A Little Bitta Fear and A Whole Lotta Bling

By Trina Ortega

Rebecca Rusch thinks we’ve got it too easy.

The pro athlete has learned much about patience, made good friends, and pushed her physical and emotional limits through mountain bike racing. To jazz up others’ lives with a little more thrill, Rusch aims to introduce the sport to more women on her 2011 SRAM Gold Rusch Tour.

“Bike racing has been a powerful experience for me. I’ve made a ton of friends. It’s a good tool for people to push their limits,” Rusch told Mountain Flyer on stop number 3 of the tour—a women’s media camp in Ashland, Ore. “Our lives are a little too easy now. I think people need adventure in their life to stay sane. They need to be scared every once in a while.” 

Rusch—the two-time Leadville Trail 100 Women’s Champion and three-time 24 Hour Solo Mountain Biking World Champion—designed the tour to get women outdoors and on their bicycles.

The tour kicked off in April at the Sea Otter Classic in California, where she and other female pros taught bike-wrenching basics, talked race tactics and mingled. Then she traveled to the Denver area for the Beti Bike Bash, a two-day, women’s only mountain bike expo, 2x10 demo and race. Then, after last week’s Ashland media tour, Rusch was headed home to Ketchum, Idaho, to start the six-week Wheel Girls Mountain Bike Club for middle and high school girls, who will get the chance to interact (either through racing or volunteering) with athletes in the USA Cycling National Championships to be held in Sun Valley this year. Her 2011 tour ends with a media camp at Highbridge Park in New York.

“On a professional level, I’m seeing more and more women on the trail. It’s awesome to get young girls and women of any age excited about the sport. I’m living proof that it’s never too late to learn to ride a bike,” she said.

For the Ashland leg of the tour, Rusch invited six journalists to the southern Oregon hills to mountain bike with her and two other pro racers—Lindsey Voreis and Katie Holden—and race in the Ashland Mountain Challenge gravity events—the Avid Chainless Challenge and the 12-mile Ashland Super D. She brought a fleet of bikes (Specialized Safire pros and comps) and connected with Ashland Bicycle Works to spec out the rigs with SRAM 2x10 X0/X9 gruppos and 2012 Avid brakes.

“A lot of these women are cross-country riders. All of these journalists ride, but this was about getting them a little bit out of their element,” Rusch said. “The whole tour is also about showing guys that women can kick ass, too.”

Rebecca Heaton, editor-in-chief of Women’s Adventure, is the example. The longtime cyclist (both mountain and road) has raced a bit but never in a gravity event. She said she aims to write about her new experience in the downhill world but is taking away more from than riding skills.

“I think you walk away from these experiences learning so much. You learn some new skills but it goes into so many other realms of your life,” Heaton said. “Building this confidence and trying something new just helps you try other things in life, maybe not necessarily athletic. It’s just part of the whole growing process, I guess.”

For Voreis, a cross-country-turned-downhiller, coaching on the Gold Rusch Tour has been another way to share her passion for mountain biking.   

“My goal is to get more women involved with the sport and to support women’s products, and I think this women’s movement is happening really strong right now,” Voreis said. “I really don’t feel like I’m a sponsored athlete I feel like I’m an ambassador for the sport of mountain biking and promoting a passionate lifestyle.”

Voreis, who also helps husband and racer Kirt Voreis run the Specialized AllRide Academy to introduce all disciplines of the sport to kids, says super downhill races like the Ashland Mountain race capture the fun of mountain biking because they’re more grassroots and have a little something to suit every style of riding.

“They’re not super-gnarly pedaling cross-country races that you have to be really, really fit for and they’re not super-scary downhill races where you have to live a little bit on the edge. They’re kind of in between and with that comes even more of a sense of joy and freedom—what we all look for when we ride our bikes,” she said.

It’s true. Billed as one of the longest super downhill courses in the nation, the Ashland race starts at the top of the ski hill, 7,500 feet high in the Siskiyou Mountains, bombs down nearly three miles of the Upper Bull Gap fire road pocked with a couple of deep washouts before dumping you onto singletrack and the only significant climb—800 feet—where cross-country superstars like Rebecca “Queen of Pain” Rusch make up time. She placed fourth among the pro women with a time of 42:21. (Kelli Emmett won the women’s pro field, and Adam Craig took the men’s pro category. See the full results here.)

