ve even come to terms of what it could be yet.
“I do know that I want to keep racing for another few years. One of the things that thought about doing are racing more in Belgium. Being able to do some of the iconic races. I’d love as a goal to end up doing Namur, which is one of the most iconic courses there is. So stuff like that, challenging courses or different experiences than the ones that I’ve had already.”
She’s also interested in trying out other disciplines. “I have done mountain bike racing and it’s extremely enjoyable. I would love to come back and do the Irish crit nationals sometime. Or do Rás na mBan with the Chicago team that we race with, CWEC (Chicago Women’s Elite Cycling – ed.). That would be fantastic. I’d love to do that.”
Before then, though, there’s the important matter of the world championships. She and the rest of the five rider squad will do a training camp with Cycling Ireland this weekend. Larkin will then fly back to the US next Tuesday and will continue working hard in advance of her trip to Fayetteville.
She can’t predict how things will go at the worlds, but does have a clear goal in mind. “I would hope that I will be able to stay on the lead lap (finishing in the same lap as the winner – ed.). I didn’t manage that in Valkenburg in 2018, but I feel like a stronger rider now than I was then. But also everybody else is very strong, and they’re absolutely flying in those kinds of races.
“I will do my best to represent Ireland. I would love to make lead lap, that will be my goal for that day.”
Continuing to progress will also be important to her. It’s just under a decade since her attendance at the world championships in Louisville as a spectator, nine years on since she wondered if she might one day be a participant. She’ll now line out as a second-time competitor at the worlds, something the former football and volleyball player can be proud of.
She’ll relish that feeling, will enjoy competing with the green jersey on her back, and will savour the experience of competing in a world championships in her adopted country.
“Ireland will be represented, and it’s also going to feel like I have a lot of friends and support there,” she says. “I’m really excited for the race.”
