Tyler West

Tyler West played many sports growing up. Little did he know that picking up running during high school would lead to such a deep passion for endurance sports. Running was introduced to Tyler by his mother; they ran up to 5K’s together, and she was stronger than him at the start of this journey. While continuing to run during high school as a hobby, Tyler's main focus was on football. However, as his running volume increased he lost interest in football. During his senior year of high school Tyler made the decision to quit football after two-a-days pre-season practice, and joined cross country late. Shortly after his fist JV race, Tyler moved up to the Varsity team where he ran for the entire season.

After graduating high school, he attended UW-Stout and pursued a B.S degree in Packaging. During his freshman year of college, Tyler had one goal, and that was preparing for Grandma’s marathon in June of 2013. After running a 2:55:46 marathon, he had qualified for the Boston marathon, and that was the next goal. During his preparation for Boston’s marathon, Tyler experienced a stress fracture in his left arch which would quickly end his running career and goal to run Boston. During his time of recovery (2014-2016) Tyler focused mainly on weight lighting with small amounts of running.

In August 2016, he purchased his first bike which was a 2017 Giant TCR advanced 2 (which he still rides to this day). From 2016-2018, Tyler mainly focused on tempo riding with some friends he met at college and utilized Zwift casually during the cold seasons. The Tour de Zwift of 2019 would introduce racing to him, and he became addicted to Zwift racing. Being a morning person, the Morning Grind P/B DIRT & Indoor Specialist series was perfect. During this time, Tyler would become friends with many of the Indoor Specialist riders, and joined the team early in 2019. Unfortunately Tyler experienced a knee injury in July of 2019 and made the decision to leave Indoor Specialist. While riding on and off from 2019-2020 his knee slowly healed, and started training hard again around April 2020.

With July of 2019 being his last Zwift race, he felt confident in his fitness and started racing again in January 2021. He was given the greatest opportunity to rejoin STPC (the indoor specialist family). Outside of biking, Tyler enjoys playing video games on PC, the outdoors, and spending time with family. He also works as a Packaging Engineer in the food industry for a CPG (consumer packaged goods) company. 

Interesting facts about Tyler:

• Grew up enjoying hockey, football, cross country, skateboarding, and freestyle snowboarding (on a competition team)

• Has 1 brother and 4 sisters 

• Heavily enjoys coffee (Red eye’s being his favorite)

• Didn’t know about Zwift racing until 2019

• Probably still trying to figure out the Zwift draft 🤣

• Has perfected the art of thinly slicing bananas 

• 🍦

• Called Westy (Yes i am the real Westy)  more than Tyler West