With the finish line behind you, the focus of your fueling shifts from performance to recovery. Exercise breaks down your body’s tissues, and good postworkout nutrition can repair this damage and support your body’s regenerative powers. This helps not only to minimize postevent fatigue and soreness but also to rebuild your body stronger than before so it can tackle your next endeavor.

Immediately following your event, continue to hydrate with water supplemented with electrolytes and amino acids (check out “3 Functional Water Additives to Try” for more on these supplements). You might not have an appetite at this stage, but if you can stomach a protein shake or some other digestible source of protein and carbs, it may be beneficial. (Find more tips on managing impaired hunger after exercise at “Why Am I Not Hungry After a Tough Workout?“)

An hour or two after completing your effort, aim to eat a meal of solid food that includes complex carbohydrates, nonstarchy vegetables, and at least 20 grams of protein.

Further support your recovery by engaging in light movement (stretching and foam rolling are great options), doing breathwork or meditation, and catching some z’s.

(For even more nutrition tips to boost your recovery, visit “A Simplified Guide to Pre- and Post-Workout Nutrition.”)

Your in-race strategy is to keep your tank from sputtering to zero. The two-pronged focus for most athletes is on carbohydrates and hydration.

The exact amount, form, and timing of carbs and hydration will be unique to you, and it may take a fair amount of trial and error to ascertain those details. Still, there are general guidelines to help you determine what works best. These are largely based on how long and how hard you’re working.

The exact amount, form, and timing of carbs and hydration will be unique to you, and it may take a fair amount of trial and error to ascertain those details.

“Time and intensity dictate the fuel,” says Thomson. “For example, if you and I did five minutes of extremely hard effort, we would essentially fire the same substrate. But if we ran a marathon, my time might be three hours and five minutes, and yours might be longer or shorter, impacting our [nutrition] needs.”

 

Top Off the Carbs

Nailing the right amount of energy is a Goldilocks affair. Inadequate carbohydrate intake can lead to glycogen depletion, which occurs when your body runs out of sugar to burn. Many endurance athletes are familiar with this phenomenon, often called “bonking” or “hitting the wall”: The lack of fuel causes fogginess and extreme fatigue and typically leads to compromised performance.

When you hit the wall, it’s not just your muscles that run out of fuel. Your brain, too, runs on glucose and requires a steady supply for proper functioning. Without that supply, you may experience brain fog and loss of coordination and other cognitive skills, says Myles Spar, MD, an expert in ­personalized performance medicine and national director and vice president of medical services at AndHealth.

Glycogen depletion can also lead to digestive upset and impaired recovery after an event. In rare cases, it can cause exertional rhabdomyolysis — a potentially fatal condition in which muscle fibers break down and toxic compounds enter the bloodstream.

Overfueling can also cause problems, notably digestive distress: Excess sugar stimulates the gut to release water and electrolytes, which can loosen bowel movements. Other signs that you’ve ingested too much include lethargy, stomachache, cramping, and vomiting.

The optimal carbohydrate intake ranges from 40 to 90 grams per hour, says Thomson, but this can depend on the length of the event:

• For endurance efforts of 60 to 150 minutes, you may want to stick to the lower end of this range and ingest 40 to 60 grams of carbs per hour.
• For longer endurance or ultra­endurance efforts lasting four to six hours or more, you may benefit from edging closer to 90 grams of carbs per hour. (It may take rigorous training to ingest more than 90 grams per hour, explains Blow, who notes that this approach isn’t necessary for most exercisers.)

Again, finding the right range and timing for you requires practice. Take advantage of your training to determine what works best for you. You might find that 80 grams per hour is your sweet spot but only when divided into 40-gram increments every half hour.

Your experiment should include liquid carbs, solid carbs, and gels. They are all good options — and you can mix and match these as desired and tolerated.

A small banana, for instance, contains about 23 grams of carbs — about the same as a serving of many sports gels and chews. Sports-drink mixes can support hydration and replenish energy stores; super-high-carb mixes can provide as much as 100 grams of easy-to-digest carbohydrates.

In general, Spar recommends trying to avoid carb sources containing high-fructose corn syrup and artificial flavors, preservatives, and dyes.

