April Laverriere : Biking Mountains

April Laverriere, of Kennebunkport, started competing on her bike after a foot injury sidelined her running career.

It was five degrees when we met, the kind of clear January morning in Biddeford where the light is sharp and the cold doesn’t pretend otherwise. We were inside a small studio near The Lincoln, catching up after a long gap, talking easily in that way that only happens when you’ve known someone since before life got complicated.

April Laverriere and I graduated from Biddeford High School in 1995. We knew each other then in the familiar way you know people at that age—through hallways, seasons, and shared ground. January 29, 2026 morning was the first time in years we’d really sat down and talked.

I’ve always liked seeing Mount Washington from the coast. On a clear day, from places like the Abenakee Trail, it sits about eighty miles to the west, just piercing the horizon enough to remind you it’s there. Growing up, it felt even closer. The local news would cut to Marty on the Mountain, delivering reports from the summit—winds strong enough to knock people over, temperatures that barely made sense, conditions that sounded less like weather and more like a dare.

To most people, those reports were a reason to stay put and watch from a distance.

To people like April, they sound like a challenge. She rides her bike up Mount Washington. Not once. Not as a novelty. She’s done it—or tried to—in summer AND in WINTER, knowing full well that the weather might cancel the race, the mountain might turn her around, or her body might call it before the summit does.

Before the mountain

Long before bikes, April ran. Track and field became her thing in middle school, after trying just about everything else. She played sports with the boys when she could, bumped into the limits of what was allowed in the 80's and 90's, and eventually landed somewhere she could compete on her own terms. By high school, she was running cross country, indoor track, and outdoor track, sometimes training alongside boys because there wasn’t a girls’ team available.

That environment made her better.

She carried that momentum into college at Regis College, where she competed in Division III track and quietly built a résumé that still stands decades later. Several of her school records remain on the books—indoor middle-distance races set in the late 1990s, still untouched. She’ll tell you records are meant to be broken, but there’s pride there too, earned and unembellished.

After college, she kept racing. Corporate track and field nationals took her to Seattle, San Francisco, and Sacramento. Later, while serving on the MECTA board, she helped organize a national meet in Portland that brought 700 athletes to Maine. The logistics mattered. So did creating space for competition to happen at all.

Work, and not taking it too seriously

Her professional life followed a different arc. She started at UNUM, newly married, pregnant, and then navigating single motherhood. Stability mattered. So did showing up.

Marketing found her along the way. At TD Bank, mentors noticed she had a feel for it—campaigns, planning, sponsorships. She managed retail marketing and helped run high-profile partnerships that put her in rooms with professional athletes she’d grown up watching. It was fun. It was demanding. It paid the bills.

From there came IDEXX, then WEX, and eventually LGC, where she’s spent the last several years moving through leadership roles. Along the way, she learned something that stuck.

“Don’t take yourself too seriously,” she said. “And don’t take the job too seriously either.”

Work is important. So is knowing when it’s not the point.

The Pivot

The injury changed things. A torn posterior tib tendon. Surgery that involved cutting and repositioning her heel bone, repairing the tendon, lengthening the Achilles. A cast. A blood clot. Months of physical therapy. A year spent relearning how to walk, then how to trust that foot again.

Running, at least competitively, was off the table.

Biking came from family. Her dad and brother suggested it as something adjacent, something close enough to running to feel familiar. She bought a starter bike and joined group rides without knowing how to shift on hills or ride efficiently in a pack. The first climbs were awkward and intimidating. She didn’t know the gears. She didn’t know the etiquette.

Then she learned.

Southern Maine helped. There’s almost always a group for whatever you’re curious about—running, riding, swimming, writing—and most of them don’t ask for résumés. You just show up. Wednesday nights became a rhythm: a group ride, mostly men, one woman leading, averaging twenty miles an hour or more, trading friendly competition for encouragement and shared suffering. Text threads filled with route ideas and weather checks. Strava segments became small, quiet motivators.

Somewhere in that mix, biking stopped being a substitute and became its own identity.

Once biking became part of her life, the circle around it grew quickly.

Biking brought her back into orbit with people she’d known only in passing before, including Ethan Balistreri, a fellow Biddeford grad she reconnected with on a group ride. Their first date was a trip to a bike shop, which tells you most of what you need to know. Ethan’s daughter, Echo Balistreri, would later hike the entire Appalachian Trail during a gap year, reshaping plans for races like Crank the Kanc but never slowing the momentum.

The Wednesday night rides she looks forward to are led by Tira Denny, a rider April describes simply as “wicked cool,” the kind of leader who makes everyone around her stronger by setting the bar where it belongs.

Off the bike, April talks about places with the same appreciation. She mentions White Door Home Store, where some of her handmade bags have lived, and Elements Books Coffee Beer, a regular stop that blends reading and ritual. She donates books when she’s finished with them, then buys more. The cycle continues.

She also points people toward Back Cove Books, run by her cousin Trevor Laverriere and his wife Becca, another Biddeford connection that found its way back home. Independent bookstores, she says, feel worth rooting for.

None of it is presented as a list.

Just the way things tend to surface when someone has paid attention to the people who helped shape their days.

Her first real push came with Crank the Kanc (https://www.mwvbicyclingclub.org/index.php/special-events/crank-the-kanc), a team hill climb through the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire. The race is long—over twenty miles—and requires teammates to finish together. She rode it first with Ethan Balistreri, her partner, and his daughter Echo. They placed near the top. The following year, Echo was busy hiking the entire Appalachian Trail, so the team adjusted, adding a friend Andrew Roope from their Wednesday night bike rides, and still finished just minutes behind a much younger group.

Back to the mountain

Mount Washington came later. Winter first. Studded tires. Ten degrees. A race that turns riders back at tree line. She remembers thinking it was miserable while noticing she was still pedaling.

The next year ended early—slick conditions, a crash, bruised ribs, a hard decision to turn around, especially after four miles in. Then a summer race that never happened at all, canceled for wind and rain at the summit, months of training reduced to an email and a “thanks for the donation.”

When the race finally went off the following year, the conditions were almost polite. The grade wasn’t. An average of thirteen percent, with stretches pushing into the twenties, and a final pitch that hits twenty-seven percent just below the summit. Cowbells echoed near the top. The weather station came into view when every part of her body was asking why she’d signed up.

She finished first in her age group.

“You want to quit the whole time,” she said. “And then you don’t.”

Apey Lee Designs

Not just one thing

It’s easy to frame April through endurance alone, but she’s never been just one thing. In high school, she sewed—clothes, team bags, anything practical she could figure out how to make. Years later, as a single mom balancing work and parenting, sewing became a side income. Hundreds of bags sold online. Late nights. Weekends. A careful decision about how much time to give before pulling back.

Today, it’s a creative outlet more than a business. Apey Lee’s Designs produces well-made bags with clean lines and durable materials—the kind of objects that quietly earn their place in everyday life. During her recovery year, when training wasn’t possible, she remodeled a dollhouse her grandmother had given her as a child, right down to the wallpaper and furniture. She needed something to work on. Something that kept her hands busy and her mind forward.

Looking West

She and Ethan recently bought a home in Kennebunkport, a place she’d always wanted to live. She talks about it without fanfare, the same way she talks about races and projects—another decision that felt right when it was time.

From the coast, on a clear day, Mount Washington still sits out there to the west, eighty miles away, cutting a small but unmistakable line into the horizon. Most of us notice it, maybe comment on the visibility, and move on.

April notices it too. Then she points her bike toward it and starts riding.

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Many thanks to April for meeting up on January 29th at a Photo Studio in Biddeford, Maine.

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