Aug 14, 2019
Known as the Queen of Pain,
Rebecca Rusch is a 7x World Champion in sports ranging from
adventure racing to whitewater rafting to 24-hour solo mountain
biking.
She has won the biggest monuments in off-road bike racing including
four Leadville 100 mountain bike titles and five total wins at the
Dirty Kanza in the 100-mile, 200-mile and 350-mile XL races. She
holds the fastest known time for mountain biking the
Kokopelli trail from Moab to Fruita, was on the first team to
summit and descend Mt. Kilimanjaro on mountain bikes and she was a
member of the Raid Gauloises Adventure Racing World Champion Team.
She’s also an entrepreneur, author and has her own world-class
gravel race, Rebecca’s Private Idaho.
In 2016 she was the first person to ride the entire
length of the Ho Chi Minh trail. That trip was captured in the
feature-length documentary Blood Road. It tells the story
of Rebecca’s journey to try to reach the crash site and final
resting place of her father, a U.S. Air Force pilot shot down over
Laos during the Vietnam war, 40 years later on the anniversary of
his death.
I’ve written about Rebecca before as a journalist and have had the
chance to hang out with her a few times at gravel events and at
SXSW where we both spoke a few years back. She’s not just one of
the most accomplished endurance athletes in all of sport--she’s an
incredibly humble and thoughtful person. My dad also served in
Vietnam. He came back alive. Watching Blood Road truly moved me on
many levels, and after I saw it, I knew I wanted to explore the
film and the impact that the process had on Rebecca. In this
interview, we talk about the many ways that experience has
transformed her as an athlete and human.
You can learn more about the film at www.bloodroadfilm.com. Catch
Rebecca on Insta @rebeccarusch
and at www.rebeccarusch.com.
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everyone out there who has dropped me a line--you can get in touch
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choosethehardway@gmail.com.
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