Abbey O’Brien is the Busiest Shred Girl We Know—And She Still Finds Time to Coach Young Riders

Abbey is still in class when I call — we mixed up time zones, but luckily, her teachers don’t mind when the young racer/violist/honor student needs to quickly answer her phone. We reconnect a few minutes later as she walks around after school, filling her one spot of downtime in an otherwise crazy schedule. Abbey serves as a local Devo MTB coach, recruits other young women to her team, and consistently supports and encourages both teammates and competitors. She is also principle violist in her school orchestra and community orchestra, and she’s in an International Baccalaureate program at her high school.

As for the bike, in 2018, she has won junior women’s Marathon MTB nationals, and she won her categories at The Gunnison Growler, Dakota 5-O, and BT epic. She wins criteriums and road races as a Cat 3, and she just took 3rd in the Cat 3 event at Jingle Cross.

How does she find time to tackle 50-mile mountain bike races, and kick off her cyclocross season as her senior year starts to fill up? She spilled her secrets here, but they mainly boil down to hard work and big goals.

How do you balance everything?

Honestly, it’s pretty difficult and this is the toughest year. I’m in an advanced program at school, and it’s very critical thinking and writing-based, which is challenging but it’s my forte. My senior year is the hardest because there are eight big tests and big papers for each class, plus an extended essay which is basically a mini-thesis. It’s a lot.

How do you find time for that and the viola and the bike?

It’s difficult! What I generally do, especially right now, I get home as fast as I can from school so I can ride until the light goes out, and then I go home and work on homework, and finish it the next morning in study hall. Some nights, that doesn’t mean much sleep!

You had a great MTB and road season and went right into cyclocross. Do you have a favorite?

I go back and forth on opinions based on time of year. My favorite is what I’m racing at the moment, but endurance MTB and cyclocross are polar opposite. You go from training for six hour races to 45 minute efforts, so it feels really weird at the start of cyclocross season. But it feels like I have this giant motor that I build over the summer for endurance and then I can turn it into intensity at the beginning of cyclocross.

When did you start riding?

I used to live in Davis, CA, and my dad used to race on the track. I’d go watch and thought it was awesome when I was seven. I told him I wanted to try it, so he found me a steel purple bike and I did my first crit on the fourth of July in 2007. It was awesome! I was chasing this guy around and I wanted to catch him—I didn’t but I wanted to keep trying! Then, we moved to Omaha when I was in third grade, and in Nebraska, we have an amazing mountain bike community. We have these great little trails, and there’s a great MTB community here. There’s a developmental MTB skills program, we get 50 kids who come out and learn to ride mountain bikes: I was in the program when I was nine and now I’m an assistant coach.

When you started coaching, were you nervous?

Yes! It was a little intimidating, I didn’t know if I could teach these kids. But after the first couple sessions, I realized I could talk through a skill and show them how to do everyhting. In a weird way, I learn more about riding mountain bikes by teaching other people to ride!

What’s your favorite skill to teach?

I love this one balance drill — balance is one of the most important things in my opinion. We get your front wheel on a park bench and hold both sides so you can understand weight distribution and balance. It’s super fun with six year olds!

So with everything you’re doing, what’s your goal in cycling?

I never want to stop riding bikes. It’s my favorite thing to do: it calms me down, it makes me happy. I’m never going to stop. But I want to go to a really really hard school for college, and a lot of the schools I’m looking at don’t have teams. But some have good cycling communities. So I’ll always keep riding. But I want to focus more on academics than bikes right now.

 

 

What’s your proudest accomplishment so far?

Interesting! I’d say winning marathon MTB Nationals, but that wasn’t really it, because I was the only one in my category. I don’t know why other junior girls want to race marathon Nats. So I think when I was 12, finishing the Dakota 50-miler is my proudest accomplishment. I hadn’t ridden more than maybe 35 miles at a time in my life and I didn’t think I was going to be able to do it. And I was the youngest female to do that course!

What’s the hardest thing you’ve encountered in cycling?

Trying to stay motivated for cross Nationals when they were in January, when I was in the middle of a really hard year at school. I had finals the week of the race, so leading up to that was super difficult. I had tests and papers due and an audition and a lot of stuff on my plate. It was really hard to stay in the game for training.

What are a few tips that changed your riding?

I have a teammate, her name is Roxanne Feagan and she’s great. She’s a mountain bike goddess. She knows everything! Whenever I travel with her, I learn five new things. I was preriding a course with her and she was telling me how she was reading this neuroscience book and she told me that your brain is trying to filter things to try to protect itself and it makes things seem way worse than it is. So when I ride, I’m trying to tell myself to ignore my brain and push myself a little harder than my brain tells me I can. I think about that a lot during hard rides or marathons when I’m feeling totally cracked: Shut up, brain!

What about handling scary obstacles?

When I teach kids about this, we have a rock section called the stairs and it’s scary because we don’t have a lot of rocks where we live. I was working with this little boy and he was scared of the rocks, so I was explaining what he has to do. I told him he just had to look where he wanted to go. We walked down the feature a couple times, I rode down and pointed and explained, and told him all he had to do was look where he wanted to go and the bike would go with him. He got on his bike, tried it, and just casually cleaned it, rolled down like it was nothing. It was great!

Have you made friends through riding bikes? Any advice on that for shy people?

I am SUPER shy! People terrify me! But there’s a great vibe with bike people. We’re very approachable, we all have the same experiences, and we all can relate to the same things. With cycling, I know if I talk to someone, we have at least one thing in common. So I just am able to start conversations on the bike, because we have that connection.

What’s your advice for someone who wants to get into bike riding?

Really, just start riding your bike around! It’s so calming and it clears your mind. It’s so therapeutic.