You signed up for the longest event you have ever done. You have ridden longer distances on the road. You have done sportives that ran past nine hours. But this one is different. Self-supported. Remote. Mountain bike terrain. The forecast for race day looks fine on Tuesday. By Friday it has turned. By Sunday morning at 4.30 a.m., you are standing at a trailhead in arm warmers and a wind jacket and the temperature has dropped further than the weather app predicted twelve hours earlier.
This is roughly where Hannah Otto was on the morning of October 29th, 2023, on the start line of her first attempt at the women's Kokopelli Trail FKT.
What happened next is the most useful failure story in modern cycling, and it is the centerpiece of her conversation with Anthony on the Roadman Cycling Podcast. She missed the record by 15 minutes. She finished hypothermic. She threw up at the line. The film of the attempt — the one that is now closing in on huge view counts on YouTube — only exists because the second attempt eventually succeeded, and the second attempt only succeeded because the first one did not.
The episode is a clinic in long-form FKT preparation. It is also one of the cleanest expressions of what failure actually buys you in a serious athletic project.
Listen to the full conversation with Hannah Otto →
What The Kokopelli Actually Is
The Kokopelli Trail runs 137 miles from Moab, Utah to Loma, Colorado. 16,000 feet of climbing. Mountain bike terrain that includes effectively every category of trail — chunky climbs and descents, hike-a-bike sections with ledges you have to lift the bike over, walls of rock, rolling plains, sand, technical drops. The route is not a road, not a gravel road, and not a tame trail. It is the kind of route that does not let a rider settle into a single rhythm for more than thirty minutes at a time.
The women's record before Otto was 13 hours and 7 minutes, held by Kate Courtney. The previous holders are a roll-call of cycling's distance and ultra royalty — Rebecca Rusch on the women's side, Kurt Refsnider, Lachlan Morton, and Pete Stetina on the men's. The men's record is currently held by Stetina.
This is not a casual FKT. It is the longest single self-supported effort most riders attempting it have ever undertaken. For Otto, by her own account, this was the longest race-format ride of her life. Her previous longest had been around seven hours. The Kokopelli was almost double that. She treated it that way.
A Year-Long Project
The preparation deserves its own headline. Otto and her team began the project in July 2023, more than a year before the eventually successful attempt. They bike-packed the entire trail in two days as a reconnaissance — not to race it, but to learn it. The route does not have signs at every junction. The water stops are remote and require route planning. The physical demands of the trail at FKT pace are not knowable from a GPX file alone.
That recon ride is what allowed her to plan everything else. Where to filter water. What to carry. Where the technical sections were that needed extra time. Where the genuinely steady sections were that could be paced by power.
This is the underrated structural lever in any long FKT or ultra event. Reconnaissance is not training. Reconnaissance is information acquisition. The rider who arrives at a 137-mile route having ridden it once before is not the same rider as the one who arrives having only seen it on paper.
For amateur cyclists prepping a similar one-day ultra — Badlands, Unbound, Trans-Iberica — see our Badlands fuelling strategy piece and the Unbound 200 training guide for related preparation principles. The Kokopelli is shorter than these in distance but the navigation demands are higher.
The First Attempt Goes Wrong
The plan was October 30th. The forecast moved a major storm into the area for that date. They moved the attempt forward by one day. The storm moved with them.
At 5 a.m. in Moab the temperature was 35°F. The opening 6,000-foot climb is the first major segment of the trail and Otto was already three hours into it before the higher-elevation conditions made themselves visible. Halfway up she hit snow. Two to three inches in places. She was wearing arm warmers, leg warmers, and a wind jacket — kit dressed for an FKT attempt, not for genuine winter conditions.
At the summit, the actual temperature was 17°F with 20 to 25 mph winds. The wind chill was in single digits. Her bottles froze. Her water pack froze. The fluids stayed frozen for four and a half hours.
Her only mid-route refill window was at the 5.5-hour mark. Because her bottles froze at the 4.5-hour mark, by the time she reached the refill she had only had one hour to consume what was thawing — and she physically could not drink enough fluid in that window to top up to capacity. The pack and bottles she carried out of the only refill stop were partial. The rest of the day was managed on whatever liquid she had managed to carry past that point.
The total fluid intake across 13-plus hours of riding was approximately 2.5 litres. For context — that is what most cyclists would aim to consume in two to three hours of similar effort under normal conditions. Otto did 13.
Ahead For 125 Miles. Lost The Record In The Last 12.
The cruel detail is that she was ahead of the existing FKT for the first 125 miles of the 137-mile route. The dehydration and the cold compounded slowly. Hypothermia set in by hour seven or eight. By the time she reached the final 12 miles of single track — the closing section, the part where a successful FKT would normally be sealed — she was unraveling.
Her hands had no feeling in them. Eating became difficult because of finger dexterity issues. The body, when it gets that cold and that dehydrated, shunts blood away from the digestive system to keep core organs warm. By the end of the ride her body was actively shutting down its capacity to absorb the food she had been carrying for thirteen hours.
She missed the record by 15 minutes. She finished throwing up at the line.
