Gardnerville's Hill starts practice with USA Cycling national coaching staff

Gardnerville resident Brooks Hill begins five days of pain and suffering Monday at the hands of the USA Cycling national coaching staff.

Hill, 21, embarks on this intensive training with the blessing and support of the Reno Wheelmen, a local cycling club eager to develop the next great Truckee Meadows cycling talent.

Hill qualified for the prestigious USA Cycling junior training camp with an early season podium finish at the Sea Otter Classic in Monterey, Calif.

She placed third in the Espoir/Under 23 road race last March, a Lance Armstrong Junior Olympic Race Series event. Hill, along with other elite young road riders from the northwest region of the country, will spend five days in intensive clinics with the USA coaching staff, including VO2 max testing and altitude training. The five-day camp takes place June 12-16 at the Northern Arizona University campus in Flagstaff.

Hill has been racing five years, and this isn't the first time she's been singled out for an elite event.

In 1996, she competed in a national junior competition at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, was top 10 at nationals and won the State Championship Time Trial, a victory she repeated last year in the older age category. With the University of Nevada cycling team, she has won several "Category A" races - the highest collegiate category.

Because Hill has focused her efforts on road rather than mountain bike racing, she is particularly proud of her third-place finish in the '99 Chico Collegiate Mountain Bike Race.

Hill currently races Category III in non-collegiate events, but she anticipates having enough racing success this summer to upgrade to Category II, a more difficult level of competition.

Will Hill be the next big cycling name to come out of Reno? The Reno Wheelmen hope so, but only time and hard work will tell.

The Wheelmen has been a mainstay of the Truckee Meadows cycling scene for 104 years and have a long history of producing top level cyclists.

In addition to the most famous of native cyclists. Greg Lemond, other noteworthy Wheelmen athletes include national champion and Olympian Inga Thompson, national champion Matt Newbury, top professional mountain biker Max Jones and last year's National Criterion champion Antonio Cruz.

With the support of club sponsors like the Reno Hilton, the Reno Wheelmen has been able to help local cyclists with training and expenses as they try to hit it big.