Lee Craigie on life and new dreams after competitive cycling

She crosses the line, a mixture of elation and relief sweeping her face. Craigie is a British champion. Fast forward a decade and Craigie, now 44, has crossed another finish line, this one a markedly different kind of milestone. 

This month has seen her publish a memoir, the aptly named Other Ways To Win – a thought-provoking and mesmerising read about success, goals and navigating the road less travelled. A story of inspiration and failure and, ultimately, finding fulfilment in the places you least expect it. 

Writing with unflinching honesty, she recounts epic adventures and covers her experiences of friendship, loss, grief, joy, identity and the life-affirming power of the outdoors. 

For those unfamiliar with Craigie, here is the crib notes version. The youngest of two daughters, she was born in Glasgow and spent much of her childhood riding around the rugged Campsie Fells and Lenzie Moss. 

Her first bike was nicknamed Kitt – a nod to the magical talking car in the 1980s TV show Knight Rider. She knew from an early age that her trusty steed could bring much-needed escapism. 

Yet, Craigie’s path into top-level mountain biking was far from conventional. It was something she only began to pursue seriously in her mid-20s. Her impressive achievements include racing at two World Championships and the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games.

Since retiring as an elite athlete, Craigie has gone on to set up women’s cycling collective The Adventure Syndicate and do stints as both Active Nation Commissioner for Scotland and Ambassador for Active Travel.

She has tackled the not-for-the-fainthearted Tour Divide, traversing the length of the Rockies from Canada to the Mexican border, and taken part in the Silk Road Mountain Race, a gruelling bikepacking event through Kyrgyzstan.

Here, in an interview drawing from the subject matter of her memoir, Craigie shares some of the biggest lessons she has gleaned from her remarkable journey so far.
 
BREAKING THE MOULD

Craigie is a force of nature. Whether it was interviewing her on that victorious Sunday at Cathkin Braes back in 2013 or in our regular conversations in the build-up to the Commonwealth Games a year later, she stood apart as a different breed of athlete. 

Forthright and open, Craigie is the antithesis to many of her media-trained peers with their carbon-copy soundbites. She speaks from the heart. A deep thinker. Her replies a breath of fresh air. 

Growing up in the 1980s, Craigie similarly railed against convention. In Other Ways To Win she recalls how she and her elder sibling Kim “caused a few raised eyebrows” with their “tomboy status”. Not least when Kim, then five, introduced herself to a teacher as “Ross” and said her younger sister was called “Nigel”.

“As we emerged into adulthood, societal pressure intensified and we felt forced to choose what side of the gender divide we were on,” writes Craigie. 

“Kim emerged from her world of tracksuit bottoms and spiked hair into an attractive, popular teenage girl, who neatly fitted the female mould, but when it was my turn, I found it harder to let go of the Nigel in me.”

Craigie remembers how during this time, she “physically couldn’t stomach the idea” of conforming to “look more stereotypically female”.

This chapter of the book is powerful and incredibly moving. When I ask about this period of her life, Craigie answers with thoughtful candour. 

“I guess we do have a template we are supposed to fit into, whether that is a gender template or a class template or a family expectation template,” she says. “We all live by these restrictions on who it is that we might grow into being. 

“It massively affects us. It can make you very unhappy if it is all external insistence on those templates. If it doesn’t ever come from somewhere within you, where you have thought, ‘What is it that actually makes me tick? When am I most happy? When do I feel free and content?’ 

“If no elements of that are guided by what makes you happy, then it is a bit of a recipe for disaster,” she adds. “I think about all the young people who grew up in my generation where we were forced to fit into binary gender terms. There was so much heartache in that. 

“You were either a boy or you were a girl. It was a very cut-and-dried, black-and-white, way of being in the world. If you didn’t fit into that, then you rocked everybody else’s boat. They couldn’t quite put you in a box and so it was frightening to them.”

CONNECTING WITH SOMETHING BIGGER

Perspective can change everything. “If you can just take yourself out of that [situation] and ride your bike into the hills to connect with what it means to be a human being, part of an ecosystem on this planet – something much bigger than the small, petty-mindedness of gender stereotypes,” she says.

