Jonathan O'Keeffe
Pronouns: he/him
Age: 56
Town: Amherst, MA
NCC Member Since: 2008
Jonathan: The History
Where are you from?
I grew up on Cape Cod, and I've been living in Amherst since 1996.
How did you first get into cycling?
I've been riding bikes since I was a teenager (I still have the bike I used to ride to high school), but I really started to get more into cycling when I started doing group rides in Amherst and Northampton around 2007.
Why did you join NCC?
Doing group rides with NCC really changed the way I rode, and made it a much more fun and rewarding experience. I had been doing mostly solo rides before that, which always felt like a bit of a grind, but riding with other people turned it into a much more social experience (and made me push myself a lot harder, too!)
What type of riding do you do?
Most of my riding is on the road -- a little bit of racing, a lot of group riding, and a bit of solo riding. I do some local cyclocross racing in the fall, filling in the back half of the fields, and a little bit of mountain biking (I'm always meaning to get out more on the MTB, but it doesn't happen often enough). Once it gets cold in the winter, you can mostly find me on my trainer in Zwift.
You organize the NCC’s intro ride series. Tell us about that!
I started assisting Leila [Everett, former NCC co-president] eight or nine years ago when she used to run the intro rides, and found this to be fun and rewarding. There's a steady stream of new faces every week, along with a lot of regulars, and it's super-satisfying to watch newer riders develop over the course of the summer into stronger and more confident cyclists. These new riders are the first stage of the pipeline into becoming more involved in the club and our rides, and I love seeing our intro riders "graduate" into more advanced rides and other leadership positions in the club.
You’ve gone on some incredible cycling trips in the US and around the world! Tell us about some of your most memorable cycling vacations.
I'm not fast, but I can chug away for a long time, so a couple that stand out the most for me are long-distance endurance races in Michigan and Iceland. In 2013 I traveled with some family and friends to the National 24-Hour Challenge in Middletown, Michigan. This is kind of like a 120-mile road race followed by an 18-hour individual time trial. We got interrupted for a couple of hours by some huge thunderstorms in the middle of the night, but I finished with 350+ miles for a first-place age-group finish.
In 2018 I teamed up with NCC members Roger Stawasz and Carson Poe, along with some friends, to take on the WOW Cyclothon in Iceland. We packed four riders, four bikes, and two drivers into a rented camper for a 48-hour, rainy, windswept tour of the 850-mile ring road around Iceland's perimeter. We each rode eight legs of about 1.5 hours each through incredible terrain, passing glaciers, icebergs, hot springs, and tons of waterfalls. We weren't anywhere close to winning the race, but I'm pretty sure we had more fun than anyone else.
Jonathan’s Favorites
What’s your favorite place to ride?
Do I have to pick just one? I'm going to go with:
1) The Falls Road loop up to the Bookmill in Montague, beautiful countryside, and scene of lots of Wednesday night hijinks over the years
2) The Patten District in Greenfield/Shelburne, gorgeous scenery that always makes me think of the Scottish Highlands
3) Mount Holyoke (Skinner), the iconic Valley climb, with outstanding views from the summit
Favorite ride snack?
I could ride all day on Fig Newtons. Throw in a couple of plastic-wrapped sandwiches from a gas station and I'm in heaven.
What is your favorite NCC group ride or event?
Probably a tie between the Tuesday night race series and the Wednesday night A/B ride.
Jonathan Off the Bike
What do you do outside of cycling?
I work out of my home in Amherst for a small software company in New Jersey, doing web application programming in international supply chain management. In my spare time, I like tinkering with web stuff relating to bikes and maps and data, and I've built a couple of Strava-linked websites for visualizing your activity data on maps and reports. Since COVID I've gotten really into birdwatching, so when I'm not riding or working, I'm probably in the woods or at a lake looking for weird ducks.
You also maintain the database with every single NCC hill climb and time trial performance going back to 2007. Give us some numbers!
The Tuesday night race series were some of the first rides I did with the club back in 2008. David Goodwin has been doing an outstanding job of organizing this series since back then through to the present day. I was intimidated by the concept of racing at first, but the crowd was super-supportive and encouraging, even to a slow newbie like me (in my first race I was over nine minutes behind the leader). I caught the bug, and have been doing them regularly ever since. I wanted to give back to the club a little bit by developing an easier way to post race results and standings each week, and this evolved into a web-based application that has been used to track the results for almost 20 years now, with 391 races and almost 6,000 individual rider performances.
What’s next for Jonathan?
A couple of years ago you did an Everest on Zwift. What can we expect from you this winter?
Definitely not another Everest! Eight and a half times up the Alpe de Zwift for 29,000' of climbing almost killed me, definitely one of the hardest rides I've ever done. The event I'm most psyched about this winter is leading the NCC team in the Zwift Thursday night Team Time Trial series. Each week a group of us gathers and competes in an organized TTT against hundreds of other teams from around the world. It's a lot of fun, and one of the best workouts you can imagine. Riding as part of a group effort with other team members makes you push yourself even harder than you would in an individual race effort. We'll be doing these events on Thursday nights through the winter, posting sign-up info on the website each week in the News section and on the calendar, so keep an eye out -- we'd love to have some new riders join us.
How can club members get involved with NCC on Zwift?
Watch for our events on the calendar on the NCC website. We do a race series every Tuesday night, the Team Time Trial on Thursday nights, and we'll probably be adding additional events as the outside temperatures continue to drop. All of our events are open to all club members. If you have any questions about our events or about Zwift setup, feel free to shoot me an email (contact info below).
What’s on your cycling bucket list?
Haleakalā. Cross-country ride. Watch a TdF stage. Learn to ride a unicycle. Figure out how to ride my cross bike or MTB over anything bigger than a broomstick.
What are your hopes for NCC?
The NCC has been putting a ton of effort into youth development, along with reaching out to new riders, women, and transgender/non-binary riders. All of these efforts have been paying off with lots of new participation in many events. I can't wait to see the local cycling community continue to grow as these riders get more involved in the club.
How can people connect with you?
Is there social media besides Strava? You can find me there at https://www.strava.com/athletes/jokeeffe. Or drop me an email at jonathan.okeeffe@gmail.com.
