We were halfway through our interview and we’d just asked Heather Jackson the million dollar question – what did she love most about gravel riding? “Between training in Bend and in Tucson, I've ridden the roads for ten years straight over and over - the same loops. Now, I get to go out and I'll look down at my map on my bike computer and be like, Oh, I think I'll try this road today. And it's more interactive. You get to explore new places, but you also have to be aware constantly - what's on the ground, what are you riding over, what's the terrain? It's new things to learn how to navigate versus something I've done for solong” came her reply, with a huge smile on her face and with passion and enthusiasm exuding from her, obvious even over a trans-Atlantic zoom call.
"It's new things to learn how to navigate, versus something I've done for so long"
To gravel riders, adventure riders, bikepackers and most other disciples of away-from-the-road riding, Heather’s name probably won’t ring many bells. But if you mention her name to a follower of triathlon, we suspect their eyes would light up. She has competed professionally since 2009 and has won a plethora of events, including being multi-time Ironman World Championships podium finisher.
But for 2023, it’s all change for Heather. She’s been signed up by Canyon and has shifted her focus to away-from-the-road racing, including taking part in the multi-race Life Time Grand Prix - a seven event race series which contains three mountain bike and four gravel events, run between April and October and spread over a variety of US states. The huge prize purse, where the overall winner of the women’s and men’s categories will win US$25,000, has generated interest from some of the world’s finest off-road (and on-road) racers and Heather will have some pretty serious competition. How and why would a multi-time world triathlon champion want to switch from a discipline that they’re incredibly successful in to racing away-from-the-road?
"I fell in love with off road riding early on in my sporting career. "
“I fell in love with off road riding early on in my sporting career. I just like getting off busy roads, getting out into nature. Getting onto the trails. I already loved off-road riding. Initially I just had a mountain bike and I was living full time in Bend, Oregon. Bend has hundreds of miles of trails, so you can just go out and explore. On my aerobic training days, I would just go out and explore. And that was I had been doing for more than ten years. But it was during Covid that I was like, whoa! I mean gravel racing was obviously getting bigger and bigger. It already had kind of exploded by then. But I was thinking this is cool that people are racing this type of stuff. We were stuck down in Tucson during Covid and we would just take our camper van and go park down in Patagonia, Arizona, which has some of the best gravel riding here in the United States. We would just park for a week and ride. For me it was this - I love this. Like riding my bike is my fate. It's my favourite of the three sports and the fact that people were starting to race events like this. I was like, Oh wow, you know, I would love to do that too.“
We headed back in time to the start of Heather’s professional sporting career. We asked her how she first got involved in cycling and which of the different disciplines she had tried out.
“Back in 2008 I moved out to San Jose, California and found the local triathlon group there. I really started properly training to do a triathlon at that time and competed in some half-Ironman and an Ironman. It was right around then that I met my now husband. His name was Sean Watkins, but he goes by Wattie and he was a national level domestic racing cyclist. He grew up in BMX and road racing, but at the time his main thing was racing on the velodrome. He came out on a local group ride and I was one of the only girls in the front group. There were five of us and he was just in the Bay Area visiting and he's like, ‘who is this chick?’ We connected and got some drinks after. And then he says ‘I want to get you on the velodrome.’
Just to expand a little on that I did have some cycling experience prior to focusing in on triathlons. I raced the track for about two years in 2008 and 2009 and I was actually going to maybe go for London 2012 for team pursuit on the track. I was training with the national team in L.A. I moved from the Bay Area to be with Wattie down in LA, San Diego area and raced on the track. I also raced cyclocross and I raced some Xterra. So early on, I had some experience of all disciplines, I guess. And then in 2010 I got this opportunity to be on a newly formed triathlon team who went big and they brought eight of us onboard. So, I had to decide - do I go for 2012 where I'm just going to be at the velodrome every single day, or do I actually want to give triathlon a go? I decided to go to triathlon at that moment. “
"The terrain doesn't include things like big drops or jumps or rock gardens, but you have to be prepared to ride super hard and fast from the gun.”
We talked next about the shift in Heather’s training from purely fitness-based, to more skills based so that she can be competitive on the rougher gravel and MTB sections of the events she will be competing in.
“I'm definitely getting more of my training on gravel and on mountain biking trails. I guess from the mountain bike side, all the racers are saying the mountain biking courses I’ll be racing on are not that crazy. I guess that is a good thing for me that it’s not too crazy. But I have actually raced a lot off road, particularly CX and Xterra. Also, because I’m from a hockey background, I have good balance. From what we could see on the race coverage and talking to fellow riders who have raced the mountain bike events in the Lifetime Grand Prix, the terrain doesn't include things like big drops or jumps or rock gardens, but you have to be prepared to ride super hard and fast from the gun.”
Heather continued talking about her new training regime, which includes some super-fast road riding in order to help her get used to the speed and intensity of her newly adopted style of racing “Here in Tucson, there's a Saturday group ride called The Shootout. I went on it for the first time this Saturday and it's gnarly. A lot of the tough guys from the bike racing world are here training at the minute. They're at the front of this group ride and it's just all out! There’s a constant change of pace - one minute on, one minute off. I was at the back just trying to hang on.”
From talking about training and racing, we moved onto the subject of bikes. With Heather’s planned schedule including both gravel and MTB competitions, we asked her what she had decided to ride and why “I’ve started with the Canyon Grizl, but I’ll be able to use a Grail too for competitions. The Grizl gives me the ability to run wider tyres and also we’re going to be doing a bunch of bikepacking down here in Arizona this winter, so the ability to put packs on the bike makes it a perfect choice.”
In the promo shots that came with the announcement of Heather joining Canyon it was noticeable that she was running a DuraAce chainset, so we asked whether this was because she wanted to run bigger gears? “I do run big gears, so that was part of the choice. On my time trial bike I run a 56 tooth chainring for example, so that’s what I’m used to. But part of my training this year will be getting used to spinning a higher cadence so that I can deal with speed changes. So far, I’ve spent most of my time riding the Grizl, but my MTB is coming and I’m hoping to hop into some of the local MTB races here to get some practice.”
"If I pull the pack out of the wardrobe, she comes charging over and tries to climb into it herself. "
We finished off out chat with an appropriately high-brow and journalistic question when we asked about the photos of Heather riding with her dog Stevie on her back. This isn’t something that you commonly see in Europe, so we thought we would try and get the scoop on why she does this and how it works. “I had seen a fellow gravel racer and his girlfriend who is a triathlete who train out of Tucson and they had a Weiner puppy that they carry around in a pack. Stevie arrived from the breeder earlier than we were expecting and just before the Kona ironman world championships, which wasn’t ideal timing. Watty was helping support me on rides and so he put Stevie in a pack from when she was around seven weeks old. She basically grew up in that pack and absolutely loves it. If I pull the pack out of the wardrobe, she comes charging over and tries to climb into it herself. “
With the race season kicking off properly at Sea Otter on April 22nd, we won’t have long to wait to see whether Heather’s secret training regime of riding with a dog on her back pays off.
If you’d like to follow Heather’s progress during 2023, you can check out here Insta account here or via Canyon’s race news page here