Life is an endless cycle for these Delray event founders.
If you go
What: Granfondo Garneau Ride
When: March 22
Details: The ride begins at 7 a.m. at Veterans Park (802 N.E. First St.), continuing south to Palmetto Park Road, then north to the Palm Beach Inlet before finishing back at Veterans Park.
Cost: $150 to participate; free to watch
Contact: delraygranfondo.com
For Chelsea Midlarsky (left) and Gina Jenkins, the founders of the Delray Beach Twilight Festival, the magic happens in a small conference room in the back of an office in a nondescript building on Federal Highway, just south of Delray Beach. The room had doubled as a second storage space for excess festival gear when I met Midlarsky, an athletic, 27-year-old corporate headhunter by day. Cycling T-shirts spilled out of boxes, yellow EVENT PARKING signs leaned against walls, and scuffed Powerade igloo coolers formed a totem in a corner. Midlarsky’s energetic dog Cassius—so named because he’s a boxer mix—provided the entertainment as we waited for Jenkins, a 47-year-old fellow cyclist who works for Susan G. Komen, to arrive. “She is notoriously late,”
Midlarsky says, gesturing to my audio recorder. “And you can record that.” Midlarsky kids because she and Jenkins are best friends, meeting in 2010 when Jenkins hired her to work for a sports marketing firm. For the past three years, every March, they’ve run the Twilight Festival, a professional cycling race in Downtown Delray Beach modeled after Georgia’s pioneering Athens Twilight. The 80-minute, .6-mile course is the only such race in Florida, and one of only 12 Twilights in the United States. Midlarsky and Jenkins—who did show up after about 10 minutes, in a Komen-pink Nike top—have the festival operations down to a science, playing off each other’s strengths. Until the weekend of the event, they’re an entirely two-woman operation, and this sometimes entails nights of scant sleep.
Their hard work has paid off. For its inaugural 2012 race, the Twilight Festival drew 5,000 spectators. Police estimates reached 20,000 attendees for its sophomore event, and in 2014, the festival attracted close to 30,000 visitors. As for the number of racers, it doubled from 300 to 600 by its second year, and Midlarsky and Jenkins have since had to cap the total cyclists at 1,000 for logistical purposes.
“The reason the event has continued to be so successful is that we really strive for the details,” Jenkins says. “There are rides every weekend, and not to take anything away from anybody else, but we go the extra step. When you get your goodie bag, it’s going to have extra stuff in it. When you come in the morning, you’re not just going to get a coffee; we have a nice breakfast.
We have music. At the finish line, we went above and beyond with the food and beer. Our goal is to make it VIP. We really try to make you feel like you’re part of something bigger.”
Midlarsky, who is a dedicated but noncompetitive rider, was destined to enter the field in some capacity; her brother Michael is a professional cyclist whose third-place medal in 2010’s Leadville 100 Splits—a grueling, 100-mile mountain-bike race—hangs in the Twilight Festival office. But Midlarsky wanted to ensure that her event wasn’t just for the pros, so in 2013 she added a community event to the end of the festival: The Delray Beach Granfondo (which is Italian for “big ride”), a 100-kilomoter ride which any cyclist can tackle at his or her own pace, surrounded by riders traveling at their speed.
“When we started this, we were a race,” Midlarsky says. “And a lot of people maybe got discouraged that we were all about the racers and not so much about the everyday recreational riders, which is not the case. We want to bring cycling to the forefront. We want to encourage people who have never ridden to come to our ride.”
This won’t be as much of an issue this year; for the first time in four years, there won’t be a Twilight Festival race in 2015. “Everyone loves it,” Midlarsky says, but it’s become too “cost-prohibitive” at this time. She needs an influx of sponsors on board, but she adds that some “people in the cycling community are looking to bring it back in 2016.”
Which just means that she and Jenkins are putting all of their eggs—and wheels, spokes and handlebars—into the basket of the 2015 Delray Granfondo on March 22, where riders who pay the $150 admission fee will receive Jenkins’ aforementioned perks, plus a custom Granfondo jersey, a timing chip, police escorts and wheel support, even complimentary massages (proceeds will benefit the event’s charity, the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center).
And of course they receive the best gift of all—a night or two in Delray Beach.
“Last year, over 200 riders flew in from Canada and stayed in our hotels,” Midlarsky says. “And they’re all going into the restaurants, because our event happens for a couple of hours, and then it disperses. We don’t serve any food, so you have to go into the restaurants and shops.
“I live in Delray, and I love Delray,” she adds. “I want to get the word out about what we have. Our event is something fun for them to do, and then we release them to what I think is the greatest city in the world. Who wouldn’t want to be in Delray Beach?”
