Endurance

Out to Stud?
Ned Overend's career may be through, but he's not done kicking butt

By Andrew Tilin

"Retiring," declares Ned Overend, as though trying out a new word, "doesn't mean I've actually retired." What it does mean, apparently, is that one of the most decorated riders in mountain biking is taking a highly unorthodox approach to what should be his leisure years. Last October, two autumns after hanging up his spandex shorts, Overend, 43, whimsically flung himself into the Xterra Championship triathlon in Maui, a 25-mile off-road event that is traditionally dominated by an elite corps of veterans such as Peter Reid, Mike Pigg, and Scott Tinley. Upon blundering from the one-mile open-water swim in 43d place, however, Overend hammered his dual-suspension rig so swiftly across the 18-mile bike course that he whisked past Reid (who had won the Hawaii Ironman earlier the same month), thrashed Pigg (the defending Xterra champion), and left a flabbergasted Tinley choking on his dust. At which point Overend's adrenaline apparently kicked in, enabling him to polish off the six-mile trail run in such short order that he broke the winner's tape four minutes in front of his nearest rival. "Ned is a physiological freak," jests Tinley. "And just like every other competitor he's stomped, I hate him for it."

In truth, the sentiment that Tinley & Co. invariably express about Overend is a bewildered sense of reverence for a man who, at an age when most of his peers are frantically ringing up career counselors, seems intent on qualifying as the endurance world's greatest mutating athlete. During a 20-year career in which he captured six American and three world cross-country mountain-bike titles, Overend sampled enthusiastically from a smorgasbord of other sports: placing among the top 25 in the 1980 Hawaii Ironman, racking up two second places at the Pikes Peak marathon in 1980 and 1981, and winning the title of Colorado's best road rider in 1985. "Ned could take on any number of pursuits," notes Steve Johnson, a sports scientist for USA Cycling. "Who knows how good he could get?"

It's a question Overend will continue to probe later this month at the 52-kilometer Birkebeiner cross-country ski race in Hayward, Wisconsin — an event whose notoriously grueling demands seem somewhat at odds with Overend's traditionally skimpy workouts. He has never had a coach, seldom uses a heart-rate monitor, and trains a scant 15 hours a week. Couch potatoes, however, take note: Overend completes his interval workouts in the 7,500-foot mountains outside his home in Durango, Colorado, at brutal race-day intensities — preparation that could well enable him to teach Birkebeiner skiers half his age the same lesson he administered to Reid, Pigg, and Tinley. "It wouldn't be a bad way to attract sponsorship," he says with waggish self-deprecation. "Maybe Geritol will take notice."

Photograph by Eric Swanson