I sometimes gaze off into the distance and picture moments of my life like the picture disk you’d put into the View Master. The photos would have a theme, say safari. And one would click through each image with their finger: a giraffe, a lion, the savanna. I wonder what a photo disk would look like for my relationship with the Tour Divide. Even more, what would a picture disk look like of my life since October 2024, after I rolled into the finish of the Arizona Trail Race.
I sometimes lie awake at night thinking about my writing. I think my distance from writing regularly says more than I could ever say with words. I’ve wanted to say something, I’ve written a few letters. They haven’t even been good ones. Just scrambling, begging “why?”
I want to confess, I’ve been trying harder than ever. Maybe more than I ever can remember having tried. I’ve had my head to the grindstone since I wrapped on my Triple Crown Challenge attempt in 2023. I knew I needed to return to the Tour Divide because my effort had ended so poorly. A mountain of effort, and a pitiful performance. I spent just as much time walking and crying in the ditch each day as I slept. Ultimately, I proved to myself that my will is surely my strongest muscle. Each day of that 2023 race was excruciating, humiliating, and I moved forward only by a simple promise I made to myself all those years ago.
The Arizona Trail Race 2024
This was the culmination of many years of effort, winning the women’s race of the Arizona Trail Race. I’d tried to win in 2021. I lost to Chase. I had torn ligaments in my ankle, and instead of sitting that one out, I lined up to traverse those unforgiving 800 miles. Why? Why would I race with such a severe injury? I was faced with my truth: either race or die. I’d quit my job; I went all in. What was it for if I didn’t become a racer? I wasn’t in a good way, I’d just crawled out of an abusive relationship.
In 2022, I lost to Ana when she took the paved highway, and I took the longer, Lemmon Pusch with my friends. I tried to catch her, but she was too far ahead of me. She beat me by 9 hours and change. By 2023, I thought I had what it took to beat Katya, one of the strongest, most bad ass athletes I’ve ever known. I didn’t, and she won fair and square. To be fair, Ana and Chase also won fair and square. I just had no excuses left (and clearly have excuses for why those two badass athletes beat me) for why Katya beat me, other than that she was just a superior athlete to me.
By the time 2024 came around, I still planned on racing the Arizona Trail, albeit less than 3 weeks after the finish of my first 100-mile running race. I scrambled to prepare at the last minute and realized that I had given Johnny my last good generator hub wheel for his Triple Crown, leaving me with only a battery-operated headlight. On night two of the race, due to poor visibility, I went down hard and crashed, slamming my knee very, very hard. I knocked the wind out of myself. I couldn’t move.
After a few minutes of assessing the situation, I was able to move my knee, although it hurt pretty badly. In the days that followed, it had swollen, but wasn’t excruciating, so I carried on. It popped, clicked, and creaked, but otherwise held up. By the time I reached the canyon for my crossing, I ran down to the River hoping to minimize my time on foot. As the ascent began, I realized there was something wrong with my knee and was no longer able to step up with my left leg. I practically crawled to the Stateline Campground.
I finally won the women’s race.
I achieved my dream goal—the goal of the first person of any gender to have “won” each of the Triple Crown Races on a bike with one gear—and in that journey, I became the first woman to have won each of those races. I won all of those races on one cog, against competitors with 10+ more gears than I. Validation. I didn’t need everything that everyone else did; I could achieve with the little I had. It was a metaphor for life. A metaphor for getting through the bullshit that is everyday life. A metaphor for peeling myself away from the trauma in my life that intended to keep me down. These races are a chance for me to look forward to something, something simple and ancestral. A modern-day chance to become a warrior. A real chance for hope, for which occasionally hope prevails.
Upon arriving home, I followed up with my clinic, and it turns out that I’d cracked some cartilage on the back of my kneecap. I spent 12 weeks doing PT, meeting with surgeons, and trying to minimize the pain while increasing my mobility. When PT didn’t help, I resorted to Cortisone. The injuries are piling up: the wrist from that scaphoid, the shoulder from that Aspen Draw crash, the ankle from that rock wall fall, the knee from the Arizona Trail Race. My scars have livelihoods of their own.
What’s Left?
I sat on a swing the other day, and in that, I let the seat pinch my thighs, my hips. I still don’t fit. I saw childhood, it was a distant, impossible blink. I was a child once; I had to grow up so fast. I tried to remember what it was like to be a kid, to be carefree, to feel cared for and safe. I don’t remember it. In swinging, I was again reminded of the weights I carry. Still. Despite pretending that I’m healing the trauma. Maybe the trauma never goes away? Perhaps healing trauma leaves scar tissue behind, just like a flesh wound. And that skin is forever thinner, more brittle. Maybe, healing the trauma is just the way we take back our ability to make our own decisions— not ones informed by that trauma. I have cascading pools of anger still very much alive in my bones.
