Issue link: http://trailridermagazine.uberflip.com/i/1540851
10 Trail Rider www.TrailRider.com Nineteen Months Earlier If you ask the Europeans, this story began nineteen months earlier, when I showed up to the EnduroGP series unexpectedly and almost by accident. Sure, it was something on my bucket list. I thought it would be cool to be the first American woman to win a round of EnduroGP. I'd met many of the EnduroGP women and competed against them at ISDE. Fol- lowing along with their social media accounts, watching videos from a beach test prologue or an epic extreme test, while I grouchily raced the Big Buck GNCC (a dusty Big Buck, no less) for the seven- teenth me, I could feel Europe calling my name. But it was s ll a bucket-list-long-shot-wouldn't-it- be-cool-if-pipe-dream sort of situa on, un l things with Sherco began falling apart, not three months a er I signed my contract. There were financial issues, my contract wasn't ge ng filled, and I was in a bind. I didn't want to spend all my money rac- ing in the US for a company that couldn't support me. I didn't want to break my contract by riding a different brand bike and therefore lose any claim to the substan al (for a person who lives in her van) amount of money I was owed. Then, a brilliant solu on came to me like a bolt from the blue. Nieve Holmes, one of my counterparts who rides for the Great Britain ISDE team, was a Sherco dealer who did EnduroGP, and the two of us were pre y friendly. Two phone calls, a flurry of texts, and one wire trans- fer later, I'd bought a Sherco 300 SEF from her, and we would be traveling together and sharing expenses for a season of EnduroGP. We thought it would be really funny to surprise everyone and not tell them I was coming… and boy, were they surprised! But they took it well enough, and I was greeted with mostly open arms. At the first round, I realized EnduroGP was just close enough to ISDE that I was lulled into a false sense of security. If not for my more experienced teammate and her outrider/team manager/business partner, I would have floundered helplessly. Despite some con- fusion and missteps, I arrived on scene in spectacular fashion, winning the SuperTest on Friday night, then turning around and winning the first EnduroGP I ever raced the next day. Things would not stay that smooth. A mechanical in a test at Portugal II, and then a self-inflicted DNF in Italy (where I failed to correctly read my route sheet,