This, asserts Craigie, can help it to “become clear how it is you need to be in the world” and provide “the confidence to go, ‘Don’t put a label on me, this is who I am, and I am comfortable with that.’ 

“The more people who do that and don’t fall into this trap of having to identify themselves as one thing or the other – and I don’t just mean in terms of gender – then the more freedom that we have to feel like we belong across lots of different walks of life,” she explains. 

“Connecting with something bigger than the petty notions of what society expects. Connecting to nature and the people who love us and with our own physicality, that brings a confidence and allows an acceptance of self. 

“And then you find your people. You find the people who will accept you for who you are. That’s when it all falls into place. If you live a life trying to fit into somebody else’s notion of what you should be, then I don’t think you are ever going to be happy.”
 
FEELING COMFORTABLE IN YOUR OWN SKIN 

I am curious about how old Craigie was when she began to embrace the freedom to be herself and throw off the shackles of expectation? “I was 16,” she replies. “I had left school. I had to get away from that because it was where it felt all of this negative stuff was being perpetuated.

“I started playing rugby. I found myself amongst a group of women of different shapes and sizes and backgrounds and ages and sexualities and colours. Suddenly I was like, ‘Oh, right, there are millions of different ways to be a woman. It doesn’t just have to be that way I was told it needed to be.’

“Among all of those women, there was such a sense of acceptance, mutual care and respect within that rugby team. That openness and lack of judgement made me relax and gave me the space to figure out who I was.”
 

MAKING NEW DREAMS 

There is the sense that throughout her competitive cycling career Craigie often felt like a square peg in a round hole within the tightly controlled environment that being a full-time, professional athlete necessitates. 

As a relatively late arrival to the ranks of elite mountain biking, only competing in her first race at 25, Craigie found herself with much to prove as she forged her own, arguably tougher, route to success. 

A clutch of impressive results saw her welcomed into the British Cycling fold in the early 2010s. Craigie went from travelling from race to race around Europe in a battered van with a friend, to suddenly being thrust into the cosseted life of a supported athlete.

“I was encouraged to take the lift up the single flight of stairs to my hotel room, close the curtains against the beautiful blue sky and distant tantalising hills, and lie down,” she writes in her book. “I felt like a cross between a small child and a prize pony, and it made me fidgety and uncomfortable.” 

Racing at the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games marked the end of a chapter that had consumed every facet of her life for almost a decade. Afterwards Craigie stood in her bathroom in the Athletes’ Village, peeled off her heart rate monitor and “ceremoniously” threw it in the bin. 

“It was the first day of the rest of my life,” she says. Even though, as Craigie now admits, she had no real inkling as to how that would actually look. 

“There are two different parts to that,” she reflects. “There was the moment immediately afterwards where there was nothing but relief and euphoria, all of the pressure being lifted. I felt an utter freedom for weeks. 

“That felt amazing in the immediate aftermath of the Commonwealth Games. But then, inevitably, there was a big gaping hole. That way of being had taken up my whole life 24/7 for the best part of 10 years. 

“Without the structure of training and a formula – because we all need some sort of structure, even if it is to push against and rebel from – I found myself reeling a bit. I didn’t know who I was or what I was supposed to do. I lost motivation for anything at all.

“I’d had this whole support network of people – coaches, medical professionals, friends and colleagues – around me. I’d had something to do every single day. But then that was suddenly gone.

“When the euphoria of the Games experience wore off and I was left with this big, gaping hole, I was pretty depressed and didn’t know what to do to fill it,” continues Craigie.

“But, in retrospect, it was important to sit with that and not bounce into filling up my time with something else. I needed to mourn that loss. I needed to give that the space it deserved. It was a huge thing and suddenly it was gone. 

“I needed to acknowledge just how amazing it had been rather than feel, ‘Oh, that was a full-on and stressful bit of my life, I am really glad that’s over …’ I needed to mourn the loss of all the good bits. Then I felt ready to move on.

