About Me

Howdy Everyone! My name is Ryan Verret. I love technology. I love human endurance. I love sustainable living and transportation. And I'm a skeptic. Team FSM Racing is all about the intersection of these interests, primarily in the form of road cycling and catamaran sailing... fast!

I live in the beautiful Austin, Texas, where I work as an engineer / product manager for a technology company. Austin has excellent roads for cycling, as well as a very active cycling community. It also has a surprisingly active catamaran sailing community with ties to Gulf coast sailing. I've been cycling since I moved to Austin after college in 2005, 5 years ago. Only in the past couple years have I gotten serious about it, though I've had to take the better part of the last year off due to a knee injury resulting in surgery in February 2010. I'm still recovering from this surgery, but getting stronger and faster every day. As for sailing, I grew up in South Louisiana where there isn't much sailing, though I've been intrigued by it my entire life. I tried it out a bit during my senior year of college with the Rice Sailing Team, though honestly 420s aren't really my thing. My interest grew until June 2008 when I bit the bullet and purchased a 1982 Nacra 5.2 catamaran. I used this boat to really learn how to sail, and I haven't looked back since.

So why road bikes and beach catamarans? Well, both of them are tools we can use to augment our capabilities as humans. Efficient road bikes allow us to travel much faster than we can run, and easily cover distances 4 times as great. Catamarans are an excellent technical solution to the engineering challenge of achieving a righting moment to counteract the force of the wind on the sails of a sailboat. Both use high-performance materials and advanced design techniques to achieve maximum efficiency. Both are fast! And cycling allows me to stay in shape, while sailing allows me to relax. Team FSM Racing pays homage to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, in jest, of course, while it provides an outlet for me to enjoy these two sports. This blog will chronicle my cycling and sailing life and times, and also include any other information I think might be relevant or interesting. I'm not quite sure where we'll end up, but in the end it is all about the voyage, right?