Stéphane Tempier is a professional mountain biker who has been a fixture on the cross country World Cup circuit for over a decade. He placed second overall in the World Cup series, medaled in the World Championships, and represented France in the Olympics. He currently rides for Trek Factory Racing. In this interview, he and Payson talk about training during France's lengthy lockdown this year, how mountain biking has changed since he started racing, how his role as an athlete has changed with t...
Dec 22, 2020•52 min•Season 1Ep. 94
Over the course of a more than 30 year career, Rebecca Rusch has become one of the foremost athletes in ultra-endurance adventure sports. Whether rock climbing, white water rafting, gravel racing or bikepacking, Rebecca has demonstrated time and again that she is the undisputed “Queen of Pain.” Four time winner of the Leadville 100, 24 hour solo mountain biking world champion, Emmy Award winner, multi-time Eco Challenge competitor, author, public speaker, and philanthropist—the list of her accom...
Dec 15, 2020•1 hr 24 min•Season 1Ep. 93
Hattie Harnden is a professional cyclist whose relatively short career has spanned multiple disciplines and garnered her both national and international titles. In addition to being U21 enduro world champ, she also became the UK elite cyclocross national champion at the age of 18 earlier this year, and holds multiple national titles for cross country. In this episode, Hattie tells Payson about juggling so many disciplines, and whether she's planning on adding a few more to her CV. She talks abou...
Dec 08, 2020•50 min•Season 1Ep. 92
Evie Richards is a cross country and cyclocross racer who rides for Trek Factory Racing. She won the U23 cyclocross World Championship in 2016 and 2018, and achieved second place in cross country at the Commonwealth Games in 2018. Earlier this fall, she gained her first elite mountain bike World Cup win in the short track race in Nové Město, Czechia. In this conversation, she and Payson talk about her rapid rise to elite international success, including the contentious sprint finish at Nové Měst...
Dec 01, 2020•58 min•Season 1Ep. 91
Kerry McCauley is a ferry pilot who delivers planes around the world, usually on routes that not many other pilots are willing to take. The planes are often too small to safely make the journeys, but need to be delivered to an owner across the world and can’t be transported any other way. In this job, Kerry has flown nearly fifty different kinds of planes to sixty countries. He also owns a skydiving school and flies corporate jets. In this episode, he tells Payson some of his most harrowing adve...
Nov 24, 2020•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 90
Martha Schoppe is a smokejumper, one of a select group of firefighters that parachute to the location of the wildfires they’re tasked with controlling. Out of the 400 smokejumpers across the country, only nine are female. Martha joins Payson to talk about the extreme physical and mental demands of her work, much of which takes place before they even reach the fire. From sewing their own gear to jumping from 3,000 feet into perilous terrain to hiking with 140 pound packs in all kinds of weather, ...
Nov 17, 2020•3 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 89
Sarah Sturm is an all terrain cyclist who’s raced road, cross country, cyclocross, and gravel. After moving to Colorado to attend Fort Lewis College, she fell into mountain biking almost by accident. After a few years on the collegiate and development scene, however, she quit racing altogether. It wasn’t until she returned to the sport in 2018 that she found seemingly non-stop success, winning back-to-back singlespeed cyclocross national championships, the crit race at Sea Otter Classic, and pla...
Nov 10, 2020•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 88
Alison Tetrick is a professional cyclist who started her career racing on the road in the WorldTour before transitioning to gravel, for which she holds three world championship titles. In this interview, Alison chats with Payson about how her 85 year old grandfather convinced her to switch from collegiate tennis to cycling, the year she spent living in Bergamo, Italy riding for the UCI WorldTour team Astana with teammates who didn’t speak English, and the 2010 crash that left her with a traumati...
Nov 03, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 87
Paris Gore is a photographer whose work has featured in ESPN, Bicycling Magazine, National Geographic, and Outside Magazine. His clients have included Adidas, Red Bull, SRAM, and BMW. Throughout his career, Paris has focused on outdoor action sports, and particularly mountain biking, where he’s captured some of the sport’s top athletes in their most triumphant and iconic moments. In this interview, he tells Payson about how giving up on his childhood dream of becoming a professional mountain bik...
Oct 27, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 86
Hannah Bergemann is a freeride mountain biker whose performance at Red Bull’s first ever female freeride event, Formation, gained her widespread public attention in 2019. As the first person to drop in at the event after days of building the perfect line, she set the tone for the rest of the day and established herself as one of the sport’s most promising riders. In addition to freeriding, Hannah continues to compete in Enduro races, winning the Trans BC Enduro in 2019. In this conversation, she...
