Katie Compton Going for the Rainbow

November 18th, 2009 by Ron Callahan View Comments

Katie Compton on the podium at CrossVegas 2009

We’ve been unabashed fans of Katie Compton since seeing her race at the Ohio Valley Cyclocross Java Johnny’s race a couple of years back. We were lucky enough to run into her at this year’s Harbin Park race (part of the UCI-3 Cincinnati Cyclocross Festival) and after some e-mail correspondence, she was kind enough to agree to an interview.

If you’re not familiar with Katie Compton, she’s been tearing apart the competition both at home and abroad in cyclocross, track, and short track mountain biking since 2002. The majority of her success has been with ‘cross, winning the U.S. National Championships in the discipline for the last five years.

She got her start attending races with her father at just 8 years of age. He would get her to ride with the promise of an ice cream cone from the ice cream shop or a Snicker’s bar from the country store. She fell in love with cycling, but it wasn’t until she was in college in Delaware that she tried her first cyclocross race on a dare. Still, she credits her parents for being her most ardent supporters and most responsible for what she’s been able to accomplish.

After a 2008-09 season that was plagued by sponsorship problems and leg cramps, she’s had a strong start to the 2009-10 season. She started out with a win at Cross Vegas and has gone on to take the opening World Cup event in Treviso, Italy, sweep the three day Cincinnati Cyclocross Festival, and take wins at last weekend’s Blue Sky Velo and Boulder Cup races. She’s heading back to Europe in November with her eyes set on taking the World Cup and winning the Cyclocross World Championships, as well as defending her National Championship title. “Those are the race specific goals,” she says, “but I really just want to have good legs and get through a full season without experiencing my leg cramps.”

Part of the goal for the 2009-10 season was finding sponsorships that could support her efforts in the U.S. and in Europe. After a protracted search for a new sponsor, she came into the season with new sponsorships with Planet Bike and Stevens Bicycles. She’s excited about the relationship with both sponsors. She told us that she and husband Mark had been talking to Stevens since before last year’s CX Worlds, but it wasn’t until just before Interbike, where Stevens announced a U.S. distribution deal with Sinclair Imports, that everything came together. The arrangement with Stevens allows her to keep separate bikes in the States and in Europe, making logistics much easier for her.

She tells me that Stevens’ high end carbon bike was race ready, and that they are “light, stiff and handle great”. She also made a switch to SRAM Red this year because, as she says, “..it simply worked better than everything else.” She added, “I tried the Dura Ace 7900 last year and had nothing but trouble with it. We bought four sets of shifters and they all stopped working in a month. Even the ones that stayed clean just stopped shifting.” The switch to SRAM came after the CX Worlds and she now has SRAM as a sponsor.

Compton says that long time sponsor Spike Shooter “decided to pull out, kinda last minute”, leading Bob Downs at Planet Bike to contact her. She says that his support “took an amazing amount of stress away from us”. Downs gives a lot of money to bicycle advocacy groups, so he had to make sure that there was enough money to continue his philanthropic efforts and bring on another rider. (Jonathon Page is also supported by Planet Bike.) “We were super lucky to sign on with Planet Bike and love the support we get from them as well as having more teammates at the cx races,” she says. “It’s a great group of people and we couldn’t be happier now.”

She thanked former bike supplier Primus Mootry for their support, saying, “Primus Mootry was a great bike sponsor and I loved the bikes, we just needed a bike sponsor that had more money for support. A small frame builder just doesn’t have the means to give me 5 new bikes each year.”

A typical week at home finds Compton riding her ‘cross bike on both roads and trails. She says that cx bikes have always been her favorite to ride because she can take them anywhere. She still struggles a little with leg cramping issues, so following a specific training plan can be difficult. She works with the same coach she worked with as a Paralympic cyclist and says that they work together to define the outline of her training needs. Husband Mark Legg-Compton, who Katie calls her “biggest supporter and training partner” is no slouch on a bike either. They train together 95% of the time and he only skips out when he is working on her bikes.

Compton also noted that she has been training with Luna’s Alison Dunlap, who is making a return to cyclocross racing after taking a couple of years off. Compton welcomes her return, saying, “She’s a great competitor and will make the season interesting and exciting for the women. We’re racing together this weekend in Boulder [at the Boulder Cup] so we’ll see how it goes then. No matter how it turns out, it’s a healthy competition for us since we are friends and ride together often.”

Regarding nutrition, Katie says that she has always eaten a healthy diet, but has no specific dietary plan other than to get plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and lean protein. She’s human, though, and she says, “I love good food, but I also have a bad sweet tooth and enjoy drinking beer and wine after hard rides… (it) is a constant struggle to let myself enjoy those things without indulging too much.”

When asked about her favorite type of race course, Compton said that she likes dry and muddy courses equally. “I love a good mud race because they are so fun and challenging in a different way…. You have to have skills to win a mud race, so I like to see who rises to the top on those days.” She continued by saying, “Fast races are fun too and there are more tactics involved in those races, so that’s a nice change than a slog fest on a heavy course. I think the fact that we get to race in all conditions makes it so fun, it’s always new and challenging in different ways.”

Outside of racing bikes, Compton enjoys skiing, taking their BMW M3 to the track, cooking, reading and hiking with her dogs. She still makes occasional forays into mountain biking and track racing as well. She still serves as a coach, though she is no longer working with Carmichael Training Systems. “I have just enough athletes to keep me busy,” she says. “but I don’t want to take on too much and not be able to give the athletes what they need…. I just enjoy coaching and like to see people reach their goals and enjoy that feeling of success and accomplishment.”

She closed the interview by thanking her sponsor for making this season possible. She also thanked her fans for their support and cheers (and heckling) at the races.