 

Maintain Fluid Intake

“Hydration is about much more than water intake,” McKinney says. Your needs will depend on numerous factors. These include temperature, humidity, and altitude; your stress levels; and how well hydrated you were when you woke up on the day of your event, among others.

If you sufficiently hydrate prior to your event and anticipate a lower-­intensity effort or one lasting less than 90 minutes, you might only need to sip small amounts of an electrolyte drink. Blow notes that elite athletes competing in high-intensity aerobic events have benefited from rinsing their mouths with a carb-containing electrolyte drink and spitting it out. You can experiment with these methods during training.

Sweat loss can become more significant between 90 minutes and two hours into a race, making it important to rehydrate. As a general target, McKinney recommends drinking about 16 ounces of water with electrolytes per hour of physical activity. This helps replenish the minerals lost through sweating. Some elite athletes choose to measure their sweat rate and adjust their intake to account for sweat loss, she says. (Blow has instructions for testing this here.)

Drinking too much water is less common than drinking too little, but the consequences of extreme overhydration can be as dangerous as those associated with dehydration. Overhydration can dilute sodium levels in the blood, which can cause hyponatremia (an electrolyte imbalance) and water intoxication (a rare phenomenon that occurs when water intake exceeds the amount of ­water excreted by the kidneys).

For athletes who exercise for hours or even days on end, maintaining a precise blood chemistry can be extremely important. Look for ­electrolyte products containing sodium, potassium, phosphorous, calcium, and magnesium to make the most of every sip. (Learn more about the importance of electrolytes on page “How Electrolytes Can Boost Your Athletic Performance” and at “Everything You Need to Know About Hydration.”)

 

Consider Proteins and Fats

By the time you start your event, protein and fat will likely take a back seat to carbs — at least until the race is over. That’s because fat and protein take longer to digest, says Koff. They offer less potential as a quick fuel source and they may cause digestive distress.

But that doesn’t mean you should completely avoid either macronutrient. Test out what works best for your body several times before the actual race or event day.

Protein can help minimize potential muscle damage, a normal consequence of prolonged, intense activity. The International Society of Sports Nutrition recommends consuming about 0.25 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight — about 0.11 grams per pound — per hour of intense endurance exercise when taken along with carbohydrates. For a 160-pound individual, that’s almost 18 grams of protein, roughly equivalent to three large eggs or ¾ cup of Greek yogurt.

For more convenient options, look for — or make your own — bars, gels, or chews that contain protein. (Steer clear of additives, like sugar alcohols, to ensure digestibility.) Plant-based athletes can find options containing protein sources such as chia seeds, nuts, and pea protein. (For more on fuel for plant-based athletes, see “The Plant-Powered Athlete.”)

If you carry a hydration pack, you can mix in protein or amino-acid powders, which offer the muscle-­protective properties of protein alongside water, electrolytes, and carbs. Clear protein powders are a good option if a thick shake is unappetizing or difficult to transport.

Unlike protein, fat doesn’t offer much benefit during an endurance event. “Fat doesn’t turn over into fuel well in the middle of a workout, and, ultimately, it may slow digestion and could cause GI issues,” Thomson says.

Think of fat as an incidental part of fuel, and pick something that you tolerate well. This might include relatively small amounts of fat in, say, dates stuffed with a bit of nut butter or a pat of butter on some sweet potato. Again, spread with a light hand and practice ingesting it during training.

Practice Makes Perfect

It can’t be overemphasized: Make intra-event fueling part of your training. “It’s important to train like you race and race like you train,” Thomson insists.

The number of training sessions needed to ensure a successful approach varies. One study on endurance runners, published in Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, found that two weeks of gut training resulted in improved gastrointestinal symptoms.

Other studies and experts say a gut-training protocol takes four to 10 weeks. “I recommend taking at least a month to adapt to nutrition changes,” says Spar.

During each training session, pay attention to your body’s signals to adjust what, how much, and when you eat. Feeling lightheaded or dizzy can signal dehydration, Spar notes. Craving salt can be an early sign that you’re running low on sodium. Stomach pain and muscle cramps are reliable indications of low electrolytes.

