At peace with her place in the sport, Merrill considers retiring

BRECKENRIDGE — Monique Merrill turned to adventure racing six years ago because she needed to escape.

The life she’d built for herself had been shaken, violently, by the death of her partner, Chris Ethridge, who was hit and killed by an elderly driver while riding his bicycle near Boulder.

“I got into it,” she said, “to get away from stuff, to get out of Breckenridge ... kinda to forget about Chris.”

In those early days she did not discriminate about which races she entered. The more the merrier. The farther away the better.

“I never had any goals,” she said Wednesday, 11 days after celebrating her 38th birthday on the starting line of the Adventure Racing World Championship in Scotland. “I don’t even think I knew what ‘world champion’ was.”

She does now. The mirror tells her. After spending half a decade as one of the world’s top female competitors despite never winning a major expedition race, Merrill has won the last two Adventure Racing World Championships, as well as last summer’s Primal Quest expedition in Utah — all in less than a year.

Suddenly, no woman in endurance racing can match her success. Which is why she’s seriously considering leaving it all behind.

“Now that I’m there and I have these three wins, I kinda wanna quit,” she said.

Then she laughed, as if her words took a moment to travel from her mouth to her ears.

“Not quit, but I don’t want to lose it. When you’re on top, you can only go down.”

She explained: “It’s kind of a fringe sport and there’s other things in my life that define me, too. Like my business, my friends. I just don’t feel like (adventure racing) is that hard for me. I’m pretty used to discomfort. I’ll go ride my bike in my jeans if that’s what I have on after work.”

For years, Merrill wanted only to race with a team that challenged her, she said — a team with which she had to strain to keep up. Finally, she earned a spot on Team Nike, the world’s No. 1 squad. Her yearn to be challenged was fulfilled, and the victories followed.

Now, however, she said her racing career has shifted the balance in her life, tilting it to a point she’s not necessarily comfortable with. She wants that to change.

“It’s just hard. I don’t feel like I want to go to these races and not win. And I’m not sure that’s healthy,” she said.

“Even now, I’m like, if I’m gonna go there and not win, I’d rather go backpacking. Or biking in Italy.”

Merrill’s peers in the sport recognize that she has a gift for long-term suffering, and that adventure racing would thus be losing a rare specimen.

“I’m not sure what it is about her,” said her Nike teammate, Mike Kloser, “but when she gets done with these races and everybody looks pretty haggard, she looks like she could start the race over again.”

Merrill won’t commit to when, or if, she will quit the sport entirely, saying only, “There’s a lot of variables involved.”

She intends to race at the Raid in Chamonix on July 1. Beyond that, she has no more races scheduled.

<i>Devon O’Neil can be contacted at (970) 668-4633, or at doneil@summitdaily.com.</i>