Willow Koerber has hit the reset button

WINDHAM, N.Y. — Bent low over her handlebars, Willow Koerber looked intent. She only had to finish one place ahead of Italian mountain biker Eva Lechner to move into second overall on the World Cup.

Five times, the women climbed the dry, dusty trails and work roads that make up Windham Mountain’s World Cup cross-country racecourse. Koerber lost a few seconds each time up the climb. But as one of the top technical riders on the World Cup tour, the petite rider gained time on the descent back to the finish. And she was far ahead of Lechner, who was struggling with mechanical issues.

Koerber crossed the line in sixth. Not her best race this season, but good enough to pull her into second overall on the World Cup — the first time an American has stood on the overall World Cup podium since Alison Dunlap won the series in 2002.

After the race, with her long, curly, blonde hair pulled back and an elaborate rose tattoo on her arm showing under the left sleeve of her cycling jersey, Koerber sat on her trainer at the Subaru-Trek team truck and chatted with her teammates and everyone who stopped by to congratulate her. She seemed content, and this is not a word that frequented her vocabulary in years past.

But 14 months ago, Koerber made major life changes — breaking an engagement and moving to Durango, Colorado — and almost immediately found the consistency in her racing that had eluded her for the past decade.

She ended the 2009 season with a world championship bronze medal and finished three (of six) World Cup races this season in the top three.

"She's always been a strong rider,” says USA Cycling mountain bike and cyclo-cross program director Marc Gullickson. “But with her international successes this season she's emerged not only as one of the strongest American women but also one of the world's best cross-country mountain bikers."

Now with World Championships this coming Saturday at Mont Sainte-Anne, Quebec, she is a favorite to win. But this won’t be the end of the 32-year-old’s career. It’s only the beginning.

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Willow Koerber was born on December 12, 1977 — the oldest of four kids in a family that is both very athletic and strict Seventh Day Adventists.

“It was strict, and I felt guilty and fearful and all those things, and just shut down,” says Koerber of her religious upbringing. “It takes a lot of unraveling to get rid of that stuff.”

A shy, quiet child, Koerber credits sports with helping her cope. She did gymnastics, and played soccer, basketball, and volleyball at the Christian school she attended for a decade in North Carolina.

“I did every sport I could do because I needed to,” she says, adding that the whole family used sports as an outlet. “We all needed that or we would have just exploded.”

When she was 13, she tried cycling. She shared an old road bike with her mom, and she and her two younger brothers “would go torture ourselves,” she says. One of her first rides was a metric century — 100 kilometers or 62.14 miles — with her brother Sam (then 10).

“We thought my Dad would ride with us,” she writes on her website, willowkoerber.com. “But at the start he wrapped an [energy bar] around our top tubes and said, ‘See you guys at the finish!’”

Koerber’s father, Bob, a contractor in Ashville, North Carolina, also competes in mountain biking. Last year, he won the men’s elite 40+ category of the Pisgah Mountain Stage Race, a mountain bike race in North Carolina (Sam won the elite men’s division). In May 2010, Bob and Sam won the Pisgah Mountain Bike Adventure Race, an epic two-person race that took them 8 hours, 17 minutes to complete.

Koerber soon tried mountain biking and at age 15, competed in the junior world championships. In college at the University of North Carolina-Ashville, she won the 1996, 1997, and 1999 collegiate national mountain biking titles.

After graduating from college, she just kept racing. It was part of her identity, and she also landed good sponsors and never had “to do that total on-my-own thing” that many young athletes struggle with. She credits Cane Creek, which designs and manufactures bike components in North Carolina, as being instrumental in her early cycling career.

“One year, they gave me $25,000 and told me to get to the races,” she says. “I’m like sweet!”

In 2004, it looked like she had made it to the next level when she finished third in a World Cup race at Mont Sainte-Anne. But she struggled to maintain consistency from race to race.

By 2007, it looked like she was figuring things out. She placed in the top 10 at four World Cups and was selected by USA Cycling to compete at the Olympic Test Event in Beijing. In January 2008, she was named to the Olympic Long Team, from which two American women would be selected to compete in the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

But in spring 2008, she cratered — physically and mentally. At the season’s first World Cup in Houffalize, Belgium, Koerber charged off the line, took the lead on the first climb, then bonked. She finished the race in 44^th.

Her results did not improve much. She thought she lacked fitness, so she trained harder.

“I was just going down in a spiraling pit of despair and doing all the wrong things,” she realizes now. “I’ve got to work harder because I’ve always been that type of person who is not easy on myself. It’s not the natural way I am. I don’t just brush things off [by saying], ‘Oh, bad day.’ [Instead] I’m like, ‘I’m bad.’”

“In her 2008 season campaign, she had a case of being physically over-trained,” says Subaru-Trek team manager Jon Rourke.

The fatigue threw her off center, both physically and mentally, says Rourke, and she had a hard time dealing with the frustration and disappointment of her poor performances.

“I’ve been over-trained since I was like 11,” Koerber jokes now. “I’m always pushing it. It was my outlet for whatever emotional stress I had going on. I just substituted athleticism for creativity.”