“And it was people and chance encounters and being open and curious again that got me out of that hole and led onto the next chapter.” 
 
SQUARING UP TO YOUR GRIEF

Hope and new beginnings. Loss, disappointment and heartbreak. Craigie has had her share of highs and lows. When she split from her long-term partner Ferga in 2018, she boarded a flight for Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan to spend six weeks alone riding the 1,170-mile route of the Silk Road Mountain Race.

After the death of her dear friend and fellow cyclist Rab Wardell last year, she packed up her bike and began pedalling through the wild landscapes of Knoydart.

“I find it a real emotion regulator,” she says. “It is not always the easiest thing to do because suddenly you are in these places and completely alone with your thoughts and your feelings, which means squaring up to your grief.

“But I find that if I don’t do that, then I will just distract myself in other ways. We are surrounded by distractions in modern day life. I would probably have stayed home and been on my phone. I might have gone to the pub. Or done something else to keep the grief at bay.

“And there is definitely a time for that. You can’t always be chucking yourself into wilderness settings in order to process grief. But you know when it is right for you. That it is OK to be sad and in a beautiful place, held by something much bigger than yourself.”
 
THE HEALING POWER OF THE OUTDOORS

Winning – as Craigie explores in her book – can come in countless different guises. Sometimes it can be as simple as finding a solution to a quandary that has been weighing heavy on her mind. And that’s a valuable tool she wants to share with as many people as possible.

“Once I realised how being physical and in an outdoor setting helps me process emotional or intellectual stuff, I realised I had been doing it my whole life,” says Craigie. “Ever since I was little that would be my way of being at peace with myself. 

“Connecting to my body stills my mind. I find that moving somehow settles the chatter in my brain that detracts from creative thoughts. 

“The number of times I have been stuck with a problem or churning things over and over in my mind and not reaching a solution. If I go on a bike ride or a run or even just a walk in the woods, the answers will come to me.”
 
NOT HOLDING ON TOO TIGHTLY TO A SET OUTCOME

In 2017, Craigie and her friend Rickie Cotter rode the Tour Divide, a 2,745-mile, self-supported mountain bike race from Canada to the Mexican border covering the “equivalent height of five Mount Everests”. 

Craigie battled illness and injury. She faced myriad mechanical issues with her bike. She made unplanned detours. She found strength in adversity. She didn’t give up.

“The Tour Divide had taught me that I always have a choice in how I react in difficult circumstances and that by not holding on too tightly to a set outcome, something even better might happen,” writes Craigie in Other Ways To Win.

Reflecting on it now, she is sanguine. “I had a very tight life as a former professional racer. I was so restricted in every decision that I made for years and years. What I ate, when I slept, what I did with my spare time.

“I held on really tightly to that focus. I needed to be in control. That is very helpful for getting you towards a goal. But once you reach that goal, then what? You have achieved your goal, but the process has not always been conducive to learning.

“The opposite to that is when you travel somewhere by bike and are open to every new experience. You can stop and adapt your schedule if you have an interesting conversation with someone. 

“Being open and curious and not holding on too tightly to a preconceived notion of how something is going to go means that you always win. Your net gain is far greater under those circumstances than if you live your life trying to achieve one specific goal.”
 
THE TRUE MEANING OF WINNING

The biggest wins, believes Craigie, have come when she has been “able to stay in the moment and enjoy the process”. 

Crucial to that, she attests, is mindset. “You can frame an experience, an interaction, a thought, a feeling. If you frame it in the right way, you have already won.

“Even if it is really s*** and not enjoyable at the time, or painful and uncomfortable, there is still something to be gained from that. You are the master of how you think and feel and what you move through life practising. 

“It is not as easy as I am making it sound. The vast majority of the time I am not getting it right. But knowing that if I feel like I am having a s***** time, I can change it in an instant just by thinking about it differently. That is so liberating.”
 
Other Ways To Win: A Competitive Cyclist’s Reflections On Success by Lee Craigie (Vertebrate Publishing, £14.95), is out now