And feeling a lack of energy could be a sign of carbohydrate deficiency. If you crave sugar immediately after a workout, you likely didn’t eat enough carbs before or during your routine.

Learn from your missteps and your successes. Take note of what works for you and rehearse that winning recipe. By race day, you’ll be optimally fueled and ready to go.

Your body uses food as an energy source by breaking down macro­nutrients (carbohydrates, proteins, and fats) into smaller molecules — namely glucose, amino acids, and fatty acids. It then uses them to produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the body’s primary energy currency.

There are several ways your body turns what you eat into what you do. Known as your metabolic energy systems, these pathways all switch on during physical exercise — but their roles depend on the available energy and specific demands of your chosen activity, explains Mike Thomson, CSCS, USATF, a Life Time running and triathlon coach.

Once you begin intense activity, it takes just thousandths of a second for the adenosine triphosphate-creatine phosphate system, or phosphagen system, to kick in. The ATP stored in the muscles can fuel only about six to 10 seconds of serious effort. This system might engage at the start of a race for quick acceleration, but its utility is short-lived.

The glycolytic system provides energy for high-intensity, short-duration bursts of activity. It can produce ATP rapidly without oxygen, using glucose as fuel. It kicks in for short bursts lasting about 10 to 75 seconds — great for picking up speed to overtake a competitor.

It’s the third energy system — the oxidative system — that is most critical for endurance athletes who need to maintain a relatively moderate intensity for a longer duration. This system uses oxygen to generate ATP. The oxidative system is also called the aerobic system.

“Think of it as the body’s slow-burning furnace,” designed to provide the body with most of its energy, says Thomson. This is the system you want your nutrition plan to stoke. (Learn more about the body’s energy systems at “All About Your Metabolic Energy Systems.”)

Mind Your Gut

Because the body breaks down glucose, fatty acids, and amino acids to produce ATP, it might seem intuitive to fuel and refuel for an endurance event with a balanced blend of carbs, fats, and protein. But not so fast.

“Food as fuel is not the same as nutrition for your health,” says  Ashley Koff, RD, founder of The ­Better Nutrition Program. While con­suming optimal amounts of macro- and micronutrients is imperative for overall wellness, the unique needs of a body under duress can make getting them from certain healthy foods hard to stomach.

During intense or prolonged activity, the body diverts blood to the muscles, lungs, heart, and brain, and away from the digestive tract, which may impair digestion and drastically alter gastrointestinal transit time. And hormonal changes during intense and long-duration exercise can tamp down hunger cues and diminish appetite. As a result, it’s common for endurance athletes to experience nausea, diarrhea, abdominal pain, and vomiting.

But digestive upset is not a foregone conclusion, says Koff. She suggests avoiding high-fiber, high-fat, and high-protein foods and drink — all of which are more filling and as a result more difficult to digest — immediately before or during exercise. And limit these nutrients the day leading up to an event.

Thomson recommends avoiding unfamiliar foods, drinks, and nutritional aids the day of — or even in the week leading up to — your race.

“It’s important to train like you race and race like you train.”

So, what should you consume to fuel your performance?

It’s vital to make sure you’re topped up with fluids, electrolytes, and carbohydrates before you begin your activity.

“Trying to make up for a deficit if you start a bit dehydrated or energy depleted by eating and drinking during the activity itself is definitely leaving it too late,” writes sports scientist Andy Blow, BSc, in an article on his training website, Precision Fuel and Hydration. In other words, you can’t play catch-up during heavy activity.

Follow these tips in the days leading up to your event.

Carbo-Load With Care

We primarily store glycogen in our skeletal muscle and liver. An adult can store about 100 grams of glycogen in their liver and approximately 15 to 25 grams of glycogen per kilogram of muscle mass in their skeletal muscle (total storage varies by muscle mass).

On average, adults can store about 600 grams of total glycogen — and you want those stores to be topped off before race day. Rather than eat as much pasta and bread as possible the night before an event, take a few days to shift your carb-to-fat ratio, Blow advises. Your overall caloric intake likely won’t change; rather, the proportion of your calories from carbs gradually increases while that from fat declines.