In tears after finishing more World Cups more than 20 minutes behind the winners, she talked to friend Todd Wells, a pro mountain biker with the Specialized team. Was it time to quit, she wondered.

He told her to call his coach, Rick Crawford, who owns Colorado Premier Training in Durango, Colorado.

Under Crawford, Koerber started training less and now knows the less she does, the faster she goes. “It’s hard for me to still believe that,” she says. “Sometimes I have to do the over-training to be like, ‘Right, Willow, you knew that. Relax.’”

Feeling physically and mentally centered again, she was back on the World Cup podium in 2009. But she realized that she had to make “major life changes” if she wanted to stay there.

“She basically needed to hit the reset button,” says Rourke.

She broke off an engagement to freerider Richie Schley, who lives in Whistler, British Columbia, and called Crawford to tell him that she wanted to move to Durango.

“He’s the only person I told because my family, I love ‘em to death, but there are a lot of them, and I just didn’t want to deal with any questions,” Koerber admits. “I didn’t want to go back to North Carolina.”

Rourke says she made the right decision. While her family offers her inspiration and support, they can also over-motivate her.

“They were always pushing her, causing her to be over-trained,” he explains. The whole family rides. So it’s not like, ‘Hey let’s just go for a spin.’ Every day was pretty much race day.”

Crawford found Koerber a place to live in Durango, and she moved there in June 2009.

Over the next three months, she won her first national series race, finished on the podium again at a World Cup, and then took the bronze medal at the 2009 UCI World Mountain Bike Championships.

“Everything magically aligned for me,” she says. “And I needed it. I needed three months of things working out for me and seeing the signs of the universe that I was doing the right thing.”

In those three months, she made other changes too.

Within three weeks of moving to Durango, she started dating Myles Rockwell, the 2000 world champion in downhill (mountain biking). She says being with him is “the best choice I’ve ever made in my life.”

“He just comes from a different place,” Koerber says. “He didn’t grow up with any fear or guilt. He had so much love and so much positive energy flowing to him all the time. That’s just the way he looks at the world. So when he would look at me and tell me that [I’m] actually the best bike rider in the world, I believed him.”

Bob Koerber credits Crawford and Rockwell for helping turn around his daughter’s cycling career.

“[Rick Crawford] learned to understand where she’s at,” says Bob, who was at the Windham World Cup Final leading a group of at least 20 family members, all clad in green “Willow Power” t-shirts. “It’s like the story where someone sees the good and the potential and is able to draw it out.

“And also, Myles has given her a vision of why not her doing well.”

Koerber also switched bikes last July. Rather than riding a traditional mountain bike with 26-inch diameter wheels, she began riding a Gary Fisher Superfly with 29-inch wheels and became the first cyclist to win a world championship medal on a 29er. (Trek purchased Gary Fisher in 1993 and began co-branding the line in June 2010.)

The wider-diameter wheels offer a less chattery ride and roll over rocky, technical sections more easily and efficiently.

Koerber has even named her bikes. One she calls Love, another Salix, which is Latin for willow.

But Koerber is known among cyclists for more than her World Cup results. She has an alter ego as a fem fatale. Over the past decade, she has posed for three provocative calendars, the most recent being Cyclepassion 2011. A video trailer on YouTube gives quick glimpses of Koerber and teammate Heather Irmiger modeling the skimpy outfits shown in the calendar. To date, the video has attracted over 40,000 views.

Even Koerber’s Facebook photo shows a sexy side not seen in mountain biking since the days of Paolo Pezzo, known for racing in gold lame cycling shorts after she won her first of two Olympic gold medals (in 1996 and 2000).

“What can I say, I like to look cute,” Koerber told VeloNews magazine recently. “I’ve had so many insecurities in the past, so many issues with self-doubt. If I can get in front of a camera and be confident, or go out and act sexy, I’m going for it.”

The Gary Fisher company has a history of working with women who market their feminine side (Pezzo raced for Gary Fisher), and Rourke says that Trek has no problem with its athletes pursuing these projects if they do not demean the women or the brand.

“We don’t shy away from that kind of PR if it’s done tastefully,” he says. “It’s a nice reflection of how the girls are hard core mountain bikers yet can have fun too.”

But this week, Koeber is focused solely on her bike. Her goal is to add a rainbow jersey — given to cycling world champions — to her wardrobe. The technical course at Mont Sainte-Anne suits her skills, especially if Hurricane Earl adds some mud to the mix.

Although Koerber isn’t thinking much beyond the world championship race on Saturday, she has no plans to retire.

“I only just now kind of figured it out,” she says. “If I have a race I’m disappointed in, I’m still disappointed. But I’m a lot better than I used to be. It’s not like a total life crisis moment anymore. The thing I wanted to quit was just beating myself up.”

Now she just wants to beat the competition.

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Peggy Shinn is a freelance contributor for teamusa.org. This story was not subject to the approval of the United States Olympic Committee or any National Governing Bodies.