Unbelievable views, wild routes, unique landscape, historic villages, and one of the toughest weeks of racing you could ask for. This was the 2024 Swiss Epic.

I learned an immense amount – being one of the first partner races I’ve completed at the (UCI) highest level. The aspect of competing as a unit –not just by yourself– and navigating five days of racing as one was actually pretty rad. Jerry Dufour and I were partners, and as you probably know, we fit like a glove. We were both on the same page in a variety of ways: fitness, abilities, and skill. But even more important was the similarity in our mentality, durability, and stress response. We’d spent a lot of time together over the last decade of racing and know how each other ticks.

​I feel that each time I line up to a challenge like this I expect to suffer, to get out of my depth, and have a general anxiousness about how I’ll “do”. This time, it felt a little more like curiosity; more excited about the opportunity than nervous about it.

I have been trying to soak up the recent success at the MTB Marathon National Championships. Interestingly, it can actually be difficult to enjoy a big win when you have a sport that forces you to move the goalposts so quickly. I got stuck in that “process, process, process” mentality and when a window finally opened for me to make it happen I had to trust myself in a new way. I've had to intentionally pause and enjoy the wake of a major elite-level win.

To mix things up and try to provide something valuable from it, I figured I’d use this article to break down the race and tactics that led to my first Elite National title.

Reframing Hard Things to Work for You

While rereading a personal Top 10 book, Do Hard Things, the theme of “choice” keeps coming up as a key part of overcoming challenges. Steve Magness, the author, references multiple studies run with either mice or dogs or social experiments with people where they were faced with an issue and given a choice to deal with it…or not. Apparently, when given the ability to choose –to make something happen by our own free will– it rewires how we view challenge, approach it, and ultimately deal with it.