Ageless Wonder:
Will Ned Overend Ever Slow Down?
Not if he Adds Adventure Racing to his Busy Schedule.
Ned Overend needs more time. He’s at GardaFest, a booming mountain bike festival in the beautiful resort town of Lago di Garda in north central Italy, but can hardly stop to enjoy the view, because he’s too damn busy. He’s got over-eager European dealers to entertain, product design meetings to attend and fan autographs to sign. And somewhere in there he’s got to line up at the start of the 80-kilometer Xenofit Marathon mountain bike race, against top European riders like Roel Paulissen and Christoph Sauser, who are just starting their seasons, fresh off of a spring of undistracted training.
Not Ned
He’s running on his legendarily slim training schedule, a 15-hour-a-week regimen that must incorporate riding, running and swimming for his triathlon racing. How the hell is a guy supposed to compete, head to head, with pro riders 20 years younger than he is, when he’s trying to cut his lap time in the local pool and still pick up his 12-year-old son, Rhyler, from school at a quarter to three?
It wasn’t supposed to be like this, really. When he retired from full-time professional mountain bike racing, that would mean he’d have more time. More time to get out, more time for family, and most of all, more time to ride — to enjoy his favorite thing in the whole world. But for Ned Overend, elite cross country racer, PR maven, ace product developer, off-road triathlete and mountain bike celebrity, there is never enough time. Not that it shows.
Overend “retired” from full-time professional mountain bike racing after the 1996 season at age 41. But mountain biking’s perpetual motion man couldn’t sit still for long and soon was showing up at the burgeoning Xterra off-road triathlon series. In 1998, he won the series championship, beating guys 15 years his junior, and, with a target on his back, defended it the next season.
He’ll be 48 this August, and while he can still make the podiums if he trains hard (he was the national champion in the Xterra USA Championship last year, beaten only by full-time pros Conrad Stoltz from South Africa and Canada’s Mike Vine), the demands of his increasingly divergent life, coupled with an impending age that not even a guy with the nickname “The Lung” can stave off, are starting to take their toll.
So in the face of all these demands, and because his longtime sponsor/employer, Specialized Bicycles, seems unable to invent a suspension design that adds more hours to the day, Ned Overend is gonna have to make some pretty tough choices: like which new kinds of racing he can add to the mix.
Travelin’ Man
While most of us know Overend through his stunning career as one of the trailblazers of professional mountain bike racing (he was the sport’s first real world champion), he is perhaps the original peripatetic, outdoor Renaissance man.
Ned was born in Taiwan, where his father was based as a U.S. State Department employee working with USAid. From there, Overend and his family bounced around to a variety of exotic locales based on his father’s assignments; he learned to walk and talk in mid-Shah-era Iran and attended elementary school in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He recalls busing to school in Ethiopia, past a town square where criminals were routinely hanged and left as warnings.
When the family returned to the U.S. in the late 1960s, Overend was entering the seventh grade. First living in Maryland and then the San Francisco Bay Area, Overend settled down long enough to get involved with his first sport, running, which ideally suited his small frame.
Not able to shake the transitory lifestyle, Overend graduated from high school but then bounced from one college to another, never staying long and always choosing a new one based on its proximity to the various outdoor activities he enjoyed, especially running and rock climbing. “I wasn’t really pursuing a serious education,” he says, adding that he took mostly welding and mechanical classes, fueled by an interest in off-road motorcycling, but also dabbled in geography and physical education.
He and his wife, Pam, finally settled in Durango, Colorado, where he began working as an auto mechanic to fuel his amateur athletic goals. He placed well in various trail runs but a recurring hip injury forced him onto a road bike, where he discovered another sport at which he was preternaturally gifted.
In one year of racing he jumped from Category 4, for beginners, to Category 1. The next season, 1983, Overend raced the prestigious Coors Classic with the TI-Raleigh team alongside Andy Hampsten, who would five years later become the only American ever to win the Tour of Italy.