This is the part of the story most cycling content does not include. The film exists. It went viral. It is a beautifully shot mini-documentary. But the path to the successful attempt ran through this earlier ride that produced no record, no medal, no trophy, no upside in any visible way.
What Failure Actually Bought Her
Otto's reflection on this in the episode is the most important segment of the whole conversation. Her view at the finish line was that she had failed. Objectively. The plan did not work. The record did not break.
Her view several weeks later was different. The framing she lands on is that nothing in training, in life, in the next attempt, felt as hard as that ride had been. Every subsequent training session got measured against that day. Every difficult moment became smaller because the reference point in her head was bigger than it had been before.
This is the function of properly hard, properly failed athletic attempts. They reset the calibration of what "hard" means. The cyclist who has experienced hypothermia at hour 12 of a 13-hour ride does not panic at hour seven of a five-hour event. The dehydration tolerance window is measurably wider. The mental willingness to suffer is more durable. The capacity to compute information at hour ten is built up.
The successful Kokopelli FKT, when it happened, was not just the result of a year's training. It was the result of an attempt the year before that had already given her body and mind the experience of what 13 hours actually demands. The successful run was the second take of a project she could not have completed on the first try regardless of conditions.
For the related conversation on long ultra-distance racing and what 37 ultra races taught one rider, see our piece referencing the same theme. The throughline across multiple Roadman conversations on ultra-endurance is consistent — the work that does not look like progress is often the progress.
How To Pace A 13-Hour Mountain Bike Ride
For amateur cyclists with their own long-format ambitions — Unbound, the Trans-Iberica, longer ultra-distance projects — Otto's pacing approach is worth studying.
She splits the day into two genuinely paceable sections and one un-pace-able middle. The first paceable section is the opening 6,000-foot climb out of Moab, which is roughly three hours of sustained effort and can be ridden to a power target. The second is a 30 to 40 mile flat stretch around mile 80 that allows a steady wattage hold. Everything between those two segments is too erratic to pace by power — the constant ledge hops, technical drops, and short hard efforts produce a power profile that no traditional metric can usefully manage.
For the un-pace-able middle, she used a virtual partner approach. She wrote the previous FKT's splits at 5 to 10 mile intervals on her top tube with a Sharpie. She then raced against those reference splits chunk by chunk. The mental architecture turned a 13-hour effort into 25 to 30 small races, each of them five to ten miles long, each of them with a clear time-based goal.
This is a generalisable technique for any long-format event without traditional pacing markers. The Sharpie-on-the-top-tube version is unsexy and requires zero technology. It works.
For more on cycling-specific pacing for long efforts, see our carbohydrate per hour guide, the hydration guide, and the mountain bike tyre pressure guide.
Bike Setup For Reliability First
Otto's bike setup is worth listing because it embodies the priority order — reliability over marginal speed.
A Pivot Mach 4 SL full-suspension cross-country bike in World Cup mode (100mm front fork, 95mm rear). The full suspension is partly about technical compliance and partly about saving the body across 13 hours. Hardtail at this distance, on this terrain, beats the rider up at a rate that costs more time than the slightly heavier full-suspension setup adds. Kenda Booster 2.4 tyres at slightly elevated pressure to mitigate flats. Rear tyre insert. 32-tooth chainring rather than 34, for the bailout gear in late-ride fatigue.
The principle running through every choice is the same. A major mechanical at hour eight ends the FKT regardless of how fast the bike was at hour one. The marginal weight or rolling-resistance penalty of a more conservative setup is a fraction of the time cost of a single mechanical that requires a 20-minute roadside fix. Reliability beats theoretical speed in any self-supported long-format event.
What Amateurs Should Take Away
For the amateur cyclist with their own ambitious project on the calendar — a sportive that scares them, a 100-mile gravel event they have never finished, a multi-day audax, a personal challenge ride that has not yet succeeded — three things from Otto's experience translate directly.
One. Reconnaissance is not optional. The riders who finish hard events are the riders who have ridden the route, or sections of it, or routes very like it. Bike packing the Kokopelli a year before the FKT was not a luxury — it was the foundation that made the project possible.
Two. The dehydration delay fuse is real. Two and a half litres in 13 hours is the cautionary tale. The losses compound, the cost is delayed, and by the time you feel it, the deficit is too large to recover. Every long event needs proactive hydration and fuelling against a planned target, not a feel-based response to thirst.
Three. Failure is not a wasted attempt. The most generative thing Otto did in the year of the Kokopelli project was fail it the first time. The second attempt that broke the record exists because the first attempt did the experiential work that no training session could have replicated.
If you are working toward a long event and you want help calibrating the year of preparation behind it, the Roadman coaching system is built for serious amateurs targeting the same kinds of ambitious projects Otto's preparation models. For a faster answer on a specific question — fuelling, pacing, kit choice for a long event — ask the AI coach.
Listen To The Full Conversation
The full episode with Hannah Otto — including the equipment deep-dive, the pacing system in full detail, and her own framing of what the failed attempt taught her — is on the Roadman Cycling Podcast.
Two and a half litres in 13 hours did not break the record. It built the rider who eventually did. The work that looks like failure is sometimes the most important work in the project.
