I will the machine.

Photo © Tristan Sheldon

“… a researcher’s precision, and a poet’s restraint.”

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My name is Genna. I’m a 30-year-old trauma-informed writer, creative, and ultra-endurance cyclist. In 2013, before graduating high school, I was kicked out of my family home by my parents after an adolescence squandered by domestic violence, hoarding, and narcissistic abuse. Fearful, consistently displaced, but convicted to remain the authority of my future, I picked up bike racing, using the deconstruction of generational and cognitive patterns to use meaning as a road map forward.

For five years, I lived in a classic van to self-support my ambitions, and have since broken the 240-mile women’s Katy Trail record twice, planned and completed multiple solo bikepacking routes, and am currently on a winding but firm collision course with an exponentially greater challenge- the Trans-Am Nonstop.

This is an ongoing collection of essays documenting my progress, exploring thought itself, and parallel stories of human endurance where I invite you, dear reader, into the pulse.

Latest Posts

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  • Endogenous Rex

    Inquiry of a Soloist at The Big Rub Gravel Race First of all, you should know I accomplished the mission. My life force was just starting to recover from the burglary that is burnout, and I just went and dumped my savings on the trail, again. I have so been missing the 100+ mile days…

  • Step Up, or Step Off

    It’s a rather pointed mantra of mine. On its head, it means that if you’re going to engage me, you need to do it completely. It means state your business. It means I’ll wait, but not forever. It’s one part invitation, one part warning, and wholly a wild and redneck carpe diem. Usually, this little…

  • I Bought Myself Flowers

    And then, I let them wilt. I walked into the house one day, having forgotten to top the vase off with water, and saw them drooped on my desk. That was enough for me to come apart again. I filled up the vase, and half of them came back by the next morning. I’ve been…

  • Spellbreaker

    It’s Sunday. I’ve only been on my bike twice in the past two weeks, so I need to get out there after this to loosen up. Tomorrow, I have to start getting up at 4:00 a.m. to ride to work again. I’m telling myself it’ll get the engine going and put loose change into that…

  • Projection, Your Honor (Pt. II)

    If you don’t like the image of yourself in the mirror, then you aren’t going to like me going to like you. The court will recall that this trial is ongoing. _____ Statement of Record– Disrepair Service I was racing with an organized amateur cycling team in Kentucky when the head mechanic of our shop…

  • A Letter to My Readers

    I don’t know who you are, and yet I do. I leave the door to this house unlocked. I swore to myself in January that I would curate heirlooms here even if I was unsure I could afford the time. I come in and out, and you follow me. Sometimes you’ll send me direct messages,…

  • Projection, Your Honor

    Learning to Trust the Part of You that Knows This passage is dedicated to those who have experienced relational dynamics where you felt lost. While you read, I hope you will listen first to that feeling in your core, and then watch for the moment where reason overlaps. Or doesn’t. And then let that have…

  • My Power Grows

    I can’t keep up. I am presently living rent-free in a house that I will have to leave next month. I am waiting for new wheels for my van that are on backorder, and currently have to air up a brand-new tire with my bike pump every morning if I want to drive. I did…

  • If You Can’t Say Something Honest

    I will know. I will cut off the elephant’s head and mount it to my wall there is no tension, or unspoken truth left standing in this hall The greatest devastation in my life actually isn’t not having parents. It isn’t that I’m rootless and uncertain of my immediate future, consistently. It’s not the constant…

  • The Edge

    This is a follow-up post to A Foundation of Sand from May 24th. “I haven’t made a plan. I don’t know how I’m even getting to work, 40-minutes away, on Tuesday, let alone the days after that.” In the hours after I was crumbling on the patio of the coffee shop I wrote that from, remembering…

  • A Foundation of Sand

    This post is edited for errors, but not for anything else. I’m writing straight through this night, no stops. This past Wednesday I gave a condensed version of everything I post here to a room of about 30 people to promote a small tour I am doing at summer’s end. I’m garnering looks with the…

  • Depths Too Dark

    One of the universal languages in endurance sports is that of “the dark place.” It’s where the human mind goes when you’ve experienced so much depletion that the governors of pretense retire, and you’re left with just the raw material of the self again. You meet you. I feel like I lived in that space…

  • Counting Up, and Counting Down

    I turned 30 today. In March of 2023, I made a social media post sharing my intent on making the Trans-Am Nonstop bike race my next big target. Historically, I love putting the proverbial cart before the horse and talking big game about my plans at the risk of them falling apart because, well, I…

  • Fog on the Harbor

    In May of last year I went down to Arkansas for an experimental new ultra race. The massively popular Rule of Three, established in arguably the most bike-centric city in the United States, introduced a 200-mile category and I wanted in. It had been a spring of seriously unsteady income but the organizers got me…

  • If You’d Known Me When I Was Older

    Here lately, I’ve been going to bed at night and wandering Grandma and Papa’s house while the worries of my adult life wait outside. I wake up in the Blue Room; it’s 9:00 a.m. and Papa insists I’ve slept long enough. I walk down the hallway, past the laminated world map with the USSR still…

  • Parhelion

    A Short Story. It was over fifty years ago when they lost the Sun. The whirling, faintly glittering Mists rolled over the earth and changed the way of life for everything. The sky lowered and fused with the sea, and everything on the earth entered delirium. The only sign of stars or moon for mortals…

  • The Ghost of a Giant

    Meeting and Chasing an International Hero I haven’t yet become familiar with a successful competitive athlete with a story like mine. I’m sure they are out there. I hope they are. My whole “why” in endurance sport is to serve as an example of what can be done anyway, when the social support (namely, family…

  • My Mother’s Shadow Sister

    I am compelled to begin with a disclaimer. I refuse to write on the surface of things and the story I tell here is intense. I am a decade removed from the life I talk about ahead, which lends itself to forgetting detail. You’ll have to excuse me, I was a kid. I am obligated…

  • The Eulogy of the Man Who Always Came to My Rescue

    -‘Peace be Still’, by Candy Christmas plays- “As once I was, I shall never be. As now I am, I shall ever be.”-Jerry Lewis Olliff, aka “Granitehead” Good morning, Vietnam. Thank you, to each and every one of you, for being here today. I hope this afternoon finds you well, but I also hope it…