A decade ago, Kristen Tonsager cycled into the extreme and never looked back.
had gotten into mountain biking with her husband, Joe, and one day he casually mentioned the , a 567-mile path from Denver to Durango that is a mecca for Colorado riders.
“I wasn’t familiar with the Colorado Trail at that time,” Kristen Tonsager recalled. “Joe was like, ‘Oh, it’s over 500 miles, and it’s a bikepacking route, and oh gosh, we could never do that.
“And I was like, ‘Well, why can’t we?’ So in 2016, we decided to do the Colorado Trail as a tour. We had done some other little weekend bikepacking stuff up until this point, but we had never gone on this kind of epic adventure.”
Since that moment, Tonsager’s epic adventure has been endless.
The 44-year-old has conquered all the biggest races in the U.S. and abroad for bikepacking — a subset of ultracycling that combines the elements of backpacking and all-terrain cycling in — and this month is on the cusp of becoming the first woman to complete all of Europe’s The Mountain Races in a single year.
are a four-race circuit that combines breathtaking terrain with extreme difficulty.
In the single-stage races — the clock doesn’t stop from beginning to end, so all breaks and sleeping count towards a rider’s time — bikers go for anywhere from 560 to 1,200 miles in rugged, remote environments with upwards of 100,000 feet of elevation gain. They occur in Morocco (the Atlas race), Greece (Hellenic), Kyrgyzstan (Silk Road) and, for the first time this year, Turkey (Taurus). Tonsager is already the first American woman to do the original three in a single year.
These races take anywhere from one to two weeks, and circuit director Nelson Trees says that what Tonsager is about to do — she leaves for Turkey for the fourth and final race this week, and it begins on Oct. 14 — puts the Coloradan in rare air.
“It’s pretty impressive, and super tough, to do what Kristen is doing,” Trees said. “Every two or three months, you’re putting your body through a big, difficult event that will take a long time to recover from. Plus, you have to find time to train in between. So you’re dragging the fatigue along all year. It takes a special type of rider to pull off all four in one year.”
Relentless competitive drive
Tonsager, a 6-foot-1 Windsor native with what her husband calls “power pistons” for legs, played college volleyball at Drexel. Once she got going down the path of competitive bikepacking, she’s continued to stair-step her way to bigger challenges in the sport.
After riding the Colorado Trail with her husband for the first time in 2016, the couple did it again in ’17, that time from Durango to Denver. But Tonsager still wasn’t satisfied. Her relentless competitive drive is insatiable.
“I really wanted to find something else that was this competitive element and that pushed my own limits and boundaries,” Tonsager said. “Bikepack racing became something I was enamored with.”
So she did the Colorado Trail Race in 2018, finishing in eight days, then did it again in 2021, finishing in seven days. She was getting faster, and hungrier for more adventure. In 2023, she completed the — the Tour Divide from Canada to Mexico, the Colorado Trail Race, and the Arizona Trail Race — becoming one of the first women to finish all three in the same summer.
She did all of that, and The Mountain Races trio so far this year, while balancing . She doesn’t have any sponsors, except Joe’s company, , which makes cycling frame bags.
Dave Nice, a longtime friend of the couple and an accomplished ultracyclist himself, values the juxtaposition between Tonsager’s competitive endeavors and her professional life. In the former, she bikes hundreds of miles at a time through the wilderness, embracing the grit and grime that comes with it. In the latter, her focus is on beautifying indoor spaces.
“I love seeing the the quiet confidence she’s developed in the sport, because in everyday life she doesn’t necessarily convey this bad-ass attitude that she has on the bike to make all this happen,” Nice said. “For some who know her (as a designer), it might be totally unexpected, her ability to throw down in the dirt and the mud and spend a couple of weeks without a shower out on a route way away from civilization.”
Since she’s gotten serious about the sport, Tonsager has embraced what she dubs her “double personalities.”
“I’m doing these races because I love to do it and not because I’m not trying to do this full-time,” Tonsager said. “I’m not trying to be just a bikepacking racer. I’m trying to be both. And I appreciate having both outlets. They both provide sanity to each other in one way or another.”
Never a DNF
Tonsager is consistently competitive in the marquee bikepacking races she enters, despite competing against professionals who have full-time sponsors. She’s never won a major race, but took fourth at both the Hellenic and Silk Road this year.
For that reason, — an accomplished sponsored ultracyclist from Canada who has won the Silk Road, the Hellenic, and the Tour Divide — calls Tonsager’s feat of racing all four The Mountain Races this year “extremely difficult.”