Buoyed by his racing experiences on the road but desiring a less-hectic life and travel schedule, Overend began to experiment again, in the fledgling sport of mountain biking. He won his first race on the strength of road fitness and motorcycle handling and promptly switched over. Although he had great success, he would not turn pro until 1986, when he won his first of six national titles (see sidebar).
His crowning moment will forever be winning the first World Mountain Bike Championship in 1990 in his hometown of Durango. Despite his success, Overend’s mountain bike career ended on something of a down note when he failed to make the U.S. team for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. “If I had one regret from my career, it’s that I didn’t go to the Olympics,” he says. He “retired” from mountain biking after that season, although he had just started to excel in the Xterra tri series.
Still Going
“Ned Overend will never stop,” laughs Mike Kloser, a longtime competitor with Overend on the pro mountain bike circuit who has also moved into different sports, in his case, adventure racing.
Ned did Xterra off-road triathlons, gaining a rep as a guy who was unbeatable on the bike but terribly vulnerable in the swim. As Xterra is designed to cater to the strong mountain biker, Overend’s riding talent and willingness to work on his swimming paid off. After placing third and second respectively in 1996 and 1997, he went on to win the overall Xterra World Championship 1998 and 1999 and was the points series winner in 2024.
But the same forces that convinced him to leave full-time pro mountain biking were starting to arrive in Xterra. “I could not win against the Euros,” he says of his decision to quit mountain bike racing. Similarly, Ned sees his time as Xterra champ coming to an end and plans to race in only a handful of the off-road tri series races this year.
At 47, Overend’s anaerobic threshold, or the rate of exertion at which his muscles produce lactic acid faster than the body can process and flush it, is declining; it sits at just 164 beats per minute. By contrast, AT for most highly trained elite male athletes is around 180 bpm. It’s just one of the unstoppable effects of age that even Overend cannot beat.
His VO2 Max, a measure of how much oxygen the body can use, is decreasing as well, at a rate of perhaps two percent a year. Contrary to the legend and his pulmonic nickname, Overend is not a physiological freak, at least in terms of lab numbers. One off-season test in his mid-20s showed his VO2 Max to be just 57ml/kg/min, or about the same as a highly-trained elite female athlete. (In his defense, a test during high season would likely have yielded a 5ml/kg/min boost, on par with many pro male mountain bikers, but still not on the astounding order of cyclist Lance Armstrong’s 83.8 score a few years ago or trail runner Matt Carpenter’s 90.2.)
Overend’s schedule has become packed with non-racing responsibilities. He has been a payroll employee of longtime sponsor Specialized since 1992, and his duties now are as much related to product development and public relations as to his abilities on a race course, of whatever kind.
“Ned is involved the development of almost every product we make,” says Brandon Sloan, a suspension engineer who helped pioneer the company’s breakthrough Epic mountain bike series. Whether fine-tuning a suspension design or greeting dealers, Overend has a seemingly tireless energy and complete lack of ego, which resonates with age-group racers and fans, who universally admire and are inspired by him.
He started teaching Xterra U’s mountain bike clinic in 1999 and has easily been the series’ most popular speaker. “I could advertise ‘Ned Overend will fart at 11pm’ and 60 people would show up,” says Xterra founder Dave Nicholas.
Overend’s work ethic is legendary. “We actually have to be careful not to give him too much to do,” says Specialized founder Mike Sinyard, “because he wants to do a great job on everything; it’s easy to overburden him.”
A look at Ned’s schedule for this summer reveals exactly how overburdened. After starting the Firecracker 50 mountain bike race on July 4 in Breckenridge, Colorado, he goes immediately to Morgan Hill, California (where Specialized is headquartered) for a 10-day visit that includes press launches of the 2024 line, an executive meeting on ’05 products, and a photo shoot for the catalog. “Then I fly to Europe for the Friedrichschafen, Germany bike show,” he says. “I hate going all the way to Europe for just a show, so I’ll try to do a bike marathon too.”
