With Pace

Anton Cooper is a fixture of the World Cup cross country scene. He won the U23 World Championships in 2015 and the 2014 Commonwealth Games, but perhaps his best known finish came in 2018, when he battled World Champion Nino Schurter for the top step of the podium in a sprint finish at Nove Mesto. In this interview, he talks about all the things that went right that day, and what he would have done...

Ellen Noble returns to the show to talk about developments in life and training since the beginning of the pandemic. In addition to moving states, she has also started working with a new coach, the renowned Allen Lim, and begun the long, slow process of getting back into racing shape following health challenges that put her career on hold for several seasons. She talks about moving from the coach...

Aaron Lutze is an athlete marketing manager at Red Bull where he works with an illustrious roster of talent including Kate Courtney, Carson Storch, and Rebecca Rusch. In this conversation, he talks about his unique role in the careers of his athletes, and what he loves most about his job. He and Payson go back in time to learn how he got to this point in his career, from working at McDonald’s as a...

Stéphane Tempier is a professional mountain biker who has been a fixture on the cross country World Cup circuit for over a decade. He placed second overall in the World Cup series, medaled in the World Championships, and represented France in the Olympics. He currently rides for Trek Factory Racing. In this interview, he and Payson talk about training during France's lengthy lockdown this yea...

Over the course of a more than 30 year career, Rebecca Rusch has become one of the foremost athletes in ultra-endurance adventure sports. Whether rock climbing, white water rafting, gravel racing or bikepacking, Rebecca has demonstrated time and again that she is the undisputed “Queen of Pain.” Four time winner of the Leadville 100, 24 hour solo mountain biking world champion, Emmy Award winner, m...

Hattie Harnden is a professional cyclist whose relatively short career has spanned multiple disciplines and garnered her both national and international titles.  In addition to being U21 enduro world champ, she also became the UK elite cyclocross national champion at the age of 18 earlier this year, and holds multiple national titles for cross country. In this episode, Hattie tells Payson about ju...

Evie Richards is a cross country and cyclocross racer who rides for Trek Factory Racing. She won the U23 cyclocross World Championship in 2016 and 2018, and achieved second place in cross country at the Commonwealth Games in 2018. Earlier this fall, she gained her first elite mountain bike World Cup win in the short track race in Nové Město, Czechia.  In this conversation, she and Payson talk abou...

Kerry McCauley is a ferry pilot who delivers planes around the world, usually on routes that not many other pilots are willing to take. The planes are often too small to safely make the journeys, but need to be delivered to an owner across the world and can’t be transported any other way. In this job, Kerry has flown nearly fifty different kinds of planes to sixty countries. He also owns a skydivi...

Martha Schoppe is a smokejumper, one of a select group of firefighters that parachute to the location of the wildfires they’re tasked with controlling. Out of the 400 smokejumpers across the country, only nine are female. Martha joins Payson to talk about the extreme physical and mental demands of her work, much of which takes place before they even reach the fire. From sewing their own gear to ju...

Sarah Sturm is an all terrain cyclist who’s raced road, cross country, cyclocross, and gravel. After moving to Colorado to attend Fort Lewis College, she fell into mountain biking almost by accident. After a few years on the collegiate and development scene, however, she quit racing altogether. It wasn’t until she returned to the sport in 2018 that she found seemingly non-stop success, winning bac...

Alison Tetrick is a professional cyclist who started her career racing on the road in the WorldTour before transitioning to gravel, for which she holds three world championship titles. In this interview, Alison chats with Payson about how her 85 year old grandfather convinced her to switch from collegiate tennis to cycling, the year she spent living in Bergamo, Italy riding for the UCI WorldTour t...

Paris Gore is a photographer whose work has featured in ESPN, Bicycling Magazine, National Geographic, and Outside Magazine. His clients have included Adidas, Red Bull, SRAM, and BMW. Throughout his career, Paris has focused on outdoor action sports, and particularly mountain biking, where he’s captured some of the sport’s top athletes in their most triumphant and iconic moments. In this interview...

Hannah Bergemann is a freeride mountain biker whose performance at Red Bull’s first ever female freeride event, Formation, gained her widespread public attention in 2019. As the first person to drop in at the event after days of building the perfect line, she set the tone for the rest of the day and established herself as one of the sport’s most promising riders. In addition to freeriding, Hannah...

