While many adrenaline athletes come into their sports knowing that’s what they want to do for the rest of their lives, Rebecca Rusch’s career seems to constantly evolve.
Brave enough to try
After discovering adventure racing in the mid-1990s, Rebecca captained a team of three women and one man to place fourth in the Eco-Challenge. In 2003, she reached the pinnacle of her sport captaining the otherwise all-male Team Montrail to victory at Raid Gauloises in Kyrgyzstan. It’s no wonder Rebecca was named “Adventure Racer of the Year” by Competitor Magazine and one of the year’s top 25 female athletes by Outside.
But the woman Adventure Sport magazine crowned “Queen of Pain” isn’t one to rest on her laurels. In 2005, Rebecca realized that adventure racing wasn’t going to be her primary sports outlet because the bigger races were struggling to find funding. So she turned to mountain biking as her next terrain to conquer.
Interestingly it had always been her least favorite sport. But she knew she was good at dealing with pain and enduring long hours awake; and 24-hour mountain bike events were just beginning to take off in the United States. In her first year of competition, she placed second at the Worlds; she took the title in 2007 and 2008 and plans to three-peat in 2009. “No one can believe that I am doing this because I used to throw my bike and curse about how much I hated mountain biking,” she says. “Now I’m completely addicted.”
Eager to inspire
Adventure Sports has called Rusch “Adventure Racing’s Queen of Pain,” and Time featured her in an article on “pounding your body too hard.” So what does it feel like to be the poster-girl for punishment?
“It still seems impossible that I do it,” Rusch confesses. “At the start line for every race, I get nervous and think, ‘This sport sucks! I’ll never do it again!’ But then at the end it’s this huge accomplishment.”
Rusch also appreciates seeing sights that few others ever experience. “When you’re moving for 20 hours at a stretch, you have time to look around, and you realize, ‘Wow – this is really cool,’” she explains. “In fact, if it weren’t for the visual stimulation, these races would be impossible.”
Amazing scenery helps distract competitors from a host of problems: acute blisters, full-body rashes, altitude sickness, and the overwhelming desire to sleep. “It’s interesting to find out what you can do when you get only 14 hours of sleep over seven days,” Rusch notes, explaining that hallucinations are sometimes a side effect of the deprivation.
With her heightened understanding of the mind-body connection, Rusch continues to explore new avenues in racing. “I’m starting to do more endurance events as an individual and long-distance mountain bike racing,” she says. “We’ll see how it pans out.”
So far, so good: she dominated 2005’s 24 Hours of Moab competition, setting the fastest individual lap time in the women’s expert category as she anchored the win for her team. And Rusch is also determined to help other people – especially women – experience the same kind of satisfaction she has received from sport. A recreational telemark skier, Rusch coaches a women’s cross-country ski team near the home she’s established in Idaho, and she hopes to captain all-women endurance teams like the one she guided to second place at the 2005 Women’s International Adventure Race.
“I feel strongly about giving women the confidence to learn to snowboard or tele-ski or whatever,” Rusch asserts. With a modest smile, she admits, “People seem to be inspired by me.”
Rebecca Rusch
