Vail cyclists win Florida 500 ultra-endurance bike race
Dan Swenson and Mike Garcia rode the 533-mile ride in just under 27 hours
Cameron Oster/Courtesy photo
It all started with a text.
“Hi Mike, do you know of any ultra TTs happening in Florida in March or April?” Dogma Athletica owner Dan Swenson wrote to Mike Garcia, who splits time between New Jersey and Edwards.
Swenson was hoping to pair a beach vacation with his wife with a long bike ride. A really long ride.
“I said, ‘Well Dan, funny you should ask? What are you doing Feb. 23-24? Would you want to do a two-man team, Jacksonville to Key West — 533 miles?'” Garcia recalled.
The 55-year-olds teamed up at the end of last month to win the Florida 500 ultra-endurance two-person bike relay race in 26 hours, 56 minutes.
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“We were on point — I thought it was great,” said Garcia, who did the race with a different partner in 2023.
“Dan was an excellent teammate,” Garcia said. “Calm, strong, went out there and gave his best effort every shift.”
Fighting steady 15 mph winds the entire way, Garcia and Swenson rode in 40-minute shifts through the day and night, without sleep. Garcia’s girlfriend, Alice Pomeranc, and cycling race director Cameron Oster, followed along in a Suburban. In addition to shuttling each athlete to the tag zones, the support crew called out turns with a megaphone and protected the cyclists from Miami’s busy traffic at 10 p.m.
“We had an amazing crew,” Garcia said. “In these events, it’s really a team event. The crew is just as important as the riders.”
Taking the long route
Before purchasing Dogma Athletica in August of 2022, Swenson was a corporate finance executive and former investment banker on Wall Street. On spring break 24 years ago, the MBA student saw a video his wife had recorded of him jogging down the beach.
“I was like, ‘Who’s that fat guy?” Swenson recalled. “I saw that and I was like, I have to get myself in better shape.”
He went from 200 to 150 pounds, focusing on diet and exercise. He set a goal of entering a triathlon before he turned 40.
“And I just became more and more competitive and focused on it as a way of self-improvement,” the 55-year-old said of his growing addiction to scratch the endurance itch.
“I really believe there are a lot of life lessons that translate from sport to everyday life: around preparation, grit, mindset, overcoming obstacles,” he continued. “There are so many things I experienced in races or while training that are directly applicable to my job as an executive, my job as a dad, a husband — all those things.”
While Swenson’s cycling resume consists of most of the major endurance gravel cycling events across the nation, Garcia is more known for his road prowess.
The former Alpine ski racer had always cross-trained on the bike during his competitive career. He took up longer rides after his kids grew up, and in 2019, structured his training to prepare for the 2020 Race Across America — which was ultimately canceled. He made his 12-hour race debut right before the pandemic and has done multiple 12-hour and 24-hour two-man team races since.
He grew up visiting Vail for ski vacations with his dad, who still lives in the Singletree house he bought in 1998. “I have a nice place to go,” said Garcia, who was introduced to Swenson on the Monday night group ride that leaves from the Elk Lot and ends at Northside during the summer.
With snow covering his stomping grounds in advance of the race, Swenson resorted to the indoor trainer to prepare. One simulation he conducted was a brutal 12-hour session consisting of 1-hour on/1-hour off bouts.
“I watched a lot of Marvel movies,” he said. One such scheduled session landed on a January powder day.
“That was a really battle of the will to actually do the training that day.”
But it paid off.
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In the early goings, Swenson pumped out 220-230 watt averages in pursuit of the team’s targeted 22 mph goal pace. The headwinds, however, were too much.
“After three sessions of that, I was like, I need to change the approach because this is not going to be sustainable over the next 20 hours,” Swenson said. He backed off to 200 watts and kept his heart rate around 130 beats per minute. Around 1 a.m., a brief tailwind pushed the cyclists through the Florida Keys at 25 mph. Unfortunately, the weather ultimately thwarted their record ambitions.
“The wind was ugly,” Garcia said, noting that he had to put out 17 more watts to sustain a speed that was 1.5 mph slower than in 2023.
With sunrise approaching, Swenson prepped for his much-anticipated leg across the 7-mile bridge.
“We were hyping that up the whole time,” Garcia said of the historic span, which sits 65 feet above the ocean.
“The only unfortunate thing was that we got there, the sky opened up.”
Pouring rain pelted Swenson, who was thrown back and forth by gale-force gusts.
“It was downright scary at times,” Swenson said. He pumped his tired legs, fueled the previous 24 hours by a regular dose of Maurten gels, protein shakes and Pringles, all the while trying to not get pushed off the bridge or into oncoming traffic.
“He was just getting blown away like you couldn’t believe,” Garcia said.
In trusting his preparation and staying on top of his gear, Swenson persevered to the finish line.
“The only way to get through it is just keep going,” he said before connecting the entire experience to everyday life.
“That was the thing here. It was just a matter of staying focused on moving down the road. In life, that’s what you have to do to get to the outcome you want,” he said.
“Sometimes that’s just what you have to do to get through the tough times.”
The next text
Garcia, who works in the grocery distribution industry (he sold a crate of dog food during one of his 40-minute rest shifts in the middle of the night in Florida), has a busy spring and summer race schedule.
He’ll go to Spain for the Mallorca 312 in April, race New Jersey and U.S. national time trial championships in May and compete in the Race Around Poland, a 2,200-mile ride around the perimeter of the European country. He’ll probably be back for the Big Horn Gravel event in Gypsum in June, too.
As for the next time he’ll team up with Swenson? Well, he’ll have to revisit his SMS inbox.
“I’m holding Dan to his text,” Garcia said.
“He said, ‘Are we going back next year to break the course record?'”
