Masters riders at the mountain bike national championships displayed their toughness again and again

Jane Finsterwald, helmeted and geared up in what could be called mountain biking armor, waited for the start of her own race in the USA Cycling Mountain Bike National Championships, which were held in July at Mt. Snow in Vermont. As she waited, she watched the bikers coming down the hill and suddenly backed out of line a bit. "Go Cupcake, go," she yelled to one of the riders as he approached a dip at the bottom of the hill, turned sharply right and raced on.

Cupcake?

In a sport where athletes ride up and down mountains -- rocky and unforgiving mountains -- risking bike and limb? At a championship where the son of one Masters rider flipped over the handlebars on a nasty downhill race and headed home to California with a broken collarbone as souvenir? And where word was that the day before, a 50-something rider on another downhill course that was supposed to be more tame, broke his femur and it took about an hour to extricate him because he was wedged in the rocks?

Cupcake? Finsterwald smiled. "Our little condo saying this weekend is, 'Cowboy up, Cupcake,' " she said.

Seems one of the folks with Finsterwald and her Colorado buddies -- she's lives in Basalt, Colo. -- was passing on a line from a coach he knew. This coach apparently had a bunch of young ski racers looking down a nasty ski slope in Alaska one day and some were a little, well, reluctant, to tackle the task at hand. "Cowboy up, Cupcake," the coach said.

The message fit as well in Vermont with bike racers from Colorado who were looking at unfamiliar and tough terrain as well as it fit in Alaska. All sorts of Cowboying up went on at Mt. Snow.

Charlie Beristain, 70, of West Hartford, Conn., cowboyed up. He wasn't particularly happy with his time of just over two hours over about 12 miles in the grueling cross country event, because it was well off the time he had turned in two years ago. But the better time, he conceded, was over a less muddy course.

Beristain, who started cycling at 60 and racing only in 2003, was thrilled that his best was good enough to beat the other half-dozen competitors in the 65-and-over division and earn him his first national title. "There are some fast guys in my group," he said. "Geezers no longer are the slowpokes."

Beristain is a retired engineer. And a retired jogger. "I was a jogger and my body started to hurt," he said. "So I took a bicycle out of the attic. This only hurts when you break a bone. Your knees, legs, arms just don't hurt."

Now he has a half a dozen bikes -- one for riding on icy stream beds, others for snow, road riding and mountain climbing -- that retail for $3,000 to $6,000. Beristain, who has broken ribs and vertebrae and has a plate in his shoulder because of a break there, too, made the most of the conditions at Mt. Snow. "It was muddy and slick out there," he said. "And I was laughing the whole way."

The conditions may not have been ideal for Beristain, but he knew he was more comfortable riding over slippery roots and rocks than most of those who came from Colorado or California. But Dave Woodall of San Rafael, Calif., adapted well. Friday night, Woodall, who turns 49 in November, and his 18-year-old son, Justin, stood on a lower hill and watched the dual slalom event and discussed the course for his event, Saturday's downhill.

"You couldn't even go stand on the roots, they're so slippery," Dave Woodall said. "Then you've got the rocks. Not little rocks. Pinnacles of rocks. But I like it. I like the challenge. I don't like hitting the dirt, and I have already. But that's a price you have to pay. My aspiration is to win." Within reason. He needed to be back at work as a remodeling contractor on Monday morning. He did. And was.

Helped by a few last-minute tips and tricks from Justin, he won the 40-49 division race by almost 7 seconds. Justin wasn't so lucky. He was supposed to be waiting for his father at the bottom of the course but was nowhere to be found. Turned out he was doing well on his race on the steeper, nastier, pro course and then crashed. He went home with a broken collarbone. "I thanked him for helping me win the race," Dave said. "But it was very heartbreaking. I want him to be the winner. I want to be tagging along watching him race."

There was a lot of parent-child interaction going on at Mt. Snow. Very young kids tooled around on their bikes followed by adults. And several Masters racers -- including Woodall -- picked up the sport themselves after years of carting their kids around to events. Two other examples: John Kresich of Clayton, Calif., who turned 49 in August and is the father of Ryan; and George Ulmer of Troy, N.Y., who turns the same age in December and follows his son, Geoffrey, around.

Both raced the dual slalom at Mt. Snow, too, but like the downhill best. Back home, Kresich is a finance executive with Clorox. "I love the rapid decision-making," he said. "The answers you get right away. In a typical race you make a hundred decisions and you're either flat on your back and looking up at the sky or feeling good about a turn... This sport changes your attitude toward injury. A broken collar bone, bruised kidneys, a broken arm are worth the pain, given the rewards."

On Friday night at Mt. Snow, Ulmer was the Labatt-Man. "That's the real race tomorrow," he said of the downhill. "This is the beer race. Tomorrow's more of an adrenaline rush."

Friday night, Ulmer, who counts a local beer distributor among his sponsors, handed out cans of Labatt's from a 30-pack that is his allotment each weekend. Sarturday, Ulmer finished fourth after nearly 7 minutes of negotiating the downhill course.

In the men's cross country race on Saturday, a hoped-for duel at the finish between longtime rivals and big names in two-wheel racing, Gunnar Shogren, 44, of Morgantown, W. Va., and Johnny O'Mara of Long Beach, Calif., fizzled out when a flat tire sunk Shogren.

O'Mara, 46, who first made his name racing motorcycles, moved smoothly into the non-motorized sport years ago and was once teamed with Shogren. He won the 45-49 division by more than 5 minutes in 2 hours, 11 minutes, 10 seconds over three laps of the course on which Beristain and his cronies did two. "Gunnar and I came out of the same mold," O'Mara said. "We both have a passion and a desire to win."

This was O'Mara's day. "I finished, that was about it," said Shogren, who has won five national mountain biking championships in assorted age categories.

Linda Browand, 45, was another who picked up her first national title at Mt. Snow. She got back into racing about a year ago, after a decade off, when she walked into a bike shop in Pennsylvania and was talked into becoming a member of the Sicklers Women's Elite Racing Team.

"I got the bug back," she said, and in Vermont she blew away the competition in her division. Jane "Cowboy Up, Cupcake" Finsterwald clearly has the bug, too. During the event, she won her fourth age-group championship and pointed out she was seventh among all expert women. "Not bad for 50," she said.

And not bad for a woman who started riding seriously only five years ago to help recover her balance as she recovered from brain cancer surgery. The American dream is not for her, she said. She has massive medical debt and figures she will never own a home. She left the championships in Vermont unsure whether she could cobble together the finances to get to the World Championships in France.

Matter-of-factly, she talked about how she started falling over and that led to a diagnosis of brain cancer 10 years ago. She described how doctors took her left ear off and went into her brain behind it. How she had to learn again to open a refrigerator door in rehab and then spent 20 minutes in tears trying to open the one in her apartment because it opened from the opposite side.

She recalled riding an adult tricycle for balance and then working up to two wheels and eventually setting a goal of riding in the Leadville 100 back home in Colorado. She told how one race led to another and then another -- and how coaches like Neal Henderson, Bruce Gottlieb, Gene Hamilton and Pablo Johnson helped her all along the way -- and here she was in the mountains of Vermont grabbing her fourth title.

Finsterwald, more than most, knows it's not all about podiums or champion's jerseys, medals or awards. "It's so incredibly empowering to figure out how to do something new," Finsterwald said. "It's the empowerment that this can give you to deal with life."

She cowboyed up, all right.