Cycles of change

The competitor

by Jason Gay

Chances are Deborah Bernard is a better cyclist than you are. And she's probably a bit crazier than you are, too. An avid mountain-bike racer, Bernard seeks thrills as much as she does speed, sometimes with calamitous results. During a race in Colorado a few years back, she fell 30 feet off a cliff, rolling down the mountainside and breaking her left shoulder. "Other than that, I've just had a lot of bumps and bruises," the tanned, black-haired Maine native says matter-of-factly.

Bernard, who is 30 years old, isn't as active on the racing circuit these days; she works full time at the Wheel Works bike shops in Somerville and Belmont, where she's been since moving back from the Rockies two years ago. Still, she isn't exactly taking it easy. Bernard still logs two to five hours of training time every day and races every so often: earlier this year, she competed in a 24-hour race in West Virginia with a team sponsored by Independent Fabrication, a Somerville-based frame manufacturer.

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The cop
The commuter
The couriers

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Off-road cycling has its risks, Bernard says. But given the choice between a mountain ravine and downtown Boston, she'll take her chances in the countryside. This city can be a dangerous place to ride, Bernard says, and cyclists can feel like moving targets -- something she learned right away during her part-time job as a Boston bike messenger. "Since I'm on my bike all the time, I encounter a lot of negativity out there, and a lot of hateful words," she says. "It's disheartening."

Thankfully, Boston's mountain bikers can find the occasional off-road oasis. In addition to wooded outposts such as Middlesex Fells and Lynn Woods, there are dozens of smaller, challenging trails in and around the city "There are lots of different pockets here and there," Bernard says. "You have to know your way around, but there's some good riding."

A former distance runner who switched over to bike racing as a form of low-impact exercise, Bernard bears no resemblance to the driftless, bleary-eyed caricature that the media and TV commercials tend to associate with off-road cycling. She's articulate and doesn't pepper her speech with "rad" and other dude-isms; today, she's wearing some nifty powder-blue sunglasses and a few piercings, but she could slip into a law firm without too much fuss.

Not that she'd want to. Cycling is Bernard's life, and it's been that way ever since she moved to Colorado, the mecca of mountain biking. After a few quick wins on the rookie circuit, she moved her way up the tour ladder and fell in love with the lifestyle. On the weekends, she and her friends would pile into a sluggish VW bus and travel to races throughout the state. "Colorado is sort of the Hollywood of biking," she says. "It's where people go to follow their bike dreams."

At times, Bernard says, life on the off-road circuit got to be a little too intense for her taste. "It kind of took the fun out of biking for me," she says. Since coming back East, Bernard has enjoyed the balance of keeping a regular job and racing occasionally. But every now and then, the old competitive urge starts kicking in. "I want to get to the point where I'm really racing again," she says.

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.