Maude Farrell on winning the Lead Challenge after months of balancing cycling and ultrarunning

With Pace

Payson McElveen

Outdoors, Interviews, Society & Culture, Current Events, Culture, Photography, Adventure, Mountain Biking, Celebrities, Inspirational, Basketball, Health & Fitness, Entrepreneur, Cycling, Athletes, Sports

4.9 • 727 Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2025

⏱️ 97 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mountain bike racing is hard. Ultrarunning is hard. So why did Maude Farrell decide to make things extra brutal for herself this season by combining them? Earlier this month, she won the Lead Challenge, a multi-month series comprised of five trail running and mountain bike races at over 10,000 feet. The final week of the series involved racing the Leadville 100 mountain bike race, running the Leadville 10k the next day, and running the Leadville Trail 100 race six days later. Maude sat ...

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Pace McElvin and this is the WithPace podcast.
0:12.2	That was when my competitive side turned on and I was like I'm fucking winning this.
0:16.4	Like I'm not, I cannot walk out of this without winning it.
0:20.6	Like I come this far and it, it did spark and it was like, again, it just felt like this
0:25.9	moment of, I trusted my voice to be like, don't worry about it, don't worry about it, until
0:30.2	it was time to worry about it.
0:33.3	And it was a really, really tough battle.
0:35.1	I cursed up my sister and yelled at her and was so mean to her in the last 12 miles,
0:38.7	and she was so loving and patient.
0:41.9	Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show.
0:44.7	We're going back to Leadville, Colorado one more time.
0:50.1	But not for the bike race.
0:52.0	Chat about the bike race a little bit, but we're going back to talk about the lead challenge.
0:58.6	Many of y'all listening, I'm sure, if not everyone, will have heard of the Leadville 100, but probably fewer will have heard of the Lead Challenge, which combines many of the Leadville race series most notorious bike races and running races
1:15.3	into one more or less two-month challenge.
1:19.1	And it's crazy.
1:21.2	And I happen to be friends with the woman that won this year, Maud Farel.
1:32.0	I kind of had ulterior motives inviting Maud up the hill to do this interview just 36 hours after she finished the lead challenge, which ends with a 100
1:38.2	mile run on a very similar course to the 100 mile mountain bike race, which she did just the weekend before.
1:46.7	I was hoping to get her up here close enough to the end of that 100 mile run that, you know,
1:52.1	should be kind of raw.
1:54.6	Vocabulary might be a little iffy.
	...

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