Jenna Nestman is new to track cycling, but that hasn’t stopped her from racing to the top of her class. At the BC Track Championships, held Aug. 17 to 19, Nestman took home four gold medals from four events: team sprint, sprint, time trial and kierin.
The 30-year-old athlete made the switch to cycling just two years ago. Before that she was competing as a triathlete with hopes of turning pro. While training, Seattle-based coach Chris Johnson invited her to participate in bike testing. Those tests proved fateful. Johnson said, rather than the four-hour triathlon, she should focus on track cycling: “Based on your power numbers you could already be on the U.S. national team,” he told her. So she gave the sport a try.
After attending a Learn to Ride program at the Burnaby Velodrome in 2016, Nestman said she “was hooked.” She then opened her cycling career at the 2016 Canadian Track Championships. “I did the nationals after only four months of really knowing how to ride a track bike,” she said. “Nobody really knew who I was so it kind of played to my advantage.” She won gold in the scratch race.
One year later she took home silver in the team sprinting at the 2017 nationals with Devaney Collier, as well as third in the kierin. “It wasn’t that great of a national championship for me,” she said, which had to do in part because of strep throat. “I ended up losing 10 pounds in the seven days I was there. It was horrible,” she said.
Things wouldn’t get easier before they got better, however. At the end of January 2018 she fell off her horse and suffered four breaks to her lower right leg, ligament and tendon damage and a dislocated ankle. “I had two plates put in and a whole bunch of screws,” Nestman said, who couldn’t bear weight for 10 weeks. “Coming off that I had to learn to walk again,” she said. Two and a half months later, she opened her season at races in Seattle before the BC provincials in August.
Heading into provincials she knew she had a chance to beat her times from the previous year, but wasn’t necessarily expecting gold. “I didn’t understand how I could be stronger after only three months of training,” Nestman said of her comeback. “The body amazes me. With such a substantial injury I’ve had to listen to my body and maybe last year I was a little over-trained and under-rested,” she said.
The self-coached athlete attributes her explosive power to her university days, when she competed as a 400-metre and 100-metre hurdler for UBC. She works with peers in the city who give her guidance and advice. She lifts weights three days a week in addition to five cycling sessions a week. That, in addition to launching Lone Wolf Bakery in Sechelt this year and maintaining a small horse farm in Roberts Creek, keeps Nestman busy. “There’s not a lot of spare time,” she said.
Coming off her provincial sweep, Nestman will be heading to Milton, Ont. at the end of September to compete at the 2018 Canadian Track Championships. She plans to compete in four sprint categories: team sprint, kierin, 500-metre time trial and the sprint tournament. Her hope is to walk away with personal best times “and with those personal best times, it would land me a couple spots on the podium,” she said.
