What would you do if your dreams were derailed by events outside your control? What if it was your own body that let you down, by causing you unbearable pain?
You probably wouldn’t switch to a sport you had almost no experience in – or take on one of the hardest races in its history. And you wouldn’t attempt it with only six months to prepare.
But that’s exactly what Sarah Ruggins did.
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As a young athletics superstar, Sarah was on course to compete in the Junior Olympics. Instead, she spent two-and-a-half years battling a harrowing nerve condition after surgery on her feet stopped her teenage running career in its tracks.
Undeterred, Sarah pivoted to cycling and signed up for a daunting challenge – perhaps the perfect one for someone looking to push their body and mind to the limit: the Transcontinental Race (TCR).
Sarah’s story was featured in Issue 124 of Rouleur Magazine.
Sarah fought her way through 3,400km of the race, enduring single-digit temperatures in the Alps to over 40 degrees on the slopes of Greece.
Her race came to a dramatic end high in the Greek mountains, when after a night of fending off local guard dogs and hiking the bike up remote gravel trails, she crashed on a descent and fractured her wrist - forcing her to scratch just a few hundred kilometres from the finish.
At the time she stopped, Sarah was the 5th placed woman and the 3rd placed pair. Given she had only begun her cycling training 6 months before, her performance in the race was all the more impressive.