Jec Ballou Wins Division In Nat'l Bike Race
By M. D. Drysdale

Brookfield native Jec Ballou takes the center platform after winning her division in women's mountain biking at Mt. Snow last Saturday. Jec was in the Beginner division, but this was the National Championship, so as far as The Herald is concerned, she's a national champion.

A dozen years after she helped the Randolph Union High School girls basketball team win a state championship, Jec Ballou stood again in the winners' circle last weekend.

This time the sport was mountain bike racing, and the venue was the National Mountain Bike championships, held at Mt. Snow in southern Vermont.

Ballou, who now lives in California and only started racing last winter, entered the Beginner Cross Country race and finished in first place in her age division, 19-29. She completed the race in two hours, 23 minutes, according to her father, Charles Ballou of Brookfield.

Even qualifying for the race is difficult, and Jec didn't expect much going into it, according to a friend, Courtney Isham, who traveled to Mt. Snow.

"Jec was feeling at a bit of a disadvantage as many of the other racers had more expensive bikes," she said. "When I talked with her after the race, she seemed totally surprised that she won! She said that her chain fell off a couple of times and she even had a few tumbles off of her bike, but she still won!

"The race was all-terain, so she was going through mud from all of the recent rain, over exposed tree roots along with large rocks."

Mount Snow has built its mountain biking program into the biggest one in the East- and in fact the championship race has been held in the West for the last 10 years, before the Vermont resort lured it here. The course is considered one of the most difficult in the country. It extends for 5.5 miles, beginning with the longest cross-country uphill in the world.

Racers in the Beginner division must do the course twice, for an 11-mile total. The next division up, the Sports division, requires three laps, and the Professional division racers bike the course four times.

If she qualifies for the Nationals next year, Ballou will be riding 16.5 miles. In winning the Beginner division, she will be required to move up to Sports.

Basketball Star

Ballou was known as an intense and talented athlete in high school, but she found that college basketball took too much of her time when she went to Smith College, and so she stopped competing in that sport.

For the last several years she has lived in Soquel, Cal., where she teaches dressage and trains horses.

Her father said that about midwinter, she decided she was working too hard and needed another activity as a release.

"She needed a goal, and she decided the goal would be to enter a mountain bike race," he said. He gave her quest a boost by buying her a competive bike. Even though it was not up to par with most of the bikes at the Nationals, it was still much better than the one she had, he said.

Ballou entered her first race near her home in California- and won her division.

"That was it. She was excited and hooked," her father said.

Since then she has entered several other races. She won one other higher-profile race, a performance which qualified her to be in the National Championships last weekend.

Qualifying next year will be more difficult. She will be in a higher age bracket- 29 to 39- but will race in the Sports division. She'll have to trim 20 minutes off her time to be invited back to Mt. Snow, Charles Ballou estimated.

He said that some of the women are faster on the downhill than Jec is (perhaps because of better suspension systems), but that she beats them when there are hills to climb.

Reminds me of another bike rider. Guy named Lance Armstrong.