Kait Boyle is an ultra-endurance mountain bike racer whose achievements on the bike include winning the 24-hour World Championship in 2018, holding the women's record on the Arizona Trail 300, and being a two-time winner of 24 Hours in the Old Pueblo. Her results often challenge both female and male records, and she continues to hold the fourth fastest time on the Arizona Trail 300. In this e...

Jesse Jakomait is a bikepack racer and SRAM design engineer who holds the record on the Colorado Trail. He broke the record on his fifth attempt in 2015, completing the 562 mile route from Durango to Denver with over 75,000 feet of climbing in just under five days, beating the previous record by more than eight hours. To achieve this, he rode for 23 hours at a time, sleeping a total of three hours...

Kurt Refsnider is a professional bikepack racer who holds records for the Arizona Trail 750 and Grand Loop. He’s also won multiple bikepacking races including the Tour Divide,  and Colorado Trail Race. In this conversation, he and Payson talk about how he got into cycling in his teens, why he chose to abandon cyclocross and crits for ultras, and the seemingly risky decision to quit his day job as...

Freeride pioneer and adventure mountain biker Eric Porter joins Payson from his home in Park City, Utah to talk about his adventures on the bike. As one of the first professional freeriders, Eric’s cycling career dates back to the early 2000s when he starred in some of the most iconic mountain biking film series of the era, such as Kranked and Chain Reaction, and competed in some of the first slop...

Sepp Kuss checks in from Grenoble, France on a rest day between stages 15 and 16 of the Tour. Since he was last on the show in December 2019 (Episode 41), Sepp’s star in the pro peloton has continued to rise. In August, he won the final stage of the Critérium du Dauhiné, just days before starting his first Tour de France, where he continues to prove his standing as one of the ProTour's most p...

Nichole Baker returns for the last episode in this four part series to talk about her nonprofit organization, Path of Logic. Founded in 2016 after Nichole’s eye-opening trip to Haiti (which is detailed in Part 2 of this series), Path of Logic supports the research, supply, and staffing of pathology labs in southwest Uganda, which provide services for several million people. Nichole talks about how...

In this third part of our ongoing series, Nichole Baker talks to Payson about some of her most thrilling and harrowing adventures by bike. From screaming monkeys, tree climbing tigers, and unexpected snowstorms at 13,000 ft., her stories in this episode span a range of continents, physical demands, and levels of discomfort. She talks about uncovering a mythical trail in the Colorado backcountry, t...

Nichole Baker returns to the show to talk about her rocky introduction to international charity work while on a trip to Haiti in 2016. Tasked with setting up a pathology lab and teaching local pathology students in Cap Haitïen, she arrived to discover that her students were on strike, her translator didn’t speak English, and the lab had no electricity or running water. Nichole talks about this rud...

Nichole Baker is an adventure athlete, philanthropist, and medical professional (who also happens to be Payson’s girlfriend). Her work as a pathologist’s assistant and athlete has taken her all over the world, including to Uganda, where she founded a nonprofit that supports pathology students and medical facilities. In this conversation, Nichole talks about how she became a pathologist’s assistant...

Eliot Jackson is a downhill mountain biker who rides for the Giant Factory Off-Road Team. He’s competed on the UCI World Cup circuit and on the Crankworx World Tour, finishing 3rd at Crankworx Rotorua in 2017. In this interview, Eliot talks about his many interests off the bike, and how his passion for computer programming has led to his latest venture, Reggy, which he describes as a combination o...

Mark Twight returns to the show to talk about transitions, decision paralysis, and, of course, the nuances and science of athletic optimization. Throughout his varied career, Mark has been a pioneering mountaineer, photographer, writer, and trainer to military personnel and some of Hollywood’s most famous actors. In this episode, he reflects on psychological impact of leaving his celebrated climbi...

Sean Hopkins is a quality engineer at SRAM. He joins Payson to talk about how he fell in love with bikes while growing up on the south side of Chicago, being stopped by the police as a child on suspicion of stealing the bike he was riding, and the pattern of obstruction he faced as a junior racer that eventually led him to quit racing altogether. He tells Payson about discovering a love for writin...