Über Girl: Without Pause

Without Pause
Nicole Duke is the ultimate multi-tasker proving that you can be a mom, a professional athlete, and everything in between

By Rebecca Heaton

Photo credit: Allen Krughoff

Nicole Duke has multiple personae. For two of the four seasons during the year, she taps into her competitive side—as a professional stand-up paddle boarder in summer and a professional cyclocross racer in fall. Year-round, she is a wife, a mother of two, and a hair stylist. This fall, she will take on yet another personality as an announcer in the world of Web TV.

So how does she do it all?

“I’m not good at pausing,” Nicole says with a smile.

This trait shone through at last year’s Cyclocross Nationals. With two laps to go and having held a solid third place throughout the race, Nicole’s brake pads locked onto her wheel and she couldn’t pedal. “Three girls passed me and I was pissed,” she recalls. “I got to the pit, switched out my bike, and caught back up to them.” The lead group whittled down to Nicole and two of her teammates.

“We were duking it out and the announcer was going crazy,” she says. With half a lap to go, the riders approached a technical section and Nicole gained a 12-second lead. Then she caught her handlebar on a course marker pole and flew off her bike into thick mud. Her teammates rode by. But the race wasn’t over yet for Nicole.

“My bike was messed up from the thick mud, so I just picked it up and started running. I got to a set of stairs and passed my teammates. I was like a fire-breathing dragon,” she says. At the final straightaway, Nicole jumped back on her bike but couldn’t get her shoe in the pedal because of the mud. Her teammates and several others rode by and Nicole finished in 6th place—one spot off the podium and from consideration for the Worlds team.

“After that finish, I went to a field and lay down and cried,” she says. “I had so much raw energy and emotion and needed a release.” Needless to say, even with this finish, Nicole ended last season as a National Masters Champion.

Nicole has been competitive at a high level since grade school in Tarpon Springs, Fla. She started playing soccer at age 10 and eventually landed a full scholarship at Presbyterian College. But after her freshman year, she burned out on the sport and moved on to her next focus: mountain biking.

As a young girl, Nicole rode dirt bikes with her dad and started racing them at age 7, so she was comfortable going fast on two wheels. When she came home that first summer after college, “I walked into a local bike shop and told them I was going to be a pro mountain biker and that I needed a bike,” she says. Nicole didn’t have enough money to buy a bike, so she put one on hold and worked as a hostess, and eventually in the shop, to make the payments.

Once the bike was hers, “I started riding with my guy friends and racing cross-country. I was winning all of my races,” she recalls. In 1994, she won Nationals for women’s sport class in mountain biking. It was at this event in Helen, Ga., that she was drawn to new styles of racing: downhill and dual slalom.

“I thought, ‘That is what I want to be doing,’ and I was automatically good at the technical aspects and the speed because of my years of dirt biking,” says Nicole. In fact, Nicole was so good that she turned pro—her dream—in 1995 and raced on the national and World Cup circuit. She and her then husband moved to Colorado in 1996, and Nicole ranked in the top 10 at the national level year after year.

Nicole credits her years of downhill racing to her skill and speed on the cyclocross course today. “A lot of women come to cyclocross from road bike racing, so they don’t have those off-road riding skills that I developed racing down mountainsides,” she says. And Nicole has no problem whatsoever getting dirty. “The more mud, the better,” she laughs. Cyclocross courses, unlike paved road bike routes, are notorious for their mud pits.

Photo credit: Zach Mahone/Teva Mountain Games

Cyclocross has also been kinder to Nicole’s body. During her downhill years, she was forever nursing injuries: broken neck, fractured vertebrae, blown-out knee (twice), broken ankle, fractured pelvis, broken pinkies (numerous times), along with multiple concussions and contusions. “I was so broken and tired; I wasn’t enjoying it as much anymore,” she recalls.

In between retiring from downhill racing in 2000 and discovering cyclocross in 2007, Nicole completely shifted gears and enrolled in hair school. “I couldn’t have a pause in my life and I needed to make money, but everyone was asking me, ‘A hair stylist?’” Nicole explains that, even though she’d been known as an aggressive athlete, she’s always had a girlie side. “My dad was a big influence athletically and he treated me like a boy, but my mom was really girlie and always wanted to dress me in the cutest outfits.”During that life shift, she also remarried and had two children, a son, Ryder, and a daughter, Carin.

With a schedule that would seem full to most, Nicole found time to add one more activity to her repertoire: stand-up paddle boarding. “Being away from water and having grown up in Florida was so hard. Paddle boarding gave me this new perspective and I fell in love with it,” she says. As with everything she does, Nicole immersed herself in the sport, teaching lessons and competing in downriver races. At last year’s Whitewater Nationals, she placed second.

Now 36, Nicole is competing at the top level as a pro in cyclocross. She’s aiming to make the Worlds team this season, since she missed it by only one spot at last year’s Nationals. “As an older rider, I’m going to have to be at the top and really prove myself and that I’m worth taking,” she says. “If I make this team, it would be an amazing cap to my career.”

For the first time, she is working with a cycling coach, Frank Overton, to achieve this goal. “I’m going to do everything I can do to be the best that I can be,” she says. But that goes beyond racing. Nicole is committed to being the best in all walks of her life. “I appreciate everything I have,” she says. “It’s a really big challenge to balance being a mom, a wife, a hairstylist, plus do things on the side, such as local bike advocacy, working with women’s events like the Venus de Miles ride, and mentoring other women. I have to just stay focused.”

She is on her way.

This cyclocross season, Nicole will host the “Cyclocross Diaries,” a series of eight “webisodes” with Wend magazine. She will travel to races across the country to conduct interviews and share experiences on the ’cross culture and racing, along with competing herself. The first episode will be filmed at Cross Vegas on September 14. Check it out at wendmag.com.