This is Amity, she’s a cyclist. Hearing those words, I think to myself, ‘When did that happen’? I was always a runner. When I left college I was training for and racing 50km trail races. I kept getting little injuries and I took a month off with every intention of coming back and refocusing on running. Of course, I had all this extra energy and all this spare time, and a need to get outside. That’s when I started riding bikes more often. I found a community that was helpful in getting me out there and riding regularly. It happened so fast. I never decided to be a cyclist. I never said ‘This is going to be my thing’ or ‘I’m going to go for this’. I had a friend going to a road race and she had told me that I was fast and that I’d enjoy it. I went, and I won.
I’ve always felt in a way that this was almost too obvious. I fell into road racing and I was always fighting with that. Road racing perplexes me in that you head to these non-destinations, race your butt off for two hours and if you don’t win, you’ve got nothing to take home— you don’t see anything, you don’t interact with anybody, and cash prizes, if they exist, are often less than an entry fee, and less for women. I felt like I was pounding my head against a wall at times and I was never going to break through. It’s these impressions that changed the conversation to gravel and community events for me. They shifted the spotlight onto racing as an experience, where it’s a shared thing between all of us who show up and then the gift of taking a positive experience away from the race, no matter what.
I miss running so much. I miss the simplicity. If you want to go running, you can leave your house in three minutes and you can get out there and you can run yourself into the ground for an hour. You can come home and be empty and be fulfilled and have complete satisfaction. Yeah, I miss it. I can totally see myself doing it again. I could realistically see myself running some more ultras when I’m older and maybe not able to compete at the same level in cycling anymore. My mom didn’t get into running until later in life - she started when she was around 30 - so I feel like that’s totally on the table and something I would love to pursue.
Cycling is complicated in comparison. It drives me crazy. I’m trying to sell three bikes right now, I have all these partially used tires - I’m swimming in gear. When you start out, you need so much equipment and everything costs so much money. It was only thanks to a few generous people in the community that I ever had any kit or was able to ride as much and as hard as I wanted to. But you reach this tipping point where you go over the edge and have more kit than you know what to do with. It’s overflowing out of my closet and I’m now the one trying to help others who might need some old gear. It’s a weird sport like that. We’re always trying to sell some new thing to someone, and the consumerism aspect of the industry is something I’m uneasy with. At the same time I understand that’s why my job exists. As a former runner, I probably have a different perspective on it. It’s still my tendency to run everything into the ground, like not replace my brake pads until I’m scrubbing them. Silly little habits I get into.
My mom won some 50-mile running races and raced Western States when there weren’t many women out there. From an outside perspective it looks like a big deal, but when you talk to her about it she never portrays it as championing a sport or trying to prove anything. She just loves running. She still runs all the time but has no interest in going to races anymore. I’m sure she could destroy her age group if she wanted to, but that holds no value for her. She ran and still runs for herself. Regardless of how things were going in the rest of her life, I grew up understanding that running would always be there as an escape, and that because of that, everything was going to be fine.
I think my competitiveness comes from my sisters. I have two who are pretty close to me in age and talent. We’ve always been driven individuals so we grew up in this hyper-competitive environment, for better or for worse. I’m two years younger than my older sister so I came up right after her in school, and sports, and in everything we did. She set a high bar. It definitely put a fight in me, trying to reach as high or higher and not always being able to. That being said, as similar as we all were growing up, we went divergent ways once we left home, so it’s been interesting to track those identities in ourselves and see how they have manifested in what we do. If you had told me when I was younger that I’d be the one to pursue a pro athletic career, I’d have told you that you’re crazy. If you’d said that even three years ago I’d have told you that you’re crazy. But here we are.
These days, every race I race is a suffer story in its own right. That’s what gets me so excited. Every single race is unique and has its own possibilities. It rained for two straight weeks before the first Grasshopper Adventure Series race this season, and the race had to be re-routed two or three times - our poor race director Mig Crawford must’ve been pulling his hair out. In that race there was a clear group of five or six girls who were contending to win. I wasn’t warmed up properly so I got dropped up the very first steep climb, but I was able to keep them all within sight and turn things around. I’ve never been strong tactically and it’s something I’m constantly struggling against. Just before this race a friend gave me a good piece of advice, he said: be bored. You win bike races by putting in the minimum amount of work to stay in contention, then use your energy at the crux of the race; the end. I have to practice that a lot more. Sometimes I ride hard out of pure excitement or just to keep myself entertained. It’s hard to hold it in sometimes, especially in beautiful places. All it takes is a flowy trail or a good road or the sun coming through the clouds and I’m probably going a little too hard.
