Hannah Otto's FKT ordeal 'hardest thing I've ever done' and fueled success at Unbound Gravel (2024)

Hannah Otto (Pivot Cycles-DT Swiss) is good at racing a bike, be it a mountain bike or a gravel set up, evident by her current second-place position in this year’s Life Time Grand Prix. She’s also good at keeping a secret.

Not once, but twice she attempted a Fastest Known Time (FKT) of the 137-mile Kokopelli Trail near Moab, Utah. The first effort in the winter of 2023 ended in defeat, beaten down by freezing temperatures, hypothermia, lack of fluids and a ticking clock. Otto missed the mark by just 15 minutes after 13 hours of riding. She called it “the hardest thing I will ever do” and gained inspiration to repeat the effort this spring, smashing the FKT by more than an hour.

“Yes, so I did it twice. The first time I tried it, it was the hardest thing I've ever done, and probably the hardest thing I will ever do,” Otto toldCyclingnews about her FKT rides on the Kokopelli Trail, which her sponsor Competitive Cyclist released Wednesday as a film on their YouTube channel.

“It has changed me as an athlete, this experience, because it has totally shifted my perspective as to what is 'hard.' That first attempt, I have never encountered so much physical pain and suffering. And I got through it, even though I didn't get the time, I still finished.

“I felt like a woman obsessed, needing to get this done. And so I had to wait for the snow to clear. Six months later, I came back, I redid it, and this time, I beat the record by an hour and 14 minutes.”

She said she learned how to define ‘hard’, and the FKT pushed her to not only complete her first Unbound Gravel 200, but contend for the victory. The second attempt became her ‘secret training’ for the amount of time and distance needed to race Unbound.

She was in the elite women’s breakaway that came nine riders deep to a sprint finish at Unbound Gravel 200, won by Rosa Klöser (Rose Bikes-MAAP). Otto finished eighth, with the same time as the German, 10 hours, 26 minutes, 2 seconds.

“Unbound would be my longest race [distance] to date, and it felt like a fun little secret that I had. I think a lot of people looked at me, saying ‘what experience does Hannah have going this far?’ But I knew I had done something pretty similar,” she confirmed to Cyclingnews, saying she was the FKT gave her confidence that she “deserved to be here” in the Unbound finish.

“Kokopelli was, in the end, about two and a half hours longer than Unbound. From the physical side, I felt prepared for the distance [at Unbound]. And on that mental side, Unbound was hard. It was really hard. But every time it felt hard, I just kept thinking I've experienced so much harder, and that thought alone can be so helpful in those moments.”

While she finished in the top 10 of the Grand Prix in the first two seasons, the 28-year-old did it without taking the start at Unbound Gravel. The timing of the 200-mile beast bumped into her mountain bike schedule, which saw her compete outside the US on the UCI World Cup circuit. The 90-minute cross-country mountain bike contests were another world away from the 10-hour-plus exertions in Kansas and were a training challenge for her.

“I have been balancing these long events in conjunction with XCO World Cup. You know, when I won Leadville in 2022 I had been fully training for XCO. I raced a World Cup XCO the week before I showed up for Leadville. So that was definitely a big turning point, at least mentally, in my career,” she said.

Otto had racked up numerous cross-country marathon successes as a pro, including a win in the XCM World Cup race at Snowshoe, West Virginia in 2023, represented Team USA at the MTB World Championships and was named to the Olympic Long Team in 2020 for the Tokyo Olympic Games. While she still races with the flat bars in marathon races, she gave up the global MTB World Cup chase in 2023 and became a full-time privateer for endurance events.

“I feel like I have a sort of knack for the distance. It's always come more naturally to me. And so I couldn't let go of that.”

From failure to fortune

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Otto said the failure in her first FKT attempt at the Kokopelli Trail turned into good fortune, as she had cleared her schedule in 2024 of the MTB World Cup races and had a spot on the calendar after Sea Otter Classic’s Fuego XL to go again. This time, the FKT doubled as an opportunity to train directly ahead of Unbound Gravel 200.

Her first-ever FKT was in 2022 on the Whole Enchilada Trail, and she “fell in love with the process” of testing her abilities in an epic, solo adventure.

“I'm a racer at heart; that's my first love. But doing that fastest known time, I saw a whole new side to cycling that I really fell in love with. I feel like FKTs have this purity, because there's no tactics, there's nobody else. It's just you and the trail. And so every single pedal stroke gets to be the fastest that you can go; there is nobody in your way. It's just you and the elements. And I really fell in love with that purity.”

Competitive Cyclist, her sponsor, which helped her with the 2022 FKT, challenged her to find a different route for 2023, and she decided on The Kokopelli Trail since it was in Utah, where Otto is based, and because at 137 miles, it would be her longest-ever distance for a ride, something closer to Unbound’s distance.

“I could not ‘fake’ this trail. It would be by far the longest thing I had ever done,” she said. “It's a true mountain bikers trail and so that that really pulled me in, and would stretch me to my new maximums.

She explained that temperatures dropped dramatically the weekend she made her first attempt, the gauge measuring 35 Fahrenheit at the start and wind chills dropping to the single digits.

“So I got hypothermia. I got frostbite on my fingers. I was peddling in two to three inches of snow and was facing 25 miles per hour winds. All of my water froze for five hours. So I kept going, and part of the reason was I was still beating the time.

She said she was still ahead of the FKT benchmark with 12 miles to go, but then it all unravelled when her body said no more.

“All of these elements, with hypothermia, with not being able to drink, with all of this, my body just shut down, and I missed the time by 15 minutes. So in a 13-hour effort with all of these issues, with all of these external elements, I missed it by 15 minutes.”

Her first attempt fueled her fire, wanting to overcome all the new definitions she had for ‘hard’.

“To go through all of that and then experience objective failure was brutal, it hit me harder than I expected. Walking away from a challenge that I put so much into, knowing that I hadn't achieved my goal, was really painful.”

She defined hard as something experienced both physically and mentally, but the challenge for her was elective.

“A lot of people are in physical pain and suffering that is not by their own will and desire, so I want to acknowledge that I was putting this on myself,” she admitted. “It was very difficult to push through the design to quit.”

She explained that even though a film crew was following her for the day, they made it a rule to not speak or interfere. And then no matter if she completed the challenge or not, it would eventually not be a secret any longer.

“This failure is not private; it's very public, and that can be difficult to wrestle with, too,” she said, ultimately completing the second attempt with a new record.

“Now that I’ve gotten to experience both sides of it, the failure and success, I hope that the biggest thing people can take away from this is failure is not the end of the story. In many ways, sometimes, it can be the first step towards success. I had the opportunity to experience what it's like to use that disappointment to fuel the motivation to try again rather than dying away from that.”