This doesn’t have to be drastic. An extra spoonful or two of oatmeal or rice (or other carb-rich foods that you enjoy and tolerate) at each meal can go a long way while sparing your digestive tract from an abrupt change, notes Koff. (Learn more about carbo-loading at “What Is Carbohydrate Loading?“)

 

Hydrate Holistically

Like carbo-loading, sufficient hydration is a gradual process and involves more than just chugging plain water before toeing the start line. Samantha McKinney, RD, CPT, recommends the following best practices for hydration throughout your training cycle and in the days leading up to your event.

• Aim to drink at least half your body weight in ounces of water per day, plus an additional 16 ounces per hour of exercise.
• Add electrolytes around workouts. Sodium, potassium, chloride, calcium, and magnesium support muscle and nerve function.
• Avoid drinks and electrolyte products with artificial colors, flavors, or sweeteners.
• Limit excess — or avoid ­— caffeine and alcohol.

 

Plan Your Prerace Meal

It’s paramount to test any preworkout nutritional strategy during your training cycle and to avoid mixing it up the day of your event.

With that important note, here’s what experts suggest for your first race-day meal:

1. One to two hours before your event, consume a meal of easily digestible, low-fiber carbohydrates (70 to 80 percent of the meal’s calories) with low to moderate levels of fat (less than 15 percent of calories) and protein (10 to 12 percent).
2. Additionally, drink 16 ounces of water with electrolytes. (For preworkout food ideas, visit “12 Quick Preworkout and Postworkout Snacks.”)

With ample glycogen and hydration stores, you’ll be set to perform your best when the race starts.

 

Practice Makes Perfect

It can’t be overemphasized: Make intra-event fueling part of your training. “It’s important to train like you race and race like you train,” Thomson insists.

The number of training sessions needed to ensure a successful approach varies. One study on endurance runners, published in Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, found that two weeks of gut training resulted in improved gastrointestinal symptoms.

Other studies and experts say a gut-training protocol takes four to 10 weeks. “I recommend taking at least a month to adapt to nutrition changes,” says Spar.

During each training session, pay attention to your body’s signals to adjust what, how much, and when you eat. Feeling lightheaded or dizzy can signal dehydration, Spar notes. Craving salt can be an early sign that you’re running low on sodium. Stomach pain and muscle cramps are reliable indications of low electrolytes.

And feeling a lack of energy could be a sign of carbohydrate deficiency. If you crave sugar immediately after a workout, you likely didn’t eat enough carbs before or during your routine.

Learn from your missteps and your successes. Take note of what works for you and rehearse that winning recipe. By race day, you’ll be optimally fueled and ready to go.

To reach your next PR — or to simply improve cycling performance — the secret may not be doing another long ride or class. Rather, it may be adding strength and mobility training to your routine.

Strength training helps build durable, powerful muscles and stable joints, which translates to better performance, fewer injuries, and improved recovery.

Mobility work, meanwhile, is “going to unlock your body for the work you’re going to be doing, which helps with proper muscle recruitment, range of motion, and all the things that can help lead to injury prevention,” says NASM-certified personal trainer and corrective exercise specialist Carrie Boyle.

Incorporate these moves recommended by Rachel Andrews, a certified strength and conditioning coach, to help level up your performance.

More on the Moves

Indoor and outdoor cyclists spend a lot of time in one position — seated, with spine, shoulders, and neck bent forward. Moving the thoracic (mid) spine in different planes of motion keeps the muscles and joints mobile, says Rachel Andrews, a certified strength and conditioning coach, who recommends the open book stretch for cyclists.

The ability to twist your spine, shoulders, and neck keeps other joints and muscles from kicking in to compensate for a lack of spinal mobility, which reduces pain and injury risk. It also enables you to check behind you for vehicles while cycling.

To power each pedal stroke on the bike, cyclists must push down with one leg while the other leg is bent behind them. This position calls for strength in the quadriceps (the muscles in the front of the thighs) and hamstrings (the muscles in the back of the thighs), along with help from the core muscles to keep cyclists from falling off the bike.