Oct 20, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 85
Kait Boyle is an ultra-endurance mountain bike racer whose achievements on the bike include winning the 24-hour World Championship in 2018, holding the women's record on the Arizona Trail 300, and being a two-time winner of 24 Hours in the Old Pueblo. Her results often challenge both female and male records, and she continues to hold the fourth fastest time on the Arizona Trail 300. In this episode, she tells Payson about how a rock climbing injury got her into mountain biking, and how she start...
Oct 13, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 84
Jesse Jakomait is a bikepack racer and SRAM design engineer who holds the record on the Colorado Trail. He broke the record on his fifth attempt in 2015, completing the 562 mile route from Durango to Denver with over 75,000 feet of climbing in just under five days, beating the previous record by more than eight hours. To achieve this, he rode for 23 hours at a time, sleeping a total of three hours throughout the whole race. In this interview, Payson talks to Jesse about his years’ long quest to ...
Oct 05, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 83
Kurt Refsnider is a professional bikepack racer who holds records for the Arizona Trail 750 and Grand Loop. He’s also won multiple bikepacking races including the Tour Divide, and Colorado Trail Race. In this conversation, he and Payson talk about how he got into cycling in his teens, why he chose to abandon cyclocross and crits for ultras, and the seemingly risky decision to quit his day job as a geology professor and pursue bikepacking full time. They talk about some of his sketchiest moments ...
Sep 29, 2020•1 hr 28 min•Season 1Ep. 82
Freeride pioneer and adventure mountain biker Eric Porter joins Payson from his home in Park City, Utah to talk about his adventures on the bike. As one of the first professional freeriders, Eric’s cycling career dates back to the early 2000s when he starred in some of the most iconic mountain biking film series of the era, such as Kranked and Chain Reaction, and competed in some of the first slopestyle competitions. Since then, he’s transitioned into adventure mountain biking, documenting his e...
Sep 22, 2020•1 hr 27 min•Season 1Ep. 81
Sepp Kuss checks in from Grenoble, France on a rest day between stages 15 and 16 of the Tour. Since he was last on the show in December 2019 (Episode 41), Sepp’s star in the pro peloton has continued to rise. In August, he won the final stage of the Critérium du Dauhiné, just days before starting his first Tour de France, where he continues to prove his standing as one of the ProTour's most promising young riders. In this episode, he talks about the whirlwind of the past year of racing and how’s...
Sep 15, 2020•37 min•Season 1Ep. 80
Nichole Baker returns for the last episode in this four part series to talk about her nonprofit organization, Path of Logic. Founded in 2016 after Nichole’s eye-opening trip to Haiti (which is detailed in Part 2 of this series), Path of Logic supports the research, supply, and staffing of pathology labs in southwest Uganda, which provide services for several million people. Nichole talks about how she used the disastrous experience in Haiti to inform the creation of Path of Logic, and explains w...
Sep 08, 2020•1 hr 55 min•Season 1Ep. 79
In this third part of our ongoing series, Nichole Baker talks to Payson about some of her most thrilling and harrowing adventures by bike. From screaming monkeys, tree climbing tigers, and unexpected snowstorms at 13,000 ft., her stories in this episode span a range of continents, physical demands, and levels of discomfort. She talks about uncovering a mythical trail in the Colorado backcountry, trekking across the Himalayas, and finding herself in the middle of a Ugandan hostage exchange. She e...
Sep 01, 2020•2 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 78
Nichole Baker returns to the show to talk about her rocky introduction to international charity work while on a trip to Haiti in 2016. Tasked with setting up a pathology lab and teaching local pathology students in Cap Haitïen, she arrived to discover that her students were on strike, her translator didn’t speak English, and the lab had no electricity or running water. Nichole talks about this rude awakening to the realities of foreign aid work, where many organizations are ignorant of the commu...
Aug 25, 2020•1 hr 57 min•Season 1Ep. 77
Nichole Baker is an adventure athlete, philanthropist, and medical professional (who also happens to be Payson’s girlfriend). Her work as a pathologist’s assistant and athlete has taken her all over the world, including to Uganda, where she founded a nonprofit that supports pathology students and medical facilities. In this conversation, Nichole talks about how she became a pathologist’s assistant after an unconventional and at times difficult childhood. She talks about dissecting body parts, sa...
Aug 18, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 76
Eliot Jackson is a downhill mountain biker who rides for the Giant Factory Off-Road Team. He’s competed on the UCI World Cup circuit and on the Crankworx World Tour, finishing 3rd at Crankworx Rotorua in 2017. In this interview, Eliot talks about his many interests off the bike, and how his passion for computer programming has led to his latest venture, Reggy, which he describes as a combination of Strava and Airbnb. He also talks about the surge in attention he’s received from brands following ...
