When 2 Stars aren't enough

In the bike business, we are surrounded by people who like bikes and some who even love them. Some are weekend warriors, some ride a few times during the week, and some are hardcore athletes who ride almost every day. What makes Mara Miller of Double Star Coaching different is Mara doesn’t have any other hobbies other than bikes. Mara doesn’t knit, garden, or go to cooking classes. She doesn’t play an instrument, go to concerts, or do pub crawls on Friday nights. When Mara isn’t working at her day job, she is coaching athletes, riding bikes, sitting on her indoor trainer, or planning her next cycling adventure. She and her husband Randy plan all of their vacations around riding and all of their activities and social life revolve around the sport of cycling. Mara is truly hardcore.

Where did this passion for cycling start? “My first bike was a Mongoose BMX bike which I still own and it was sitting under the Christmas Tree when I was 14”, Mara explains. Who still owns their first bike? Mara does. She rode that bike everywhere around Greensburg Pennsylvania, the town in which she grew up. After an illustrious college athletic career playing softball and basketball for the University of Charleston in West Virginia, Mara picked up cycling again and turned it into her main hobby. She had moved to the metro DC area where she met Randy and the two started riding together, often with the local cycling clubs. During that period, she remembers the precise time when the hobby turned into a lifelong passion. It was when she attended an all-women Chris Carmichael cycling camp in California. She was in her early 30s and spent the week training and hanging with Katie Compton, former 15-time national Cyclocross champion. The camp and Katie lit the fire in Mara’s belly to start to race and she came back East dedicated to giving bike racing her all. Her hard work and training began to pay off and she started racing every weekend and started to win. Her notable victory as a Cat 3 amateur, was the overall GC at the Fitchburg stage race in Massachusetts. After working her way up the classifications, Mara turned Pro for Team Advil-Chapstick where she won her first National Title (1st star) in 2004, racing Criterium (Crit). This was a tremendous accomplishment for Mara since a Crit race is an extremely strategic lapped race on a closed circuit with a massive sprint at the finish. “My forte was climbing” on open courses which is a complete departure from the type of event that Crit is. In 2006, Mara won her second National Title (2nd star), this time winning the road race and utilizing her skills as a climber. During her cycling career, she has stood on the podium 33 times. Another notable victory as a pro was the Bear Mountain Race which was special since it was so close to Northern, New Jersey, which she now calls home.

Mara has now stopped racing but her training schedule is sculpted around doing at least one big event per year which are mostly gravel events. Mara loves riding bikes on all surfaces and gravel seems to be the happy place where she and Randy have the most fun and adventures together. When I asked Mara what her favorite event or place to ride is, she said she doesn’t have one. “I like changing it up. It’s always a real adventure because you’ve never been there before”, she explains. One of Mara and Randy’s goals is to ride in every state in the US which they have already started since they plan a one-week cycling trip every year. This year they opted to go international and took a trip to road ride in Italy which Mara felt was life-changing. This was a group trip through her coaching business and they are looking to go back again since they had such an amazing time riding bikes and being with friends.

Mara’s primary day job is as an administrator at a school that focuses on special needs students who struggle with mental health issues. It’s a small school with 35 students that is having a great impact on the families that it serves. Her secondary job is her coaching business. She focuses on 10-25 “age group athletes”. Some just want to stay fit, while others have an event or training goal that they need her expertise to achieve. Mara says “I tend to attract riders that are new to the sport”, probably because of her kind demeanor and overall happy disposition and stoke for all things bike. People who aren’t looking to smash the competition but have fun and get better at bikes are the prime candidates for her coaching style although she works very well with the 1-2 pro-level riders she trains regularly. Those athletes compete hard and progress with her tutelage and she obviously has 2-championships to prove she knows how to win. Mara has also been our go-to person when it comes to teaching kids how to ride and was key to helping to launch the NJ NICL team, the Palisades Cyclones of which Mara and I shared the task of running for almost 5 years. She also served on the board of the JFCS Ride to Fight Hunger for many years and she designed the courses and helped run the event during that time.

Mara definitely earned the 2 stars that she won during her cycling career but those who know her personally, feel that she has earned many more since she retired from racing. She is everything that embodies a cyclist in its purest form and checks all the boxes when it comes to building a community based around a healthy and fun activity. She spreads more bike stoke than anyone and spends almost all of her personal time mastering that craft. She brings a smile to the room when entering and even when I am fed up with bikes, she revives my own passion for the sport that I dedicated my life to. Mara Miller gets all 5 stars in my book. Time to make up some new kits.