Someone I look up to is Lindsay Dwyer, she’s someone I cheer for even when she beats me. I came up behind her in that first race and she was breathing heavily and I was dying a little bit too. I went past her and I said “Lindsay, ride your own race. You’ve got to stay positive.” She gave me a look like she wasn’t really keen to hear that right now, but honestly it was as much for me as it was for her. I was telling her all the things that I’d been telling myself in my head for the 10 minutes before that. There’s that weird cycling dynamic again; you’re cheering each other on and at the same time you’re trying to take each other out. There are races where it’s you and one other girl climbing up a hill, and it feels like hand-to-hand combat. You attack, attack, attack, it’s very personal but it also creates this bond of togetherness and shared suffering that couldn’t exist without the physical challenge.
“I’m still new enough that I’m figuring out the possibilities for myself as a cyclist.”
I’m excited for what Steamboat Gravel (SBT GRVL) is spearheading and what it’s going to become. The gender parity goal is something that someone has needed to champion for some time. At races you’ll pass 20 guys and not see a single female. It’s weird that nobody is looking around thinking that’s weird. Race promoters need to do more and the community as a whole needs to be more supportive. The lack of women at races is not a fair reflection of how many women are out there and excited about riding bikes on a day-to-day basis, and in turn, the number of women riding bikes is still so much lower than what it ought to be at this point. The parity goal is a huge thing but it shouldn’t have to be, it should be standard. But in a sport steeped in so many years of regressive behaviour, there’s an urgent need to be more proactive about it.
I think the most damaging attitudes I’ve encountered are when I’m told that people don’t watch women’s racing or they’re not investing in women’s racing because it’s not interesting, it’s not as aggressive and it’s not as fast. Bike racing as a spectator sport often isn’t that exciting, that’s not a male-female thing or an aggressiveness thing, it’s just bike racing. People don’t realize the amount of energy it takes for us to even arrive at a start line, or how much you have to overcome as a woman to enter this sport. It takes a lot of confidence to show up to a group ride as the only girl, or sign up for a race not knowing if you’ll have competition. It takes a lot of initiative to keep training without much support, without seeing anyone like yourself out there doing the same thing. So in the case of SBT GRVL, I think anybody who is opening up opportunities for us and making the road a little easier deserves a lot of recognition.
Being labeled as a cyclist still feels weird to me. I mean, I do a lot of other things. But it’s true, it’s becoming a bigger influence in my life and as that happens I’m doing fewer other things. Throughout everything I do I’m driven by this desire to be better. To me, meaning lies in any sort of positive improvement, something tangible that I can work towards. And I struggle when that improvement doesn’t seem to be there. Like, I’ve been to college twice and dropped out twice. I’ve held and left countless jobs where I was always fighting this concept of things being “good enough”. But I have, and have always had this tumultuous relationship with myself in which I’m always wondering what I’m doing, asking myself where is my overriding sense of purpose? And my escape from those thoughts has always been endurance sports. First running, and now cycling.
I’m always dwelling on races from six months ago and thinking ‘Oh, if only I’d played it this way.’ I’m competing with the previous versions of myself, even if that version is just yesterday’s. Often I can’t help but think I could have done more, I could have pushed further or harder. My biggest takeaway from that is that I’m super hesitant to give myself credit for anything. I can accomplish so much and still have a tendency to overlook all the good. This can be hard, mentally and emotionally, but at the same time I think it’s what makes me good. We could all slow down a little sometimes and take that moment of reflection to understand where we've come from. I want to grow, to get better at living this strange journey without a constant sense of the past and the oncoming future.
You can listen to the full conversation between Travis McKenzie and Amity here.
© 2026 InnerVoice
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