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I think my adventure calling is ultra-distance cycling



When I bought my first adult bike in 2016 as a 20-year-old (a snazzy Walmart deal for $250, the most I ever spent on anything at once), it was more for transportation than for sport. Its main purpose was for a summer internship; I haphazardly dismantled the pieces I recognized and boxed it up, shipping it and myself via Greyhound bus for 25 hours to Missouri. I was going to spend the hot and sticky summer at the Department of Conservation in waders, sampling a plethora of fish species in streams via electrofishing. A bike was my only option for transportation since I didn’t have a viable car to make the long drive from Pennsylvania. I’d commute a mile every morning and evening, possibly carpooling with some coworker housemates if it was raining, and periodically play Go Seek when other employees would hide it. After the workday, I’d bike the 5-10 or so miles to the nearest gym where I would squeeze in a workout and then bike home. It didn’t occur to me that biking could be my workout: I didn’t have a way of navigating the roads alone (I didn’t own a smart phone or have cellphone data for many years, now an impossible thought), and I wasn’t confident enough to do so anyway. Not to mention, cycling for sport just wasn’t really a thing in my high school or undergraduate friend circles, so I didn’t have any exposure to it.



When I was 22 and moved to Ithaca, NY for school, I still had that same bicycle, but this time I met a boy who liked to bike even more. While I hated hills (and, man, was it hilly), my soon-to-be Montanan boyfriend, Uri, was not a stranger to them. Ithaca and the surrounding areas are known for the Finger Lakes, picturesque gorges, and waterfalls, as advertised by all the Ithaca is gorges shirts around town. If you want to get anywhere by bike, eventually you’ve got to do some lung-powered, slower-than-walking uphill battles, even to get to school. The steep rollers were really a deterrent for me; I loathed the quad-burning pain, and I didn’t really understand why anyone would do it.


Sometime in the semester, another female in my cohort (read: badass, iron-woman athlete) mentioned casually that she was going to bike a century around Cayuga Lake for the AIDS Ride for Life event. To me, this was mind blowing. The thought of biking 100 miles was unheard of. At the very least, it was only something I’d imagined professionals do. Consequently, I chalked it up as something that wasn’t possible for me.


Fast-forward and my mileage started ramping up. My friends at school actually had bikes this time, and there’s a notable cycling community in Ithaca with people of all ages and many women (!) too. We would go for after school rides and weekend jaunts, typically ending in a refreshing beer somewhere while being sweaty and tired. I still never carried any bike repair equipment; fixing anything myself was a foreign concept, and I wouldn’t know what to do with the tools anyway. When I took my first nail to a tire, a friend had to help me patch it because I was tool-less and clueless.


In 2020 (unbelievably only two years ago), my first century ride was around Cayuga Lake, the same route that Iron-woman rode. The amount of moving time and time spent in the saddle was a cycling culture shock, and I remembered specific mile landmarks, like 60 and 80, being physical and mental walls that I had to surpass. I didn’t know how to fuel right, I was constantly bonking, and my butt was 50 shades of sore.


During a field season collecting ticks on Staten Island, NY, my beloved Walmart bike was stolen, but this gave me the opportunity to upgrade. After another year, I found a carbon road bike, courtesy of Facebook marketplace. My friends were moving faster with lighter bikes and clip in pedals, and I needed to be on that train, especially in this punchy hill region.


In spring 2022, I decided to do something crazy and embark on a bike tour across the country: blog posts here. Never had I ever done a tour before, and my only overnight trip was an epic failure: I am embarrassed to admit that I wore a glorious 65 L backpack, and my back breaks rubbed on my wheel the entire time, leading to tears and a strong will to quit. But during the tour from San Diego to Saint Augustine, FL, my bike buddy, Casey, and I averaged 66 miles a day for 53 days. Somewhere east of Austin, TX we snuck in a century ride. A week later, motivated by the finish line, we pumped out 4 back-to-back centuries, fueled by Burger King’s Impossible Burgers and a free ride home that Saturday. The feeling after accomplishing this and biking 3,000+miles to the Atlantic Ocean was so empowering, and it unlocked a mental barrier: I could achieve way more than I had ever thought possible, even with little recovery and sleep.



I am not fast, and I’ll never be the first to say that I am speedy on a bike. What I can do, however, is go for long periods of time, from morning until night, and wake up and do it again. So, after the tour, I was inspired by what other humans could do: cyclists that bike across America in less than 2 weeks, that set FKT records on gnarly terrain, that get sub-four hours of sleep per night and then bike 200+miles over and over. Something had changed for me, and it happened after discovering Lael Wilcox.


It is so important to see successful and inspirational people who look like you. I didn’t really have that in the running world: the best runners were/are (seemingly) tall and skinny, and I am not that. My family says that our ancestors were best at carrying very heavy things long distances, and I buy it. In the cycling community, things are different. Not only are women succeeding at ultra-distance bike racing, but women of all shapes and sizes are crushing it. I’ve been particularly inspired by Lael who only started casually biking at the age of 20. It didn’t take long before she was winning ultra-races outright (averaging 230+ miles a day for some races), against both men and women.


This year, in 2022, I tried my first 150 mile ride and felt (very surprisingly) pretty good the next day. Three weeks later, I did it again. I plan on doing it a third time, but, hopefully, it the form of a 24hr ride. It feels great to be on the bike all day long and to push my boundaries/see what my limits actually are. It’s been more mental than physical, really: once you accomplish something, you know you can do it again, so pushing that bar increasingly higher is an exciting and challenging goal. Importantly, I want to have fun while I am doing this, and I don't want to exchange the joy of biking for hammering out miles; it's a conscious effort.

I’m not sure what my long-term plans are for cycling. I know I want to continue doing ultra-endurance rides, to bike 200 miles in a day, and to do that for a couple days straight to know what it feels like. I’m not trying to win anything; that thought is just as crazy as when I first heard about biking 100. But I know that I can go the distance, and I feel really good doing it. Importantly, I want to be part of that cycling community, but I don’t really know where to start.

Where are the people that bike crazy long distances, and how do I find them? If anyone has tips for getting more involved in the cycling community or helpful tricks for fueling on very long endurance rides/ ways to improve, please let me know!


As always, happy tailwinds!

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