To shore up these muscles, Andrews recommends offset front-rack split squats. “It’s a similar position as the bike pedal stroke, where you always have one foot forward and one foot back,” she says. Holding a weight on one side can help train your core muscles to stabilize while your legs bend and straighten.

So much may begin with a bike ride. The wind on your cheeks, the sun on your back, and soon, a smile on your face. Your legs spin, your blood flows, and next thing you know, your cares are left behind.

The personal benefits of bicycling are old news: better cardiovascular fitness; boosted muscle strength and flexibility; stronger bones; improved joint mobility; decreased body fat; lower stress levels; and reduced anxiety and depression.

New research suggests that for a whole community, the benefits of biking are even more far-reaching. In technical talk, it’s called “bikeability” — how suitable a place is for biking. If more people climb on their bikes, the personal health benefits add up to a huge plus for public health.

There’s less traffic, for instance, which makes for better air quality. And this can contribute to lower healthcare costs for all, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted in a case study on preventing chronic disease.

That’s just the start to the econo­mic benefits, the advocacy group Blue Zones notes in a 2022 report. More bike lanes and paths, more bicycle parking, and more cycling infrastructure are wise investments in a town’s, city’s, or neighborhood’s economic health.

“The world’s longest-lived people don’t pump iron, run marathons, or join gyms,” says Blue Zones founder Dan Buettner. “Instead, they live in environments that constantly nudge them into moving without thinking about it.”

So, how can you make your life — and your community — more bikeable? We’ve gathered some ideas.

1) Make It Easy

The simpler you make it to just jump on your bike and go, the more apt you are to do it. Create space to park your cycle, remembering that it gets dirty and that it needs to be lockable so your ride doesn’t get stolen. And consider a nearby storage spot for your related gear — helmet, shoes, tire pump, and whatever else you need.

Keep an eye out for fun places to ride, such as bike paths and trails, or a specific destination — a coffee shop, a café, a glorious view, or a cool playground for the kids. You can research rides at bike shops, which often have local maps and advice to share, or via online chat groups.

2) Dress for Success

Keep the gear you need at hand: a comfortable helmet that you’ll want to wear, high-vis clothing, bike lights, and a lock. Consider adding a rack to your bike for toting groceries — or a seat for hauling kids. And be prepared to make repairs: You can learn to fix flats or tune up your ride in group classes at bike shops, from books, or on YouTube.

3) Shift It Up a Gear

The more you shape your daily life and surroundings in bike-friendly ways, the easier it becomes to ride more — a truly virtuous cycle. You might consider an e-bike for grocery runs, transporting children to school, or commuting to work.

In the last few years, and coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic, e-bikes have boomed in usability and reliability, with a wide range of options for racks, multiple-person seating, and weather protection. Try other modes of biking, such as road racing, mountain biking, gravel riding, or long-distance touring. And if you live in a land of snow or sand, you might learn to love a fat-tire bike.

4) Find Your People

Studies show that one of the best ways to inspire yourself to get out and exercise is to have a fitness buddy. Whether it’s for serious workouts or just to get you biking more often, keep a lookout for like-minded cyclists. Bike shops are good places to find group rides of various levels.

Or join a local or national club, such as Black Girls Do Bike, The Black Foxes, or International Cycling Club. And seek out a cycling mentor, someone who knows bikes and can provide advice on buying or maintaining your two-wheeled friend.

5) Consider Commuting

A fine way to make sure you ride regularly — and wash away the stress of work at the end of the day — is to commute via bike, if it’s possible. Less than 1 percent of Americans use bicycles for active transportation, according to the Alliance for Biking and Walking. But the fact that Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis, two cities with major-league inclement weather, consistently top the lists for the most bicycle commuters year after year proves it can be done.

Research safe routes. Secure a suitable parking space at both ends of your trip. And last but hardly least, plan ahead on how to freshen up and carry or store work clothes.

6) Advocate for Bikeability

Your bike ride is just the start. You can help your community ­become more bikeable by working with organizations that advocate to add bike lanes to roads, create bike paths, install bike racks at businesses, and promote bicycling in other ways.

