About Steven Francisco

Who I Am

I'm Steven Francisco, a 21 year old chemical engineering undergraduate at the University of Delaware and the author of Velo Quips. I wrote this page as a Senior, with one more year of college ahead before heading into industry.

Outside of coursework and career plans, cycling is my number one passion. It's the thing I keep coming back to, whether I'm training, racing, or just writing about the sport on this blog.

The cycling season is a long arc of preparation, effort, and recovery. From the dark winter months of base training to the sharp intensity of spring classics and grand tours, every phase demands patience. Riders often speak of the gaussian distribution of form—peaking at just the right moment for a target race. But the amateur cyclist knows this rhythm too, even without a WorldTour schedule. Balancing training with work, family, and daylight hours becomes the real challenge. There is a certain humor in the way we obsess over power figures, rest days, and the perfect workout plan, only to have a flat tire or a rainy week derail everything.

The peloton is a strange democracy where age and experience sometimes outpace raw talent. Watching a veteran like Chris Horner or Joaquim Rodriguez outsmart a younger rival on a mountain stage reminds us that racing is as much about guile as it is about watts. The same dynamic plays out in local group rides, where the older rider who knows the roads and the wind patterns can drop a college racer on a bad day. Cycling humbles everyone eventually. The excuses we make—bad legs, wrong gearing, too much rest—are part of the shared language that binds cyclists together, whether they are chasing a yellow jersey or just trying to hold the wheel on a Saturday morning.

There is a quiet satisfaction in the data that cycling produces. The total hours, the distribution of power across a ride, the scoring of a hard effort—these figures become a personal archive of performances. But the numbers only tell part of the story. The best memories are often the ones that don't appear on a screen: the photo of a sunrise from a solo ride, the conversation at the coffee stop, the feeling of flying down a descent with no cars behind you. Velo Quips exists at the intersection of that hard data and the human experience of the sport. It is a place to observe, to laugh, and to remember why we ride.