I started 2023 with aspirations of building my race experience and skills to qualify for the 2024 XCM World Championship at Snowshoe, WV. Never did I imagine that I’d have the opportunity to race at the 2023 XCM World Championship in Glentress, Scotland… or for that matter, the Pan American XCM Championship in Colombia. By…
Category: Mountain Biking
Wild & Wonderful West Virginia
Since returning home from Scotland in early August, I’ve spent nearly as much time in West Virginia as I have at home in Virginia–and I’m not complaining! Less than 48 hours after arriving in Roanoke post-World Championships, I headed up to Slatyfork, West Virginia for the Slatyfork Enduro, an epic event on the backcountry trails…
World Championships!
Where do I even start? Just the realization that I raced in an Elite World Championship race seems a bit surreal. The “pipe dream” that has been motivating my race schedule for the past year was to qualify for the 2024 XCM World Championship, to be held at Snowshoe, in WV, but even as I…
Winner! Wilderness 101k Race Recap
This one feels like its been a long time coming. I’m not sure what sort of literary device tells the end of the story first, but, I WON A MTB RACE! In 2019, I attempted my first 50-mile mountain bike race, the Whiskey 50…which I promptly DNF’d. Later that year, I flew to Arkansas for…
How did I get here?
I might be sitting on the couch right now with my leg propped up on pillows, but I can’t help but reflect a bit. On week ago, I was racing (and crashing) in the XCM Pan-American Championship in Colombia, and in a mere six weeks, I will be racing in the XCM World Championship in…
¡Bienvenido a Colombia!
When I got the e-mail saying that I had been selected to be a part of the 2023 Pan American XCM Championship team, I immediately envisioned high mountain singletrack and stunning views. I got one part of that right. The 2023 Pan American XCM Championship took place in Santa Rosa de Cabal, Colombia, a small…
Winning the Experience
I felt incredibly strong coming into the spring block of races and was excited about the potential for earning some solid results at both Whiskey 50 and the Transylvania Mountain Bike Epic Stage Race. And then I crashed. My return to the Whiskey 50 was one marked with a burning desire to redeem myself. The…
Sweet Simplicity
Early on in my evolution of becoming a mountain biker, I remember meeting someone who had a singlespeed mountain bike. I was curious, even to the point of asking if I might someday borrow the bike and experience singlespeeding for myself, but never did. (Ironically, while living in the Midwest, where a singlespeed mountain bike…
Try New Things
There’s a wide range of skillsets within the world of mountain biking, and while I feel like I am learning quickly, I often have to remind myself that until I moved to Virginia in 2021 (just a year ago?!), I had never seen rocks…not #eastcoastrocks, anyway. All of that to say, I have a LONG…
Just one of those days…
What do you do when you show up to your A race of the season, the gun goes off, and you just don’t have any legs? This year’s USAC Marathon MTB National Championship returned to the rocky trails of Gambrill State Park and the Watershed in Frederick, Maryland. After racing there in 2021, I made…
Ride Fierce Racing 