It’s that lens of injustice that’s just so fucking hard to escape. My life has been so immensely shaped by injustice as an Indigenous person in the United States, that I can’t separate myself from a constant trickle of anger and disappointment.
I want to prove something. But to who? Who am I proving things to now? I laugh because I was telling my friend the other day that I still believe, that if I do well in just *one more* race, then maybe I will get to be a real professional athlete. I’ve been pushing hard since 2017 in self-supported ultra-endurance bike racing. My gut tells me that the elusive they haven’t seen me by now, they probably aren’t going to. As the years carry on, these race fields are more and more competitive, and all I can think about anymore is what chance is there for young women like me coming into the sport? All I had to do was win the Tour Divide twice to get sponsored. Winning the Tour Divide now takes everything.
It used to be that I thought I gave up so much, like me, alone in a vacuum, saying “no” for the 100th time to a friend who wants to play bikes or go for a hike. I haven’t been put in any one place for the past decade as I’ve put everything into a chance to build this career. I’ve prioritized my ability to say “yes” so that I don’t miss an opportunity to make this dream a reality. But in that', I’ve found deep loneliness. What does it take to become the best version of oneself?
I’m tired.
This is what I have to show. Hours of my life dedicated to training. September was the 100-mile run. October was the 10-day race across Arizona. I recovered in November and was back at it in a big way in December. I interviewed for jobs in Duluth; I ended up taking a remote, part-time job with my current bike frame sponsor, Esker. I worked four days a week, Monday through Thursday, and did my big volume rides Friday-Sunday. I’m beyond grateful that they helped me build a hybrid gig with them; it’s just not what I pictured myself doing when I thought I was on my path to be a pro athlete. I guess that’s beautiful, right? The romance of the title gives way to the reality of existence. I remember fantasizing about being a wife, a doctor, whatever title I thought romantic in the before. The hardening of the heart through the burden of living makes romance all that much more elusive.
I’m so grateful to have had 2023 and 2024 fully sponsored. The further I get away from that, the more sponsors that tell me that they “won't be able to dig up meaningful support for [my] 2025 season.” I was in a romance bubble of success, and I got comfortable thinking that the more I called myself a professional athlete, the more likely that reality would become. I found a Tribe to sponsor my racing in 2023; I contributed my life story to a film project. I got to spend two years as a professional athlete, training, speaking, and adventuring all over the United States. It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, and I took it. I went all in, and even though that’s not the case now, I am blessed. It was just that in the moment, I thought it would last. That’s the cruelty of a good moment, times so good you think they’ll never fade.
I am blessed to have so many, so so many individuals who have helped me get my ass to the starting line of the Tour Divide this year. It’s not lost on me that I am riding incredible tools that I could never afford otherwise.
Ten Years Later
It’s just that a decade is such a tangible block of time. As I scan through old pictures, pictures of a youthful me, ignorant and curious of the depths of athletic ability within me. I feel peace. I have heard some solid competition will line up at the start this year, and it makes me feel joy. I don’t want to try hard alone. I’ve done enough of that, I want to be a part of my competitors journey, pulling them through thick, and chasing them through thin. I don’t know that wanting to win has ever served me well; chasing the win for glory’s sake is such low hanging fruit. My dream is to compete against the best, to cultivate a place where we leave everything we got on the course, and then to legitimately share post ride time in a laughing, exhausted, feasting state; a place where our egos have dissolved, our past grievences put to bed, the curated internet visage dissolved. The public praise for finishing first is infinitely validating, but I’ve learned and grown so much more from my public losses, from the races where my name and legacy evaporates like the insignificant life force that I am. It’s infinitely humbling, endlessly inspiring—to be but an ant in a galaxy of ego. It’s a gift to be known and celebrated, and to instantly be forgotten.
To pick yourself up in the shadows, to dust off the dirt from your knees, to piece yourself back together and to try, try again…it takes me back to childhood. When the chaos of people around me telling me “you’re okay,” while knowing that I wasn’t okay, but I was still going to get up anyway.
I’ve loved learning about who I am through ultra racing. I’ve loved exploring impossible worlds that I didn’t know existed. It’s been the journey this whole time; fuck results-driven storytelling dominating the waves in ultra-endurance.
I’m really curious as to what this year will teach me, but my gut has already been whispering the next steps. I wonder how it will all line up. I wonder where the path will take me. I wonder where I will be a year from now.
Beautiful as always. I'm trying to believe that trauma healing leaves its mark not as a scar of thinner skin, but as a broken bone heals: stronger where it once was fractured. You're tough as hell, maybe it is so.
Break down the words Professional Athlete. Is it your profession? Are you an athlete? 100% you are for real. It's a difficult enough career path without appearance norms, and yet you continue, and find the inner drive to push yourself when doubt weighs heavy. That, I believe, is what makes you a professional athlete. You have so much to offer once this chapter closes, but you decide when, not sponsors.