It’s not like she needed extra street cred.
Amy Morrison is a world-class Enduro rider with 17 career victories, regarded as the top American in the Enduro World Series, a global sport dominated by Europeans. Riding her Fuji Auric LT, she won the North American Enduro Series and the Sea Otter Classic last year. She’s a threat to rip the field whenever she lines up.
Still, something was missing. Although when she traveled overseas she was regarded as the discipline’s best American, she hadn’t won a U.S. national championship to back it up.
“I felt like I kind of earned that title from being the fastest American at those EWS races, but not officially having the title made it feel not totally true,” Morrison said.
Now, totally, it is. On Thursday, Morrison dominated the field over eight race stages at Winter Park, Colo., riding the Auric LT to the USA Cycling Enduro Championship to earn her first stars-and-stripes jersey and give the 30-year-old Nevada schoolteacher what she felt she lacked.
“Now I have the proof behind what I’ve always felt,” she said on the Friday morning after the race. “I’m on the right track, riding well, and there’s a bit of pride to have the national championship on the resume now.”
She had come close, with a second-place finish in Snowshoe, W.V., last year that felt like a missed opportunity. “It was not my best riding,” she said. “I crashed, there was rain and mud with lots of roots, and I hadn’t trained on mud and roots.”
The conditions at Winter Park were perfect but the course was more challenging, in a different way. “It was super pedally and physical. The stages had a lot of flat, up and down, then flat, and I was a little worried because it was so physical and painful,” she said.
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Amy Morrision pilots her Fuji Auric LT during one of the eight runs at the USA Cycling Enduro Championship in Winter Park, Colo.
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Morrison charged into the first stage, admittedly “going super hard but feeling relaxed and calm, smooth and fast.” By the end of the fifth stage she had opened a large time gap. “By the sixth and seventh [stages] I was feeling gassed,” she said, “but everyone else was tired, too.”
No one would come close. She won the title by staggering 17 seconds; only seven seconds separated the second through fourth places.
“I definitely had the feeling as I was racing that it was a first-place day,” she said. “It’s a mental thing. You think, ‘If they gave me a rerun, would I take it?’ All day, if they’d given me a rerun I wouldn’t have taken it.”
She wouldn’t have taken another bike, either. The Auric LT, with its slack angles, MLink suspension and 27.5” tires, was more than capable of carving up the up-and-down Nationals track.
“Winter Park is known for being gnarly, and a lot of the girls and guys before the race were like, ‘Whoa, maybe I’ll run my smaller-travel 29er,’” she said. “I think it was really cool to take on a pedally course and win on a slack 27.5 Fuji. It says a lot about MLink and about how efficient it can be.”
Morrison will compete in a North American series race Montana this weekend and the Enduro World Series stop in Whistler, B.C., next weekend. Then it’s back to school, where she teaches high school health sciences and has an MTB-themed classroom.
“I’ve kept all the race plates over the years. The kids think it’s pretty cool to see all the places I’ve raced, like Costa Rica and Colombia, and you can see little sparks go off that they can go places, too,” she said.
She’d like to start a mountain bike club at the school this year to show her students that “it’s something you can do throughout your life, and it’s something you can do with a community of people who want to
be healthy, be outdoors and explore.”
She’ll probably make one – at least temporary – addition to the classroom this fall: her championship jersey. Her father, a woodworker, will mount it in a frame with an etched plaque.
“The kids will probably think that’s cool, too,” Morrison said. “You know, it gives you a bit of street cred.”
Not that she needed it. But now she has it.
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Photo 1: USA Cycling
Photo 2: Dejan Smaic
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