Aug 10, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 75
Mark Twight returns to the show to talk about transitions, decision paralysis, and, of course, the nuances and science of athletic optimization. Throughout his varied career, Mark has been a pioneering mountaineer, photographer, writer, and trainer to military personnel and some of Hollywood’s most famous actors. In this episode, he reflects on psychological impact of leaving his celebrated climbing career for an unknown future at the age of 39, and his struggle with finding new avenues of fulfi...
Aug 04, 2020•1 hr 27 min•Season 1Ep. 74
Sean Hopkins is a quality engineer at SRAM. He joins Payson to talk about how he fell in love with bikes while growing up on the south side of Chicago, being stopped by the police as a child on suspicion of stealing the bike he was riding, and the pattern of obstruction he faced as a junior racer that eventually led him to quit racing altogether. He tells Payson about discovering a love for writing and reading as an adult, his recent article in Bicycling Magazine, and how his grandmother’s battl...
Jul 28, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 73
Koen de Kort is a professional road cyclist who currently rides for the UCI WorldTeam Trek-Segafredo. After 15 years on the WorldTour, he is one of the most respected road captains in professional cycling, making tough tactical decisions during races and maintaining the focus and collaboration of his teammates. In this interview, Koen talks about why he ended up in this role, and why it fits his style of racing. He also talks about the self doubt he struggled with early in his career during the ...
Jul 20, 2020•58 min•Season 1Ep. 72
Rachel Olzer is an activist, evolutionary biologist, and mountain biker, who has become a leading voice in the current wave of racial justice advocacy taking place across the world. As a transracial adoptee growing up in an all white family, she had to navigate the cognitive dissonance of a grandmother who vocalized deep-seated racism and a family whose conservative politics were directly at odds with her own experiences as a person of color. It wasn’t until she moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota f...
Jul 14, 2020•1 hr 55 min•Season 1Ep. 71
Ruth Winder is a professional road cyclist who rides for the UCI Women’s WorldTeam Trek-Segafredo. In this conversation, she talks about her nail-biting win at road National Championships last year, and why her experience doing the Everest Challenge in May was even harder. She opens about her struggle with an eating disorder early in her career when the team she was on requested that she lose weight in order to enhance her skills as a climber. She talks about the ways in which disordered eating ...
Jul 07, 2020•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 70
In this episode of Quarantine Companion, mountain bike World Champion Kate Courtney returns to the show to talk about how her life and training have changed in the last few months. She and Payson talk about her covid-19 fundraising challenges, why the last few months have provided her with greater confidence in her process, and why the support of the global cycling community is more important now than ever. They also talk about some of her top secret preparations for the postponed Tokyo Olympics...
Jun 30, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 69
Chloé Dygert is a track cyclist who has won five world championships and a silver medal from the Rio Olympics in 2016. She currently races for the UCI team Sho-Air Twenty20. In this conversation, she tells Payson and Justin about how her extensive history of injuries has only served to strengthen her drive and competitive mindset, how she managed to win every single title at the 2019 Colorado Classic, and why she’d rather quit than get second place. She also talks about her goal of competing in ...
Jun 23, 2020•54 min•Season 1Ep. 68
In this special episode, Payson and Justin are joined by fellow pro cyclist, Christopher Blevins, for a wide ranging conversation about racial justice. Growing up as one of the only people of color in his small mountain town, Chris confronted the realities of race in America from an early age, and has gone on to study criminal justice and prison reform in college. Justin shares his own experiences of growing up in a predominantly black and Latino part of Los Angeles, and how racial inequality wa...
Jun 16, 2020•1 hr 39 min•Season 1Ep. 67
Coryn Rivera is a road cyclist who rides for the UCI WorldTeam Team Sunweb. Over her 16 years of racing, she’s achieved 72 national titles and won the Tour of Flanders in her first year on the World Tour. In this conversation, she talks about growing up racing and training with Justin in California as a junior, the nail-biting team relay at Collegiate Nationals when she went head-to-head with Payson’s team and forced him to dig deeper than he’s ever gone, and the cultural challenges of moving to...
Jun 09, 2020•1 hr 27 min•Season 1Ep. 66
Chase Garrett is a former Red Bull athlete marketing manager, and founder and CEO of Icon Source, an online marketing platform connecting brands with like-minded athletes from all realms of professional sport. Throughout his career, Chase has managed athletes and agents in tennis, NFL, MLB, NBA, cycling, snow, and motocross. In this conversation, he talks with Payson and Justin about why he chose to leave his dream job at Red Bull after six years to start his own company, what it was like workin...
Jun 02, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 65