Volunteer for a biking audit, aiding your city in counting the number of riders to assess bikeability. Help your kids’ school become more bikeable by lobbying for bicycle parking, searching out safe routes, and creating a “bike train” of kids for safe riding. And if you’re commuting, recommend that your workplace add a bicycle room for parking and changing clothes — ideally with a shower area (even if you don’t have a shower at your workplace, you can still ride your bike to work. Here are some tips on freshening up).

As bicycling advocate Elly Blue writes in Bikenomics, “The bicycle may not be able to save either the economy or the world that we have now. But it is one means by which we may be able to get through whatever comes next with grace and meaning. And it provides us with the opportunity to build ourselves lives, communities, and an economy that we can truly afford for the long run.”

This article originally appeared as “Get More Bike in Your Life” in the July/August 2024 issue of Experience Life.

On a dark, frigid morning in St. Paul, Minn., Anne Hed, CEO and co-founder of HED Cycling, woke her son, Andrew. It was 5 a.m. — hours before the December sun would rise amid the long Minnesota winter — but this was urgent.

“You’re getting on a plane today,” Anne told her then-26-year-old son. “Rach needs a wheel.”

Before waking up Andrew, Anne had received a call from one of HED Cycling’s top triathletes: four-time Ironman 70.3 champion, Rachel “Rach” McBride, a.k.a. the “Purple Tiger.” When McBride had arrived in Florida for the 2021 CLASH Endurance Daytona the day before, they’d found a broken part on one of their bike wheels. Without the wheel, McBride couldn’t race — so they called Anne.

A few hours later, Andrew boarded a flight from sub-zero Minneapolis to tropical Daytona Beach, where he hand-delivered the new wheel to McBride at the start line of Daytona Speedway. Later that afternoon, McBride finished with a time of 3:37:51 — good enough for seventh place — all of their wheels still in-tact.

For Anne, a last-minute, transcontinental flight to deliver a single wheel to a single athlete wasn’t a difficult decision. “I just wanted to make sure Rach had the best equipment,” she says. “I was concerned, so we just brought them one.”

Rach McBride (left) pictured with Andrew Hed (right)

From the very beginning, the people — not the wheels — have defined Anne’s tenure at HED. Beyond designing and engineering “the best carbon fiber bike wheels since 1984” (which she loves to do, by the way), Anne views her primary role as an investor in people.

As part of our interview, Anne gives me a tour of the HED manufacturing facility in Roseville, Minn. Before walking the manufacturing floor or peeking into the freezer filled with pre-molded carbon fiber, though, Anne pulls up a list on a conference-room monitor; on it, the lineup of HED-sponsored athletes.

As Anne scrolls through the names, she smiles, pausing intentionally on each athlete. “Lionel Sanders is one of the most-loved athletes in the sport,” Anne says, stopping on Sanders’ picture.

“Annie Davis did the 350-mile XL at UNBOUND,” she explains, referring to the 2022 Life Time Garmin UNBOUND Gravel presented by Craft in June 2022 in Emporia, Kan.

“Clara Brown is a para-athlete for cycling,” Anne continues. “Danielle Larson just won a big gravel race out in Europe. Emilio [Aguayo], Eneko [Llanos], and Ivan [Rana Fuentes] are our European triathletes. Jocelyn McCauley’s a mother of two who is doing an Ironman. Johnny Purvis is a gravel guy. Magnus Ditlev is our newest athlete — he’s ranked No.3 in the world.”

Among the expansive and impressive list of HED athletes runs a common thread: firsts. Cody Beals is the first openly gay male professional triathlete. Sika Henry is the first Black female professional triathlete in the United States. Chris Nikic is the first person with Down syndrome to finish an Ironman.

And then there’s Rach McBride, the first professional triathlete to come out as gender non-binary. “If you look at Rach, the ‘Purple Tiger,’ you think you’re gonna get, ‘grrrr,’” says Anne. “But I was just astounded at the demeanor of this amazing, brilliant, and kind individual.

“We are very diverse with our choice of athletes at HED, but it just kind of happened. It’s not like I was out saying, ‘Let’s make our company diverse.’ Cody approached me, and so did Rach. I met Sika at an all-women’s summit. I just look at these folks as wonderful people from all walks of life. They’re all beautiful individuals.”

