We had a get together in conjunction with Specialized, where long time Specialized ambassador and all round legend Ned Overend sat down on the Singletrack sofa to answer questions submitted by the audience. The whole session was broadcast live on Facebook, and you can watch it here or scroll to the bottom to see the video in full. However, for the impatient among you, we thought we’d pick out a few quotes from the evening.
On getting older:
“I got older one day at a time, right – you get older slowly…It’s not like next week you say ‘I’m older now, I got to change my training strategy because I’m older now'”
On training:
“You don’t get better from training hard. Your body improves when you train hard, and then it rests, and then it builds itself back up stronger from the hard effort. It’s not hard effort, hard effort, hard effort…you need the recovery”.
On racing with friction shifters:
“Fortunately we didn’t have many gears on the back, so the spacing was kind of big!”
On his old bikes:
“It’s frightening how narrow those handlebars are, I can’t ride a bike with bars that narrow!”
On his favourite bike of all time:
“There’s bikes that have memories attached to them,but really right now is a great time to be involved in the sport of mountain biking. The bikes are so capable.”
On forgetting to unlock your fork for a descent:
“As you ride hard, you become stupid.”
On trying new technology:
“You’ve got to have an open mind towards testing, you can’t just fall down in one situation and say well, that fork is garbage.”
On ebikes on trails:
“It’s mountain bikers who are saying ‘we don’t want those bikes on our trails’ … and to me it reminds me of the early days of mountain biking when the hikers said ‘we don’t want those mountain bikes on our trails”
On pedal assist:
“If you can imagine, there are people who actually don’t like to suffer! I don’t understand it personally! But there’s a lot of them out there, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing that they’re involved in mountain biking.”
On what he’s going to do next:
“I’m going to keep it a secret until I’ve won the Nationals!”
On American politics:
“Wouldn’t it be incredible to go from Barack Obama as Us President – a liberal, Afro-american – to Donald Trump. It’s frightening. And it’s a little embarrassing.”
On having a Yorkshire pudding described to him:
“Oh yeah, that sounds good.”
On nutrition:
“Butter is the new broccoli.”
On Gary Fisher:
“He went from bizarre to even more bizarre! I love Gary. That guy knew about 29ers before we did, for sure.”
There are many more pearls of wit and wisdom that benefit from the full context of the discussion. Watch the video here below and hear about Gary Fisher’s civilised approach to 24 hour racing, the races on Ned’s bucket list, where he thinks XC racing is heading, what happened with his first ride on a suspension fork, and much, much more.
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This doesn’t help the feeling of guttedness* at being forced to miss this at the last minute:-(
*not a word.
Sound quality leaves a lot to be desired I’m afraid…