July's Featured Rider: Leana Gerrard

Leana Gerrard is the face of Cannondale's Mona Vie racing team. While gated racing is her forte, Leana slays it on the downhill track too. She has a drive to excel and a passion to ride that's hard to match. Leana recently graduated from Western Washington University with a degree in marketing and business. After recovering from an ankle injury that cut her 2008 season a bit short, Leana is back to her hard-charging self!--FF


Name: Leana Gerrard
Home: Lake Tapps, WA
Age: 23
Favorite type of riding: I like a lot of different types of riding, but my favorite would have to be a flowy trail with berms and jumps.
Why you ride: I ride because bikes are my sanity. I find that the longer I stay off a bike, the more agitated and unpleasant I get. But after a ride, I am just stoked on life. Mountain bikes are my safe haven, so when I feel the world is spinning out of control around me, getting on a bike out in the woods is the only way for me to slow it all down again.
Sponsors: Mona Vie, Cannondale, Bell, E-Thirteen, KORE, Oakley, Azonic, Kenda and Fabel Headwear
Website: LeanaGerrard.com

I started riding bikes when my older brother was racing BMX at the local track. I had just quit ballet and was looking for something a little more exciting, so BMX looked awesome. I was seven at that point and my life has never been the same. But, as I grew older and got tired of BMX, I tried some cross country racing as cross training. One cross country race however, had a dual slalom event as well, and once I saw that, I knew I found my calling.

I think perseverance is key to being a successful rider. Everyone falls, everyone gets hurt at one point or another, but it's those that hop back on the bike that find success. The hardest thing for me to learn was that failure is imperative to reach success. You have to slide out in a corner to find the limit, never fun, but necessary.

Bikes and the people I have met through biking have shaped me into the person I am today. I look at my friends and paths that they are taking, and every day I am thankful that I'm not on the same track. The experiences I've had, the places I've gone and the people I've met have all been because I have the passion to ride a bicycle.

January's Featured Rider: Darian Harvey

Darian Harvey is the current National Mountain Bike Series Downhill Champion and represented the USA at the 2007 World Downhill Championships. She's fast on the downhill bike and aggressive on the 4x course. Darian has a Fine Arts degree with an emphasis in photography, and she's an ace bike mechanic as well. She's current training in California, and will return to Durango, CO to skate ski and snowboard until the mountains thaw enough for her to start riding bikes again. --FF

Name: Darian Harvey
Home: Durango, CO
Age: 26
Favorite type of riding: Fast, flowy DH tracks with wide-open, drifty corners.
Why you ride: I ride because I love it. I love that no matter what happens to me on a ride, I can come home with a smile on my face. I can get a flat tire, go over the bars, or just ride poorly--the bottom line is that I had a chance to ride my bike, and for that I am happy.
Sponsors: SoBe-Cannondale Team (SoBe, Cannondale, Fox, Shimano, Mavic, Michelin, E-13, Thomson, Smith, Bear Naked, Marmot, Hydrapak, Teva, Pedro, Thule ), Six Six One, Royal, and Sunline
Website: MySpace.com/DarianHarvey

When I was 10 years old, my cousin bought his first mountain bike. He let me ride it a couple of times and I was hooked. I knew that I had to have a mountain bike of my own, so I started working odd jobs and saving money. I subscribed to Mountain Bike Action for about five years before I could afford to buy my own bike.

In those magazines, it always appeared that the gravity riders had more fun. The cross country riders always had these painful grimaces on their faces, while the gravity riders looked like they were having a blast. I would see pictures of legends like Missy Giove, John Tomac, Shawn Palmer, Anne-Caroline Chausson, and I would think, "I want to do that!" So the first bike I bought was a typical hardtail, but I always dreamed of racing on a downhill bike of my own. After several more years of saving, my dream came true. I bought my first DH bike, and have been racing ever since.

One of my big goals for 2009 is something that I have struggled with for a long time. My goal is to become proficient at jumping. Anyone that has ever watched me race 4X or dual slalom knows that jumping is my Achilles heel and my inability to jump doubles has cost me races. I intend to change that for 2009 and I am actually moving to California for part of the winter so that I can work on my jumping skills. Look out dirt jumps, here I come!

I think that there are many important skills that can help riders be successful in our sport, but the two most important things to me are fitness and mental preparation. It doesn't matter how high you can bunnyhop, how far you can jump, how long you can manual, if you can't remember your lines and don't have the power to pedal out of every corner, you are not going to win races. All those fun skills come in handy in nearly all riding situations, but great fitness allows you to be competitive and proper mental preparation allows you to put all of your skills together and hopefully win.

I would say that my career highlight so far would be winning the 2008 Pro Women's Downhill National Mountain Bike Series Championship. This year was the first year that I was able to make it to nearly all the races in the series (only missed one this year), and I ended up winning the whole thing.

Movie Review: Latitudes

Freeride Foundation wants to help you stock your DVD case with rad riding movies. However, we're getting picky. We only want to sell and support production companies and films that support women riders. That's one of the reasons we brought in The Way Bobby Sees It--Wendy Todd was a co-producer and she played a large part in getting Bobby prepared for the race. Believe it or not, there are several movies from this year that include significant women's riding segments.

The first movie we're reviewing is DH Productions' hi-def film Latitudes. Lisa Myklak turned me on to this flick. She'd told me that she and Emily Johnston were at Woodward West, and were fighting for camera time. When the two girls decided to hit a huge gap jump, they immediately had everyone's attention. The resulting segment shows Lisa and Emily ripping singletrack with the guys, hucking off of Woodward's stunts, and of course, boosting the gap. While I still have a few more films to watch from this season, this segment strikes me as the most comprehensive women's gravity segment possibly since the Marla and Missy years.

Lisa and Emily aren't the only ones to get some air time. Hannah Hannah appears early in the film, riding with the Cannondale Cut crew. The only problem is that none of the riders in the segment receive credits. So, if you don't put 2 and 2 together and realize that Latitudes' main sponsor is Cannondale, and that Mick is a Cannondale Cut rider, and that the girl riding with them must be his ripping freerider wife Hannah, you'd be left wondering who this anonymous female shredder could be. The movie came with a second disc, which includes the Nomads TV show created from Latitudes' France riding chapter. Hannah is introduced here, but who watches Disc 2 first?

Amelia Colasurdo has a short but cool big-mountain-style segment from Southern Utah too. She's also the caboose on the Salt Lake City chapter's singletrack segments. She has a much larger role in the Nomads TV show created from the Southern Utah chapter, which is also found on the second disc.

As for the rest of the movie, there are impressive big mountain and dirt jumping performances from JD Swanguen and the Van Dines, and cool urban and dirt jump segments with Aaron Chase, Jeff Lenosky, Dave Smutok, and Kyle Ebbett to name just a few of Latitudes' featured athletes.

We're stoked to see a movie with more than one female rider and with girls showing up in several segments throughout the film. The industry has a long way to go to when it comes to incorporating ripping female riders into mountain bike films, but at least we're seeing some progress.

We're working on bringing Latitudes to Freeride Foundation, but in the meantime, you can grab a copy at DH-Productions.com.

Leana Gerrard's Bike Check on Pinkbike.com

Leana Gerrard is one of the most talented gated racers in the US--and she rips on a downhill bike too. Unfortunately she's been injured for the last half of this season. She's looking forward to lots of training time this winter, though, so we know she'll be going strong next year. Click here to check out her Cannondale bike check on Pinkbike.com!