“I would be unlikely to try to race one, let alone all four, without financial sponsorship,” Hackinen said. “That speaks to Kristen’s huge investment in time and energy and training and finances to get to each one of these races. Because to do all four and make time for training and have to earn the income yourself (elsewhere), and not be paid for the training and the travel, it’s an incredible feat.”
Tonsager hopes a podium is in her future, but emphasizes that winning is not her driving motivation. Finishing is, especially in The Mountain Races, where Trees estimates the dropout rate is about 45%. In all the bikepacking races that Tonsager has ever done, she’s never DNF’d.
Hackinen, a rider that Tonsager admires, appreciates Tonsager’s approach to competition.
“If you finish, you’re kind of a winner because it’s so hard and the DNF or scratch rate is so high,” Hackinen said. “In many ways, it really is a competition against or with yourself. The mountains are so, so humbling. So getting to the finish line within the rules of self-supported racing, within the time cutoff, is a huge feat.”
In The Mountain Races, riders must hit checkpoints at specific times to stay in the race. And while riders have to be cognizant of their pace, they also need to carry food, purify water, find bodegas and markets to restock at, and make critical decisions on how much and where to sleep.
That’s what makes bikepacking part cycling, part camping, and part foraging, as each rider must possess a substantial expeditionary intellect in order to make it through races.
“You can be an incredible athlete and pedal a hundred miles on a mountain bike, and that’s great and fantastic,” Nice observed. “But when you’re carrying everything that you think you might need, including your calories and water and tools to repair your bike, there’s a level of intellectual (finesse) that comes with self-supported racing.
“It’s such a different animal than, say, the Tour de France where you’ve got a team following you, a bunch of people handing you water, and people giving you a massage after each stage. There are so many parts to bikepacking where just being an athlete doesn’t quite cover it.”
‘Drawn to the hard stuff’
Much of Tonsager’s success comes down to mentality. In a solo sport where nearly the entirety of your ride is spent on backcountry routes alone, Joe Tonsager explains that his wife is “drawn to the hard stuff.”
“The more obscure it is, and the harder it is, the more it pulls her in,” said Joe Tonsager, who sometimes travels with Kristen for competitions but doesn’t race himself due to a heart condition. “She has a mental fortitude that I’ve never seen in anybody. You know that if she’s putting in the work, and putting in the time, she’s going to get it done.”
Kristen keeps her mental approach to the bike simple amid the grueling days that sometimes seem never to end. As she jokes, “I’m usually not having an existential moment out there.”
“I’m always thinking about the time it is to do something — is it time to eat? Is it time to sleep? Is it time to filter water? Is it time to move my chain? What am I going to do when I stop next?” Tonsager said. “I’m always plotting and planning to get to that next thing. Sometimes, it’s eating that Snickers that I’ve been thinking about for the last 10 minutes.
“Having these little goals within the bigger goal are the things that keep me focused to keep pushing on to mile 1,000 from mile 950.”
Tonsager will sometimes stop to take pictures along the way. And she often chooses to sleep in her just off the trail, eschewing an indoor sleeping setup that many of her competitors seek out. Tonsager’s minimalist approach doesn’t even bother with an inflatable air pad.
So after biking scores of miles in a single day, Tonsager simply sleeps in a thin sack on the ground. She wouldn’t want it any other way. It’s the same mindset that maintains her levity even when things go wrong, like when, during the last race in Kyrgyzstan, her water filter slipped from her hands into the river. Tonsager had to jump into the water to save it.
Tonsager is prepared for more mishaps and inevitable adversity in Turkey, where Trees says riders will encounter a diverse course that features pine-filled, mountainous sections contrasted with high-plateau, desert conditions.
Should Tonsager maintain her perfect finishing record, no matter where she places, a prize will be waiting for her at the end: a wooden, cubed trophy bearing the logos of all four of The Mountain Races, with an inscription signifying her accomplishment.
But it’s not hardware that will be motivating Tonsager in the thick of the race, when her mouth is cotton, her legs are weights and another climb is on the horizon. Once again, Tonsager will be in the extreme minority of female racers, as women account for only about 10% of the overall field at The Mountain Races.
“What Meaghan Hackinen did last year was very motivating for me to pursue all four races, and I hope that there’s more women out there who will want to pursue it because they’ve seen what Meaghan has done and what I’m doing,” Tonsager said.
“You just have to have dedication and tenacity and perseverance to see a goal and not be afraid that you’re not good enough or you’re not the right person to do it. We can all do this. It starts by just having to tell ourselves that we can.”