After that, it’s back to Specialized headquarters in early August, followed by a trip to San Diego for the Muddy Buddy duathlon, the NORBA NCS finals in Durango in the middle of the month, the Denver Muddy Buddy on August 24, and maybe even the Masters World Mountain Bike Championships at the end of the month. “I haven’t committed yet, but it’s on my schedule,” he says.
The only problem with all of that is that it keeps him from racing as much as he likes. And when he does race, he can’t do as well as he wants. After 30 years of competition, Overend knows his abilities; he knows his own body so well that he’s never had a coach and uses a heart-rate monitor on only one workout, a hill-repeat series where he must maintain an exact percentage of his AT. With the ability to train full-time, he says, he could still be competitive at the highest levels.
In the next breath, he refuses to use age and lack of time to train as a crutch to explain sub-par results (which, for Ned, is generally anything outside the top five). “I could relax and say, ‘I’m doing good for a guy who’s 47-, 48-years-old.’ But at that time you won’t make the podium because you won’t suffer to hang on to that (3rd) spot, or suffer hard enough in training to be that good.”
At a Crossroads
But clearly it frustrates him, not least because it leaves him without a real category in which to feed his deeply ingrained competitive impulses. He can kill himself to compete against guys who were in diapers when he graduated high school, and who pursue undistracted training regimens as full-time pro athletes. Or he can beat up on the 45+ age-groupers who have similar demands in their professions and family lives but don’t have the benefit of three decades of elite-level competition behind them. It’s not an enticing decision, so for this year he’ll continue racing as a pro in significantly fewer the Xterra series races.
But of course he’s not retiring. Ned Overend will never, really and truly, retire. All this talk of age just brings up one of the few sports where 40-somethings are not only competitive, but dominant: adventure racing. It’s something Ned seriously considers; something he knows, at heart, that he could succeed at, but something he’s cautious about entering because he is so competitive, so focused.
His good friend Kloser, at 43 a three-time Eco-Challenge winner and on of one of the best teams in the sport, says Ned’s long career in a variety of sports and his balance between physical prowess and emotional stability give him the perfect background for a future career as an adventure racer.
“Older athletes know how to train, recover, repeat; it’s knowing you have to get up the next day and do it all over again,” Kloser says. “When you get older, the experience of everyday life makes us better able to adapt to the pressures of adventure racing. You don’t speak off the cuff; you’re less impulsive. You contribute to team unity and morale.”
Although he’s likely to make his foray into adventure racing this year, he says races like the Eco-Challenge don’t interest him, at least not right now. He’s more fond of events like the Mild Seven Outdoor Quest, “where each day is a stage, and you’re not racing at night.”
But he knows there are skills he lacks — especially kayaking — and worries about his eager-to-please attitude getting him in trouble. “Because you’re in a team situation, it’s easy to go too hard (and end up fatigued),” he says.
So in the meantime, he’s going to do more distance mountain biking and training in sports like paddling. There’s a 24-hour mountain bike race in England that he’ll do on a Specialized dealer’s team, and he wants to hook up with other members of the company’s mountain bike team for similar events here in the U.S. And there’s a most un-Ned-like entry into BMX racing alongside his son, Rhyler.
And speaking of that to-do list, he’s got to call Specialized’s tire guru, Al Clark, about a new tread design and make some travel arrangements. There are two hours of e-mails to answer, parent-teacher conferences to attend. His daughter’s about to go off to college, and his long-suffering wife, Pam, deserves some time too.
There is never enough time for Ned Overend, but he’s found one temporary solution to the problem: he can at least be fast. That 80k marathon event at Garda? He won his class, finishing third overall out of more than 500 entrants and on a similar pace to several World Cup racers who entered the shorter, 40k Ronda Piccola.
Ned Overend will never really slow down. He’ll just find new ways to occupy himself, new venues and racing formats to explore, new means to inspire people. It is, after three decades spent constantly in motion, the only thing he can do. Maybe, if he rides fast enough, he can find the time to do it all.
Joe Lindsey writes about cycling for several magazines, including Outside and Bicycling. He wrote a story about Montezuma's Revenge 24-hour race in the June issue of Adventure Sports.
