Ruth's return to the road: 'I think I needed a sabbatical more than a retirement'

Published September 21, 2023 11:00AM

After a rough start to the season, which included injury and a subsequent DNS at the Sea Otter Classic which then led to a DNF at Unbound Gravel, Edwards has performed well at the last two races of the Life Time Grand Prix series. She placed second at the Leadville Trail 100 MTB race, an endurance epic at altitude, and then won Chequamegon, the 40-mile “northwoods drag race,” a month later.

No one is surprised to see Edwards creeping up in the standings of the off-road race series. Despite finishing 14th overall last year, Edwards came into the inaugural series backed by a hefty history of results, including multiple national championship titles on the road and track. The 30-year-old turned pro in 2014 with United Healthcare and retired from the women’s WorldTour with Trek-Segafredo at the end of 2021.

Shortly after announcing her retirement from the road, Edwards signed up for the inaugural Grand Prix, following in the footsteps of quite a few WorldTour pro-turned-gravel racer peers.

Yet Edwards is about to turn that familiar storyline on its head. The Coloradan will not be returning for season three of the Life Time Grand Prix next year, nor will she be doing any more gravel or mountain bike racing other than what she can fit into her new schedule.

So while it may be too early to call this one a comeback, Ruth Edwards is coming back — to racing professionally on the road.

‘I think I needed a sabbatical more than a retirement’

Edwards admits now that ‘retirement’ may have been too strong a sentiment for what she was seeking by leaving the WorldTour.

It’s not entirely surprising, given that she hadn’t retired for any earth-shattering reason; at 28, she still had plenty of racing years ahead of her. Edwards’ decision to leave the WorldTour was fairly simple — she wanted to be home in the US more than she wanted to be away, and she hadn’t figured out a way to reconcile the two with the demands of working as a professional road cyclist.

“In the beginning it was more ‘oh, I know I’m going to miss this, but I don’t want to get on an airplane and leave home, I love being here with Zach'” Edwards said. But what began as ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ quickly shifted to a borderline obsession with racing on the road again.

Winder said that at first, she kept the thoughts to herself. As much as she’d talked about retiring in 2021, it didn’t seem fair to start up a similarly earnest conversation about returning in 2022. In fact, when she did begin to say things out loud, Zach, her fiancé at the time, was quick to call her out.

“We went to Europe to ride bikes in early 2023, and I was like, ‘oh shit, being a road racer is so much fun!’ I tried to mention it to Zach, and he was like, ‘what do you mean, you’re gonna go back to Europe? You’re not leaving me again.'”

Meanwhile, Winder had signed up for the Life Time Grand Prix — again. Although she didn’t have the best time during the 2022 edition — “I remember going through the year, feeling kind-of miserable on my bike doing these long epic things,” she said — she went into 2023 telling herself she’d be more competitive, train harder.

Then, things got off to a rocky start. She had to miss Sea Otter, one of her goal races, only to DNF at Unbound, “a 200 mile gravel race was never going to be a goal for me,” she said. She hoped to do well at Leadville but was finding it hard to feel motivated for much else — and that wasn’t a sensation she was used to.

“I feel like I was trying pretty hard with gravel racing, but I’m not inspired by it at all,” Edwards said. “I wanted to be in a place where I was inspired or to move on.”

Eventually, Zach, Edwards’ now-husband, softened to her yearning to return to the road.

“He said, ‘if this is really want you want to do, try it. Even if you make it three months, at least you tried, you won’t be 40 and regret it,'” Edwards said.

That was the green light Edwards needed. She started reaching out to old peers and colleagues from road racing and received near-immediate feedback — and interest.

“That felt really good, to reach out to people and have them be stoked about it,” Edwards said.

While officials from Edwards’ new squad asked not to be named in this story, she said that the fact that she’s going back to the WorldTour is far from secret. In fact, in a way it’s the truth that has set her free.

Pressure drop

The weeks leading up to Leadville were some of the worst Edwards can remember. She got very sick, which took her off the bike for weeks. Then, Magnus White, a 17-year-old racer for Boulder Junior Cycling, a program Edwards coaches for, was struck and killed by a motorist.

After the race, Edwards said that, perhaps not coincidentally, it was those factors that led to her impressive second place result.

“I think I took a lot of pressure off the last few weeks,” she said in Leadville. “This was not the prep I wanted. As a bike racer, we’re all really type A and want it to go perfectly and it wasn’t perfect at all. So, I came in with no pressure and maybe that was what I needed.”

