In her fourth traverse of the Banff, Alberta to Antelope Wells, New Mexico <big>2,745-mile</big> Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, 29-year-old Alexandera Houchin from Cloquet, Minnesota is the first 2-year consecutive women’s winner of the Tour Divide, with an unofficial time of 18 days, 20 hours, and 26 minutes — besting her own 23 days, 3 hours, 51 minutes’ record from last year.
What’s more, she did it riding a singlespeed bike vs gears previously, and broke the existing women’s singlespeed record by a full day.
“Alexandera is a positive force of nature that people gravitate toward,” says George Kapitz, owner of Broken Spoke Bike Studio in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and one of Houchin’s two sponsors. (The other is the Austin, Texas, custom-bike manufacturer Chumba.) “No challenge is too much. In fact, the harder the better. She has determination and the ability to persevere.”
Multiple videos https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=alexandera+houchin
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The 2018 finish line at the Mexican border in blazing Antelope Wells, NM heat —and in absolute solitude— had made the latest of eight grueling biking and running races she’d completed in under 2 years. She pulled open the little gate across the border, to a pop machine and a chair under an awning, nothing else. So she got orange pop, and sat down to drink it. But when her Tucson friend arrived through the swelter with cake and beer, she burst into sobs,
“the way you do when you see someone in a big moment who knows how far you've come...”
...She got into biking 7 years ago when she was struggling with her weight. After losing 120 pounds, she realized she could do anything on a bike.
"A lot of this bikepack racing is me proving to myself that my body is beautiful and strong, even though it doesn't look like everybody else's. It's really hard to be in society today and just have this 'You're supposed to look this way if you're beautiful.' ... my body can peddle up mountains and I can go for days on end...
“[So I’m also here to] show all the other racers and all the other people that aren't racing: All you have to do to finish a bike race is show up and cross the finish line. It doesn't matter how fast. It doesn't matter what you look like. You just go out there, do your best and sometimes your best is first place. Who knew?" she said with a laugh.
The 2018 win topped a year of life changes, beginning with leaving the Mexico-to-Canada 2017 race at 300 miles in, too homesick for the Great Lakes to go on.
For the first time in my life, I began to realize the significance of belonging to an Indian nation. As we journeyed through [southwest] reservations ... I spoke to Indians [there]. All of a sudden, it occurred to me that (we) are the future of our nations.
Soon it will be up to my generation to continue our legacy, to carry on the future of the Ojibwe.
In that first 300 miles, though, she met a rider about to start dental school, and as they rode together, she found compelling how focused he seemed on building a career. They talked about the fact of Houchin being Native American, and of Indian Country both under-represented in the dental field and under-served.
According to the Society of American Indian Dentists, there are fewer than 200 enrolled tribal members who are dentists, yet there’s a need for 3,000 nationwide.
Houchin has said her life before endurance cycling was aimless, one poorly paid meaningless job after another, without plan or purpose. Grown up with her father in a southern Wisconsin trailer park, she weighed 300 pounds on graduation from highschool, and by sheer chance there was no other transportation to one particular job except by bike, a heavy old Schwinn she spray-painted purple for the 20 mile round-trip commute. When it was stolen, she had to find whatever else she could but fast, a fixed-gear with no brakes! Which led to a bike-delivery job…
After the incomplete 2017 race attempt, Houchin moved in with her mother on the Fond du Lac Reservation of the Lake Superior Chippewa/Ojibwe, beginning to repair their relationship and research Native American health disparities.
With tuition assistance as a Fond du Lac member, she transferred to the University of Minnesota Duluth, to double-major in organic chemistry (+ physics, quantitative analysis, etc) with her own dental school goal, and in American Indian studies, to gain larger context for her family's history and her own future.
I have this responsibility to do something for my people … My tribe helped me, I'm going to help them. It was all just that one little [race] where I met this person just by fate..."
She also set her sights on the next race, running up to 22 miles at a time.
I ran the roads of my reservation breathing in the oxygen produced by trees that may have known my ancestors. I traversed that land that generations of my ancestors fought for. I'd never been so connected to a place in my life, and drew strength from a winter of training there..."
Her 2018 Tour Divide plans at first were just to finish, hopefully in 21 days. At Ovanda, Montana, she learned she was in first place in the women’s division, and suddenly it was important to her to keep the lead. Despite storms forcing "a lot of walking, a lot of hike-a-biking, and when it rains 12 hours a day, it just wears on you..." she still covered up to 150 miles per day, averaging 117 overall.
“Leapfrogging" with other riders at similar pace and progress through severe weather and astounding scenery, she found again a situation of people coming to know one another who’d otherwise never have met.
You pull each other through these miserable things where you're not even trying to be there for somebody, but you just are. The friendships that come out of it are so inspiring ... We're just normal people doing this extraordinary thing."
Houchin found it tough to transition from endurance biking back to day-to-day life that doesn't feel hard and seems underachieving. But now she has a sense of purpose that includes riding the Tour Divide again, though she says out there every day you question why anyone would put themselves through it more than once, and very few even that. But as crazy as she says it seems, you finish and say “I’m never doing that again” yet literally the next day, “I can’t wait to get back out there.”
“I had a really big realization this year,” Houchin [said in an interview]. “I won the Tour Divide and a bunch of opportunities presented themselves, but I was torn. I could be a better bike racer if I could spend more time on my bike, but it’s pretty important that I make an impact in Indian country by giving back to my community...”
“I don’t like the spin that reservations are poor, impoverished places, but I do see people really struggling here … I wouldn’t have been able to go to college without my tribe’s support. We’re still a nation within this big mechanism of the United States after all these years. When I ride my bike, I think about that. We still exist because we never give up.”
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