For Anne, that common thread runs deeper than ethnicity, gender identity, or ability. It’s not about what makes HED athletes different, but rather, what they share. When Anne looks through that list, she sees a group of athletes who have battled through life and overcome hurdles — and it’s where her own story intersects.

“Life is tough,” Anne says. “We’ve all lived adversity.”

Anne Hed (left) pictured with Marilyn Franzen (right)

An Athlete in Her Own Right

When Anne was 13, her parents decided to divorce. In search of an outlet to deal with the emotions caused by the change in her family, she turned to sports. Since she didn’t yet have one that interested her, she focused initially on something with limited barriers to entry — swimming.

“I thought, ‘Well, anybody can make the swim team,’” Anne recalls. Unfortunately, that wasn’t true. Of the 30 girls who tried out, 28 made the team. Anne was number 29. But the disappointment didn’t stop her.

“When you don’t make a team, it makes you go, ‘Well, gosh, I want to be a swimmer.’” Fueled by this new goal, Anne joined her local YMCA, where she started training with the head swim coach, Marilyn Franzen, who also served as race director for the Aquatennial Triathlon (which eventually became the Life Time Triathlon in 1990).

“Marilyn taught me how to swim fast,” Anne said.

Day after day, Anne returned to train with Franzen, shaving seconds off her lap time with every visit. Two years into her training, Anne broke a pool record that still holds today.

With each new training session, her passion for swimming — and eventually, triathlon — grew stronger. In 1981, she competed in her first triathlon in Hurley, Wis., and in 1983, she qualified for her first (of seven) Ironman World Championships in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii.

But Anne had a problem: Since she wasn’t (yet) a professional triathlete, she couldn’t pay her entry fee or travel expenses for Kona. She didn’t own an Ironman-quality bike, either.

Knowing Anne was in search of a solution, one of her friends referred her to Steve Hed, the owner of Grand Performance, a small bike shop in the Twin Cities. “I was waitressing at the time, and I went to Steve’s store,” Anne told Forbes in November 2016. “He was barefoot, shirtless, covered in grease and had permed magenta hair. He pulled out a check, wrote it to me, and it didn’t bounce. That was my entry into the Hawaiian Ironman.”

Steve Hed (left) pictured with Anne Hed (right) racing the Kona Ironman

They’d only just met, but Steve fronted the $100 entry fee and gave Anne a bike. In a sport where only 10 percent of athletes were women, Anne had found herself a sponsor — and, eventually, a boyfriend who would later become her husband.

Beyond covering her expenses and providing gear, Steve also started tinkering with new wheel designs for Anne to ride at her events. “When he saw that the set of double-disc wheels Francesco Moser used to break the hour record were $6,000 a piece, he was like, ‘I really believe we can make something more affordable.’” So that’s what he did.

Equipped with Steve’s new wheels, Anne started winning more races, which got her thinking: “We need some money to make more of these,” she told Steve.

A few months and races later, Anne won a brand-new Subaru as a prize at the Steel-Man Triathlon in Brattleboro, Vt. She used the new ride as collateral to take out a $14,000 loan, and in 1984, Anne and Steve cofounded HED Cycling out of Steve’s garage.

People Before Wheels

From that first set of wheels, the mission of HED cycling remained not on the speed, accolades, or aerodynamics, but on the people. It’s right there in their online bio: “Creating an improved riding experience for every rider.”

“Steve used to travel all over the world to help athletes,” Anne says. “We both came from pretty humble beginnings, and we had to start this just by ourselves. It wasn’t like we had anybody else helping us.”

For many of those early years, Anne and Steve took on the task of “revolutionizing cycling” by themselves. To earn extra income, Anne worked as a salesperson at U.S. Swim and Fitness, which was eventually acquired by Life Time, and became one of their sponsored athletes. In 1989, Anne ended her professional triathlon career to join Steve full-time at HED.

Together, they designed and engineered the fastest wheels in the world — Steve inventing, Anne getting wheels out the door — growing the company from two to 40 over the next 35 years and becoming one of the most respected cycling brands in the industry.

