HARRISON – The bike doesn’t look that strange – a normal, multi-speed mountain bike – and Kirk Turner is an average commuting student at Hebron Academy, traveling about 40 minutes to and from school each day.

Put the two together, though, and you may be waiting a while for him to come back.

“I just really love to ride,” said Turner. “If you don’t like to do it, if you are doing it just to please someone else, that’s no fun and you probably aren’t out there having a really good time.”

While riding a bike is something most people learn at a young age, Turner has taken this elementary skill and ridden with it, all the way into the national rankings.

“I had a cousin that was involved in road racing,” said Turner. “I saw a thing in a newspaper about a race at Sunday River, too and I tried it out. I started getting my hands on everything I could about bikes and racing.”

This fall at Hebron Academy, Turner joined the fledgling mountain biking team under the guidance of coach Brian Cheek, and promptly won his first two races. So far this season, Turner has claimed five of the six races he has raced in, and he took second on a borrowed bike in the fifth. On Saturday, Turner won the state prep school championship race after claiming the points title the week before.

“It’s challenging as much as it is fun for me,” said Cheek. “You have to balance the whole team, with some riders who are out for the recreational value of the sport with this potential world-class cyclist trying to achieve his own goals.”

And while the school league is fun for Turner, the real experience and challenge – and national recognition – comes from racing more than 30 races a year in two different regional and national series.

“I race in the EFTA (New England Fat Tire Association and NORBA (National Off-Road Bicycling Association) series’ during the summer,” said Turner. “I am in the J-17 for EFTA and in the U-18 division for NORBA, and am an expert in both.”

“Expert” denotes his level of advancement. In 2003, at 15, Turner raced in the next level down, the “sport” division, for EFTA and won the season points championship. He repeated the feat in the expert division this season.

“That was pretty cool,” said Turner. “The year before, too, I was second in Maine in J-16 as a 13-year-old, so it has been a good run so far.”

All of the success doesn’t come without a price, in both senses of the word.

“Training isn’t hard once you get into a rhythm,” said Turner. “I usually go about 150 to 200 miles in a week to train during the summer. At school it’s about 75 miles a week.”

And Hebron’s training route isn’t exactly the easiest terrain on which to bike, either.

“Luckily he has a personal trainer, and we can incorporate some of his workouts into our own,” said Cheek. “It’s nice for him, too, because here he has someone else to ride with. All summer, he trains and does most of his miles by himself.”

And then there is the money. Currently, Turner is sponsored by Sebago Outfitters of Windham, but he continues to search for more money, including from national companies.

“It is really an expensive sport,” said Turner. “When you get to the high-performance equipment, you are replacing wheels and other components all the time, and the better the equipment, the higher the price. Hopefully I can get some bigger, corporate sponsors on board for next year.”

Of course, winning won’t hurt his cause in his quest for money, nor will it hurt his desire to be ranked among the best in the world. This year, Turner has climbed as high as 32nd in the country among the under-18 racers, and with the elimination of some of his top competition as they grow a year older, he feels his chances to be near the top by the time he is 18 are pretty good.

“In national race, the top 20 are usually the best in the world,” said Turner. “I was ranked 32nd out of more than 150 this year and next year I hope to crack the top 20 and maybe the top 10 the year after that. Who knows, really. All I can do is keep working hard at it.”