Ned Overend Shares Tips for Endurance, Why Durango MTB Culture is so Strong
Singletracks Mountain Bike Podcast
Singletracks.com
4.7 • 574 Ratings
🗓️ 26 September 2022
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ned Overend is a mountain bike Hall of Famer and highly accomplished racer, winning the first ever UCI mountain bike World championship in 1990, the XTERRA world champion in 1998 and 1999, and the UCI Masters World Cyclocross Champion in 2012. Today he’s the Specialized XC mountain bike Team Captain and lives in Durango, Colorado.
In this episode we ask:
- How did you end up settling in tiny, out-of-the-way Durango?
- When did you first hear the term “mountain biking”? What was your initial impression of the sport?
- How do you train for bicycle hill climb races? What are the keys to building endurance in general? Do genetics help?
- Does fat bike racing require a specialized skill set, or is it pretty similar to XC racing?
- Tell us a bit about the local cycling community in Durango. How has it grown and changed over the years?
- What was it like last year seeing hometown rider Christopher Blevins become the first American to win a WC mountain bike race since 1994? What are some of your fondest mountain bike racing memories?
- Tell us about the Test Track in Durango, an area that’s now known as Overend Mountain Park. Did you help build the original trails there?
- What were some of the innovations tested on the trails?
- You appeared in one of the first mountain bike videos ever, in 1988. Do you think it’s even possible for a video to fully express what it’s like to ride?
- What’s been the biggest innovation in mountain bike equipment over the years?
- Do you have a favorite trail in Durango?
Find out more about Durango's Spoketober festival at durango.org/spoketober.
✏️ A written transcript of this conversation is available at singletracks.com.
--Keep up with the latest in mountain biking at Singletracks.com and on Instagram @singletracks
Transcript
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| 0:30.3 | Hey everybody, welcome to the single tracks podcast. My name is Jeff and today my guest is Ned Overend. |
| 0:36.6 | Ned is a mountain bike Hall of Famer and highly |
| 0:39.7 | accomplished racer winning the first ever UCI Mountain Bike World Championship in 1990, |
| 0:46.2 | the XTERA World Championship in 1998 and 99, and also the UCI Masters World Cycle |
| 0:53.7 | Cross Championship in 2012. |
| 0:56.0 | Today he's the specialized cross-country mountain bike team captain and lives in Durango, Colorado. |
| 1:03.0 | Thanks for joining us, Ned. |
| 1:05.0 | Yeah, great to be here. |
| 1:07.0 | So I read that growing up you lived in several countries all around the world. |
| 1:13.2 | How did you end up settling in tiny out of the way Durango? |
| 1:17.2 | Well, my dad worked for the State Department. |
| 1:20.2 | So I was born in Taiwan. |
| 1:23.2 | And in between these trips to different countries, we would live in Bethesda, Maryland, |
| 1:30.8 | because it was close to Washington, D.C., the headquarters for the State Department, |
| 1:35.3 | and it would be in Maryland for a couple years, and then we'd go for three or four years overseas. |
| 1:40.2 | And we lived in Tehran, pretty interesting. |
| 1:48.3 | And we also lived in Ethiopia for three and a half years. |
| 2:01.8 | Wow. And also something that we would do is, you know, that you get a couple months R&R, they call it, when you work with the government overseas. And during these couple of months, my parents would take the whole family, and there were six of us, six kids, and they would travel to some |
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