Annette MacNiven, Athletic Ambassador
Annette MacNiven, a world-class mountain-biker who competed in Xterra championships in Hawaii, California, Colorado, and Utah, and who taught swimming to I-Tri girls and members of the Hurricanes youth swim team at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, died on Sept. 16 at Southampton Hospital, where she was on life support. She was 56.
Her husband, Tom, said his wife of 30 years had “a strong will, and a huge heart, both physically and emotionally. Her heart was the last thing to stop.”
Ms. MacNiven was born on Dec. 31, 1957, in Albuquerque, the daughter of Manuel and Marie Alarid. Her father died when she was 2 years old.
She was reared in Fort Worth, where she met her husband-to-be after they had graduated from college, she from Texas A&M with a degree in horticulture, and he from Southern Methodist University.
They met, he said, when he “hired and trained her in 1984 to sell cable TV door to door — that was one of my first jobs out of college.” Within four months they were married, “in Albuquerque, in the presence of our two dogs and her older brother and his wife. We’d decided by then to pack all our worthless belongings up in a U-Haul and make the trip here, where my parents had had a weekend house since the mid-’60s. We took that detour to Albuquerque after Annette said, ‘Wait a minute — I’m not going unless we’re married.’ ”
Mr. MacNiven remembered it was “a freezing cold and windy April day with a bright blue sky when we arrived. Annette had never been east of the Mississippi. We were on the beach and agreeing that it was beautiful up here when she said, ‘Okay, I’ll stay.’ ”
The couple have been an integral part of East Hampton’s athletic community ever since, participating in road races, triathlons, and mountain bike races, “though, coming from Fort Worth, she had a very difficult time assimilating in New York,” he said. “She told me recently that she hadn’t felt she was a part of the community until she began coaching the Hurricanes and I-Tri girls at the Y four years ago. She loved those kids — she’d tell me all about the practices when she came home. It got so I knew all the kids without having met them.”
A runner first and foremost, Ms. MacNiven had to conquer fears of her own when it came to swimming. Evidence that she had was amply provided at the 2013 world cross (swim-bike-run) triathlon’s warm-up 1K swim in the North Sea at The Hague in the Netherlands. As hundreds bailed out, she was among the few who braved huge waves and 20-knot winds the entire way.
“Tom said he couldn’t believe it,” she said in recounting the event for The Star. “After that, I was ready for anything.”
Some of their best times, Mr. MacNiven said, “were when we’d go with the Cashin brothers, Ed and Kyle, and David Brauer and Mary Scheerer, Shari Hymes, and Nancy Lipira to the 24-hour mountain bike races in Canaan, W.Va., along with a full complement of cooks, masseuses, managers, mechanics, and kids.”
Ms. MacNiven gravitated to Xterra’s rigorous mountain bike races about a decade ago, “because it was more fun for her than racing on the roads,” he said. “It was never important for her to win. She wanted to, but that wasn’t it. She wanted to be there and finish, she wanted to compete with everybody and with herself. She was an Xterra ambassador — there are only a few in each region. Her job was to make the new people welcome.”
Mr. MacNiven also said his wife “never stopped — she had a work ethic like nobody I’ve ever known. Literally, she rebuilt all of our houses, here and in Colorado. She wore the tool belt. You’d want to stay away when she had power tools in her hands.”
Besides her husband, Ms. MacNiven, who took her own life, leaves a son, Casey, and a daughter, Cory; her mother, Marie Baca, and stepfather, Benjamin Baca, of Fort Worth; two brothers, Albert Alarid of Albuquerque and Steven Baca of Cleburne, Tex., and two sisters, Lorraine Cox of Fort Worth and Patricia Baca of Mansfield, Tex. Two other siblings, Andrew Alarid and Benjamin Baca, predeceased her. She is also survived by a grandson, Carter MacNiven, and by five nephews and three nieces.
A celebration of her life is to be held at the MacNivens’ house at 7 Knoll Lane in Wainscott on Saturday at 4 p.m.
Donations may be sent to Theresa Roden’s I-Tri girls program at P.O. Box 567, East Hampton 11937, or may be made online through I-Tri’s website.