I grew up in Durango, CO. My family spent time weaving through rivers, exploring forests, and breathing with the mountains every day. In middle school I started racing with the development team, Durango DEVO. I rode with DEVO through high school and slowly dropped other activities as I realized my time spent mountain biking was consistently the absolute best hours of the day. Unlike most competitive cyclists, I did my first set of intervals my senior year of high school, almost 6 years after I started racing. For me, biking was simply getting outside and shredding around without numbers, power, heart rate, or a designated ride time. As it turns out, fun is simply not so track-able with a power meter -- and I remind myself of this anytime cycling starts to feel like a chore.
True to form, my first training plan during freshman year of college was a piece of printer paper, with a rough calendar outline, and a few numbers tossed in. A few months into college, I was able to finish 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in three different Collegiate National Events between mountain biking and cyclocross. My 3rd place finish at Division 1 Collegiate Cyclocross Nationals still feels like a fluke, I raced on a borrowed cross bike and it was my third ever cyclocross race. My basis in mountain biking and ability to see the race as simply a fun game allowed me to embrace the extreme mud and cold. I remember thinking about the race like an epic video game where I was sliding, falling, and running through a Mario Kart-like course of complete havoc. It was epic. Again, the "never-forget-the-feeling" mentality of fun from Durango DEVO taught me how to smile even bigger when the mud gets thicker, because this really is all for fun and games.
Since graduating college in 2018, I've lived in Boulder, briefly in my car traveling to races, in Austin, and back in Durango. I've raced for a few teams run by men who were pretty mean and in the last two years I've joined, with reckless excitement, the Bitch'nGrit Squad with Dani Arman and Kristen Legan. We run the team, and we run with our pretty titanium bikes all over this country.
A few years ago I dropped the idea that racing at the World Cup level was the ~ultimate~ goal and instead have worked so hard to find a balance of life and love and bikes and rest that fills me up. After concussions, healing, therapy, and a rocky re-entry to the sport, I've settled into inevitability of my circuitous path. If you want some musings and arguably blurry mind spirals, join me and huck yourself into that blog with as much sporadic, albeit passionate, energy as I have.
True to form, my first training plan during freshman year of college was a piece of printer paper, with a rough calendar outline, and a few numbers tossed in. A few months into college, I was able to finish 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in three different Collegiate National Events between mountain biking and cyclocross. My 3rd place finish at Division 1 Collegiate Cyclocross Nationals still feels like a fluke, I raced on a borrowed cross bike and it was my third ever cyclocross race. My basis in mountain biking and ability to see the race as simply a fun game allowed me to embrace the extreme mud and cold. I remember thinking about the race like an epic video game where I was sliding, falling, and running through a Mario Kart-like course of complete havoc. It was epic. Again, the "never-forget-the-feeling" mentality of fun from Durango DEVO taught me how to smile even bigger when the mud gets thicker, because this really is all for fun and games.
Since graduating college in 2018, I've lived in Boulder, briefly in my car traveling to races, in Austin, and back in Durango. I've raced for a few teams run by men who were pretty mean and in the last two years I've joined, with reckless excitement, the Bitch'nGrit Squad with Dani Arman and Kristen Legan. We run the team, and we run with our pretty titanium bikes all over this country.
A few years ago I dropped the idea that racing at the World Cup level was the ~ultimate~ goal and instead have worked so hard to find a balance of life and love and bikes and rest that fills me up. After concussions, healing, therapy, and a rocky re-entry to the sport, I've settled into inevitability of my circuitous path. If you want some musings and arguably blurry mind spirals, join me and huck yourself into that blog with as much sporadic, albeit passionate, energy as I have.