In 2014, the Heds broke new ground: building bike frames. The cycling minds at Cervélo needed a U.S.-based carbon fiber manufacturer, so they approached Anne and Steve about making a frame for their upcoming Cervelo P5X. On the same day Steve met with the engineers, however, the unthinkable happened.

“Steve called me when their engineers were here and said, ‘Anne, we made it. It’s beautiful and it works, and they want us to make their frame,’” Anne told Forbes in November 2016. “That was the very last conversation I ever had with him. He was so happy, like a kid. Then the next phone call I got was, ‘Anne, you’ve got to get to work, Steve collapsed.’”

Outside the HED facilities, Steve collapsed and never woke up. He had a virus in his heart. After 25 years of marriage and building a world-class company from the ground up together, Steve was gone. In one unexpectedly absent heartbeat, Anne had to start this new project, move the company to a new facility, and step into the role of CEO — all without her lifelong partner.

“Life is hard,” Anne says. “I’ve had my ups and downs. You’ve just got to put your foot in front of the next one the next day and just keep moving along. You have to keep being persistent in life. Don’t give up.”

As Anne stepped into her new role as the face of HED Cycling, she quickly learned the value of quality people. In the days, months, and years after Steve’s passing, Anne continued to put one foot in front of the other, fueled by the familiar faces who surrounded her, who’d always been there: her family, her staff, and her athletes.

“I don’t want to do it by myself,” Anne notes. “I don’t want to continue this company alone. I’ve had staff that’s been with me for over 25 years, and collectively, it’s amazing what you can do together.”

Step by step, day by day, Anne and her team moved HED Cycling forward as one of the only woman-owned companies in the cycling industry. In 2016, HED and Cervélo launched the P5X, the frame Steve had been working on when he passed. Later that year, HED launched the VOLO — the wheels on which Team USA’s women’s track team competed at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

“How many times can you reinvent the wheel?” Anne says. “But we did.”

Bringing People Together

Back at the HED facility in Roseville, Anne thinks back on her decision to deliver a wheel to McBride on that early December morning, remembering her own time as a sponsored athlete.

“I’ve been there,” Anne recalls. “I’ve had sponsors throughout my life that have done special things for me. Life Time, for instance, helped pay my health insurance as a young athlete. The organization has just been part of my life ever since I started this sport.”

From the start to today, the stories of Life Time and HED Cycling have intertwined — specifically, in their shared focus on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). As Anne supports athletes like McBride, Sika Henry, and Cody Beals, Life Time has also created a non-binary category for all of its Athletic Events.

And just as the healthy-way-of-life company works to ensure everyone can find a place at its start lines, fitness classes, and athletic country clubs, Anne also seeks to empower people from all backgrounds and circumstances — and not just athletes.

“Thirty percent of our workforce is female in manufacturing, which is really rare,” she says. “We’re really proud of the people we’ve hired. Some of them have degrees in engineering, but I am so proud when I find a young person, teach them a skill, and give them a livable wage and something they can be proud of when they walk out of here. It’s not just about making a wheel to me. It’s about providing jobs and supporting all walks of life.”

In the end (and from the beginning), it all comes back to the people. “I’m just in awe of where they’ve journeyed and what their journeys have been like,” she says. “All of our journeys are different. All you can do is just embrace it and support them, whatever walk or journey they’re going on or how difficult it gets, because we all need that.”

As for McBride, they finished first in the non-binary category at three iconic Life Time events in 2022: Garmin UNBOUND Gravel presented by Craft, Crusher in the Tushar presented by The Creamery, and the Stages Cycling Leadville Trail 100 MTB. They’re 44 years old, but they’re not done yet — not even close — and Anne plans to be with them every step (and pedal) of the way.

“I believe we’ll look back years from now and consider Rach a pioneer,” Anne says. “I know they’re opening doors now, but when my grandchild’s sitting on my lap in however many years, I can say, ‘Yeah, that was one of our athletes, and look at what they’ve done.’”

That’s the thing about sports — cycling, swimming, running: Across all different backgrounds, stories, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and every other definable characteristic, they bring us together.

“It doesn’t matter where you came from or where you’re going,” Anne says. “We all have this love of sport, and it can unite us.”