Double Life, Single Speed

By Sam Mcmanis
The Sacramento Bee

E-Mail

Comments (0)

Text Size:

tool goes here

Papers cover much of Linda Eckhart's desk, albeit in meticulously arranged piles. She bears down, inputting figures, pecking away at her keyboard, occasionally swiveling to consult with a colleague via speakerphone.

"Let me just finish this and I'll be right with you," she says, head buried in facts and figures.

Her blond hair pulled into a prim ponytail, Eckhart, 41, fits the template of a certified public accountant. Most weekdays find her at the engineering consulting firm Holdrege & Kull in Nevada City, the only bits of personality in her office an old-school tin Snoopy lunchbox and a Wonder Woman action figure.

CLICK FOR MORE PHOTOS

Get this woman outdoors, however, and she transforms into something of an action figure herself. The Auburn resident is an elite single-speed mountain bike racer, fearlessly flying down rocky paths and cruising up quad-burning ascents, often beating riders on conventional bikes that offer the luxury of shifting to higher or lower gears.

A two-time winner of the Single Speed World Championship who recently took first place overall in the Tahoe-Sierra 100-mile Mountain Bike Race, Eckhart has an efficient yet laid-back business demeanor that masks a burning competitiveness, in a quirky, fringe bike-racing culture that includes cross-dressing and in-race beer refueling.

"She's an animal out there," says Brad Cole, a top male single-speed racer and fellow rider on Eckhart's three-member Dirt City racing team, based in Folsom. "She's one of a kind."

When asked about her two personas, placid accountant vs. fierce bike racer, Eckhart smiles and waves her arms before the piles of printouts on her desk.

"This is probably why I ride single-speed," she says. "Gotta cut loose a little bit."

Single-speed mountain biking and its cousin, single-speed cyclocross, a sport that uses a road bike over off-road terrain, have provided that outlet for Eckhart since she first hopped aboard one of the modified cycles 10 years ago.

Back then, the single-speed and more urban, hip "fixed gear" craze had yet to extend much beyond bike messengers in New York and San Francisco. (The difference between single-speed and fixed gear is that single-speeders feature a hub that lets riders choose a specific gear before a race.)

Eckhart was then just another middle-of-the-pack conventional downhill mountain biker. She had been using a sturdy, full-suspension bike that provided ample stability and shock absorption, but not the stripped-down speed she craved. It was too confining, too cumbersome, too much like getting buried under paperwork.

"It's the simplicity and functionality that I like," Eckhart says. "And to me, the conventional bike was harder. I started riding with a team in Folsom that had single-speeders, and I couldn't keep up. I thought, 'Man, I gotta get one of those.' "

Eckhart's single-speed bike weighs about 24 pounds, considerably less than most conventional mountain bikes. When she first sat astride a single-speed, she felt unfettered.

"My fitness improved, my speed improved, and I just loved everything about it," says Eckhart.

She lives with longtime boyfriend Lou Turold, who also has taken up single-speed riding.

So why do many say single-speed bikes are more difficult to ride than geared bikes? "A conventional bike absorbs all the terrain," Eckhart says. "It gets transferred into the shock system of the bike. You can take a line straight down and may not have to worry about that 6-inch rock.

"When you're on a single-speed that either has no suspension or just front suspension, you gotta pick your line."