Edwards knew at that time she was going back to the road, and she hinted in her post-race interview that having certainty about the next steps in her career also served as a release on the pressure valve.

Leadville notwithstanding, the Grand Prix has presented an interesting predicament for Edwards: she initially joined the series because she’d heard gravel racing was fun, “there were aid stations with grilled cheese, these big epic things,” she said. In reality, it didn’t feel that way. So, Edwards then got caught up in the bike racing side of things, which also didn’t feel right.

“Some of it [gravel], it doesn’t feel like racing for me,” Edwards said. “We’re in this situation where it’s like, ‘is this a race?’ It’s very much a race at the top but you’re just going hard. You’re not really racing. It’s ‘seven hours of get dropped by the men, then when we get dropped by the men, maybe I’ll catch someone maybe I won’t.’ And you don’t know what’s going on. It’s really hard and it’s really boring. It’s like a really hard TT where you don’t know how you’re gonna do ’til you get til the line.”

Yet Winder is not joining the growing chorus of pros asking for separate women’s races in gravel or among those debating the discipline’s ‘spirit.’ She’s just realized that gravel isn’t how she likes to race bikes.

“Sure, I understand this stuff from one point of view, but other point of view is that we already have what people are asking for — there are so many different disciplines,” she said. “It’s so cool we have so many because there’s something for everyone.”

Learning from the past

As simple as her reason for leaving the WorldTour was, Edwards’ desire to return is similarly straightforward, although with a laser focus.

“I want to be racing against the best in the field when I’m still capable,” she said. “I’m going to jump back in. And with two feet, I’m not going to jump in to the middle of the pack. I have a lot of motivation to be at the level I was when I left.”

And what was that level? In 2021, Edwards pounced to an early season win at the Belgian classic, Brabantse Pijl, then to second place at Navarra, one of the Spanish one-day races. She scored a stage win at the Giro Rosa, then represented the United States at the Tokyo Olympics. She was second at Donostia San Sebastian Klasikoa in July and then won a stage of the Tour Cycliste Féminin International de l’Ardèche. She represented the USA at road worlds before announcing her retirement.

Yet Edwards’ peak form had a shadowy side. Years ago, she opened up about her struggles with relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-s) and although she made progress toward returning to health, by 2021 she’d trended back toward bad habits. During an early 2022 interview about her retirement, Edwards admitted that her weight had become “unsustainable” by the end of her last season. She also opened up about the mental challenges of gaining weight upon retiring.

In the same way that Edwards has been thinking of returning to the road for nearly two years now, she has also been thinking about how not return to the dark side.

“I have a really good team of people I’m going to work with next year,” she said. “I’ve already voiced my concerns about returning, one is that [health] and the other is being lonely. I think having people in August already knowing that, just saying it out loud, really helps.”

Edwards will continue to work with her longtime coach Ben Day, as well as people in the sports science world like Allen Lim and Mollie Brewer. She’s adding a nutritionist and strength coach, and anyone “we see fit as we go on.” She’s excited to work with everyone as a team, rather than with each of them individually.

“I think it’s gonna be really fun because I have a perspective of before and a perspective of after, and now I get to take knowledge and be the best I can be with all of it.”

In terms of loneliness and missing home and Zach? Edwards has a plan for that, too. With both of them at points in their careers where they can afford to travel more, Zach plans to be in Europe more often. And Edwards said she won’t hesitate to ask for time to come back to the US, either.

“I think I’ll be in a position to request what’s best for me,” she said. “I want people to know I’m here to show up and do my best. If I’m gonna go back I’m gonna go back. But with that, I’ll have a team around me that knows when I need to go home to be my best when I come back. We’re working on the season now.”

Before Edwards skips town for the 2024 road season, however, she’s got one to finish up here. There are two more races in the Life Time Grand Prix series — The Rad in Colorado on September 29 and Big Sugar Gravel in Arkansas on October 22 — and Edwards is currently third place overall.

So while she may have begun to move back to the road in her mind, and subsequently taken some of the pressure off to perform well in gravel, Edwards is in no way checking out. That’s just not how she operates.

“I’m a bike racer, I pin a number on and I’m always gonna try as hard as I can,” she said. “There’s no denying that gravel is much different from any world I’ve raced in before. And it’s definitely not where my heart belongs. But that doesn’t mean that you pin a number on me and I’m not gonna try my hardest.”