The route then follows a second, narrower fire road where you can really let it rip through the sweeping, banked turns before hitting more singletrack and entering a shady evergreen forest that contours through a fantasyland of dense ferns, moss-covered trees, and other lush foliage. Some tight, s-curves connect you to the Alice in Wonderland Trail before descending the dusty rabbit hole gapped with several kickers to the finish. It ends at the verdant Lithia Park, which locals consider the Central Park of Ashland. The course will leave you grinning like the Chesire Cat.

These women do not need fictional characters to spice up their lives, however. They have their bikes and a sense of play. Voreis was immensely amused, for instance, when the boy sitting next to her on one shuttle ride asked, “Is Lindsey Voreis going to be here? I heard she has rock-hard tits.” (Coincidentally, the self-described flat-chested chick had stuffed the breasts of her neon pink and yellow racing leotard/costume with knee pads, and her knockers were pretty solid that day.) But it required more cool at the end of the shuttle ride when she wished the boy well, and he replied: “Thanks, Ma’am.”

The women were the liveliest bunch to show up for the three-mile Avid Chainless Challenge the day before. Just because they were dolled up in sparkling, colorful prom dresses didn’t mean they could not—in Rusch’s words—kick ass.

Pan Am Champion Katie Holden took the top spot on the podium, sporting a poofy, black strapless dress with white polka dots. The group took to calling her Minnie Mouse, and she posted a time even the men envied (5:19:86).

When it comes down to sharing riding tips, race day tactics, and life lessons gained from mountain biking, these women keep their spunk but also take it seriously.

While working on jamming over logs, taking hits and jumping, Voreis advised the women to ride like Katie Holden. “No one controls the bike better than Katie. Get aggressive, manhandle that bitch.”

After the Super D, Rusch also shared some pointers with Voreis and the other women about how to push physical limits but not overdo it to the point where you can’t recover.

Life lessons came in different forms. In one extraordinary case, Voreis approached an arrogant junior racer to school him about his lack of etiquette on the start line of the Super D. Earlier that day, he had snarled at the pro woman ahead of him: “When I catch you, you better get out of my way.”

The boy was fast; he did pass the woman and clocked a time of 37:41 on the course.

But as both Voreis and Rusch express in word and action, there’s more to being an athlete than being on the podium.

“There’s a huge responsibility when you’re wearing a company’s brand or logo. You’re representing that company. With that comes the responsibility of respecting the brand, being conscientious of how you present yourself and how you treat others around you,” Voreis said.

It was a privilege to see these pros at work practicing what they preach, and it was reassuring to see that even these women, who crush it on the trail, lean on each other for advice: asking how much pressure to run in their shocks, complimenting on each other’s strengths, and pumping one another for race strategies. They are just people, after all.  

People who know that initiatives like the Gold Rusch Tour and the AllRide Academy contribute to a larger goal: growing the sport of mountain biking.

It took Holden breaking her arm in competition to recognize that the world won’t end if she doesn’t win a race. “At the time I was pretty devastated, but I can look back now and say that it was one of the best things to happen to me because I’ve had tunnel vision about downhill for a long time. I was able to step back and get a better perspective of what I wanted to do [long term] in the mountain biking industry,” Holden said.

So last year she developed the program Love to Ride, supported by Specialized, in which she travels the country helping female cyclists get to know their local trails and connecting them with other women who love to ride in their communities. She’s carved a niche for herself with a program that capitalizes on her expertise, gets people psyched about riding and still allows her to compete.   

As for the Queen of Pain, she may be a little softer than her nickname implies. Her sponsors love what she’s doing; fellow athletes want in on her tour; women are feeling empowered; and people’s lives are changing.

Being scared has never been so fun.

2011 ASHLAND MOUNTAIN CHALLENGE RESULTS

Super D race, June 18

Pro Women - Kelli Emmett 38:48

Women 19-34 - Jennifer Bosler 43:54

Women 35+ - Maria Pastore 44:02

Pro Men - Adam Craig, 33:58

Cat 1 men 19-39 - Luke Mason 37:18

Cat 1 40-54 men - Adam Snyder 35:40

Cat 2 19-39 - Bevan Jones, 40:01

Cat 2 40-54 - Craig Burnett, 43:05

Masters 55+ - Tony Lucchesi 53:58

Junior men 13-18 - Max Houtzager 37:41

Avid Chainless Challenge, June 17

Pro women - Katie Holden 5:19

Pro men - Peter Lucas 4:38

Amateur women - Melodie Buell 5:43

Amateur men - Devon Lyons 4:35

Junior men - Max Houtzager 5:02