Two years before the 2012 London Summer Olympics, Kirkland resident and cycling Olympian Jennie Reed was determined to walk away with a medal as part of the U.S. Women’s Cycling Team, despite it being her first time competing in a newly-created Olympic event.

Ultimately, despite a lack of support, funding and resources, the team was able to take the silver medal, the first for the U.S. women’s track cycling in over 20 years.

A new film, “Personal Gold,” tells the story of how Reed, along with teammates Dotsie Bausch, Sarah Hammer and Lauren Tamayo, managed to pull it off. It will be shown at the Kirkland Performance Center during a private screening at 7 p.m. tomorrow.

Running at 80 minutes, the film covers various topics, including the Lance Armstrong doping scandal that erupted right before the Olympics, and also uses footage recorded during the women’s training prior to the Olympics in Mallorca, Spain as they struggle to recover from a disappointing fifth place performance at the World Championship in April of that year.

To improve before the Olympics, Reed said, the team had made several significant changes in the training, one of which was writing their own training program.

They also began training together every day, whereas before they had been mainly training individually and only together during week-long camps every other five weeks.

Still, they encountered problems, one of which was a lack of resources, according to Reed. The team had only a single coach, Benjamin Sharp, compared to other teams that had a full coaching staff and millions of dollars in funding. Though the U.S. team had the necessary equipment to compete, it was far below the quality of their competitors.

“We were buying things off the shelf,” Reed said. “It’s funny to look back in some ways, because it was so ridiculous and stressful and we made it through, but it was everything down to the skin suits.”

Their hope was to shave off five seconds from their time, but when Reed reached out to former Olympic teammate Sky Christopherson only a few months before the Olympics, she was less than optimistic about meeting that goal unless more changes were made.

“We were a long ways out from the podium,” she said. “We had a lot of work to do. I said (to Sky) we actually have limited resources and we’re not on track to make up those five seconds the way we’re going.”

For Reed, it was her first Olympics competing in the endurance event after a 12-year career as a sprint cyclist. A graduate from Issaquah High School, she first started cycling at the Marymoor Velodrome in Redmond and won her first national title as a senior-level racer at the 1998 U.S. National Track Championships. She went to compete at the 2004 and 2008 Olympics, where she finished tenth and seventh respectively. In 2008, she won the World Championship Title in Manchester, UK, making her the first and only U.S. woman to win the World Championship in the keirin, according to her website.

Following what she considered to be a disappointing performance at the 2008 Olympics due to illness, Reed retired for a year, but in 2010 she came out of retirement after Hammer convinced her to compete in the newly-created team pursuit event, a three-kilometer race compared to the 500-750 meter sprints. While Reed saw it as a chance to do something different from sprint cycling, it required her to adapt to an entirely different training program. The question, she said, wasn’t whether she could physically prepare, but if it could be done within the limited time frame before the Olympics.

“It was quite scary to put myself out there,” she said. “I had retired as world champion…I didn’t know if I could make the transformation (in time).”

Fortunately for the team, Sky Christopherson and his wife, Tamara, offered to join them in Spain, where they also brought along electronic tools Sky felt might be useful to their training. The tools they brought, which measured their glucose levels, core body temperature, and tracked their sleeping patterns, were part of what Sky Christopherson would later call the ‘Data not Drugs’ project, at the time known as Optimized Athlete. The year before, Sky had broken World the Record in the velodrome sprint. As part of his training, he had used a “digital health” model designed to help athletes achieve performance naturally.

At first, however, Reed said she was wary of introducing something new at such a late date.

“When you’re training, you’re so tired from day-to-day training, to add anything new at that point can be really stressful,” she said. “And when people add more it becomes more of a stresser than a help. Because he had been an athlete he was really good at respecting those boundaries.”

Reed said the program helped them become better informed about aspects of their training by collecting data that by itself is not significant but when added together can produce significant results.

“With the data it’s about..pooling every single one percenter,” she said. “To have a performance like that (at the Olympics) everything has to go right and you have to pool every resource that you can. You build this community around you with as many resources as you can and that’s how great performances are done.”

Yet, in spite of the new tools, Tamara Christopherson said it still wasn’t clear how well they would perform when they got to London.

“The hope’s always there (to do well), but there were a lot of days they were riding slower than even the World Championship,” she said. “It’s a tough thing as an athlete.”

Originally planning to stay for just 10 days, Tamara said they decided to stay and contribute further to the team’s training, which included setting up cameras to film the women for feedback.

As details emerged about the Lance Armstrong doping scandal, which also involved other top U.S. men’s professional cyclists, Reed said they saw their own race as an opportunity to bring attention to the U.S. women’s track cycling team and prove they could get the same results without using drugs.

“As females, we’ve been competing at the high level for years,” Reed said. “We’ve been producing results for the U.S., but we haven’t gotten a lot of recognition. This was really a great opportunity to show ourselves and what we’ve been doing for years and years and years because we’ve been under the rug the whole time….And we’ve been doing it the whole time drug free.”

“I want people to understand it’s (drug use) not at all cycling as a whole,” she added. “Women’s cycling, women’s track cycling, we’ve been working hard for years to get these performances and we just haven’t received the recognition.”

When they finally reached the Olympics, the team took the world by surprise, finishing second behind Great Britain, which beat its own world record. Reed took part in the semifinal and preliminary rounds of the event, with Hammer, Bausch and Tamayo finishing with a time of three minutes and 19 seconds.

Six months after the Olympics, Sky and Tamara Christopherson realized the footage left from training inadvertently contained a great story that would translate well onto the screen. Hiring a documentary writer, they sat through the hundreds of hours of footage to decide what would be used for the 80-minute film.

“Two days scrubbing through every single minute of the footage, he came away with a really clear vision,” Tamara said. “The heart of the story was overcoming and being the underdog and what that feels like.”

The film also shows how family members like Reed’s husband, Brandon Madden, along with Hammer’s husband, Andy Sparks, were fully involved in their training.

“That was what was so cool about the movie,” Reed said. “All the husbands came together and became a huge support for all of us.”

When they finally finished “Personal Gold,” Tamara said they screened it for the athletes and their family. Reliving their journey on the screen, she said, allowed them to reflect on their accomplishment.

“For them, it was this really emotional experience,” she said. “As an athlete, you kind of forget how tough it was, how difficult that training is….it was awe-inspiring and physically challenging to watch that again.”

Having screened the film in several states in the past year, Tamara said the film is not just for cycling enthusiasts or sports fans, but anyone inspired by overcoming adversity.

“Seeing how the crowd relates to that and responds to it, I think it was really cool for them (Reed, Hammer, Bausch, Tamayo) to see that,” she said.

Reed said the response she’s received from people, even those who are not particularly into cycling or sports, demonstrates the film’s wide appeal.

“They weren’t even athletes, but inspired in some way,” she said. “A lot of the film is like a love story. We brought in our husbands and then Sky and Tamara…they came to help. We just pooled as many people who cared about us…and built a community around it.”

What makes it inspiring for others, Reed said, is that the film shows how one can really beat the odds.

“On paper it didn’t look like we were going to stand on the podium,” she said. “Obviously it’s an underdog story, but it really shows it’s still about hard work and perseverance and what you can do with limited resources and drive.”

To purchase a ticket, go to http://www.personal-gold.com/seattle. Proceeds will go to the Jennie Reed Foundation.