Former Leadville 100 champion Hannah Otto (Scott Sports) doesn't just seek long rides to challenge her fitness and expand her definition of what is hard, she makes it her job to knock out fastest known times (FKT's) and still have gas in the tank to compete at Mountain Bike World Championships as well as finish high in the standings of the Life Time Grand Prix (LTGP).
Ahead of the fourth race in the Grand Prix series at Chequamegon on September 13, Otto will represent Team USA at the UCI Marathon MTB World Championships in Switzerland this Saturday. Last year on home soil in West Virginia, Otto was 16th in her first Marathon Worlds appearance.
The reigning US Marathon mountain bike national champion this time, Otto will compete alongside Kate Courtney (She Sends Racing) in a 125km (78-mile) route from Verbier to Grimentz with 5,025 metres (16,486 feet) of elevation gain. That's more climbing than Leadville compacted into a shorter distance. The men's team will feature three-time Grand Prix champion Keegan Swenson (Santa Cruz) and men's US marathon MTB winner Cole Paton (Giant Bicycles).
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"I'm very impressed with the course they have set up. It's about 80 miles with up to 17,000 feet of climbing. It will be particularly brutal, which I'm quite excited about. I love competing on the world stage," Otto told Cyclingnews.
After a day in the Swiss Alps, she'll fly back to the US for Chequamegon MTB in Wisconsin, looking to boost her placement in the Grand Prix from 10th after three events. Otto is one of the handful of athletes, women and men, who have competed in all four years of the LTGP and finished in the top 10 each of the past three seasons.
"I'm definitely looking to keep that streak alive," she said of targeting a fourth top 10, where riders split a $180,000 cash purse at the end of the season.
"This year does offer a little bit of a different scenario. [The series] started with two gravel races in a row, which put more of the mountain bikers on the back foot. Having reached the halfway point after Leadville, knowing that the next two races are mountain bike races, I think it sets it up to have some pretty nice shifts. It creates a pretty stressful dynamic for all the other events."
Off the beaten path events suit Otto and she considers herself a mountain biker rather than just a gravel racer. From the Mediterranean Epic mountain bike stage race, where she came fourth overall, to a top 20 at Unbound Gravel 200 and a second consecutive podium at the 50-mile Whiskey Offroad, she switches between the disciplines easily. And now she has completed the Moab Triple Crown, a set of non-race efforts for FKT achievements - Whole Enchilada, Kokopelli and White Rim trails in the high desert terrain of Utah.
Otto developed the Triple Crown after she moved from college in Missouri to Salt Lake City area of Utah in 2018 to test her all-around mountain biking skills on three very different trails. She now has set FKT’s for all three trails - the 55-mile Whole Enchilada in 2022, 140-mile Kokopelli in 2024 on her second attempt, and 100-mile White Rim. The 100-mile White Rim trail best time had been 6 hours and 51 minutes and she beat that by 13 minutes on May 2, 2025.
"I wouldn't say that these FKTs are preparation for any of the races. In fact, since we race such long events [in the Grand Prix] we have to be really intelligent about how we use those matches. Because even though people see us racing these events weekend after weekend, the reality of the situation is we're racing the time duration of Ironman [triathlon].
"These are very long, hard events and hard on our bodies, and so we have to be really intelligent about when and how we do these efforts. And so these activities are something that I've definitely fallen in love with."
A former collegiate champion in cyclocross as well as cross-country and short track cross-country in mountain biking, she's now hooked on performances of five to 10 hours. Otto twice won the XTERRA Amateur World Championship in triathlon, so a return to those long efforts was familiar territory.
No race or ride is ever the same twice, even if you reverse the course or return several times to the same path. And that is in complete contrast to her first and last name, a palindrome in both instances. There's no repeatable pattern to her schedule, every effort a new challenge.
"The real challenge for me is figuring out where I can place FKTs in the calendar. And for me, May was a great time, because I was giving off a really big block to train for Unbound, and I also had some time to recover after it.
"The goal that I have in this sport is to demonstrate to people that they are capable of so much more than they imagine. And so I think offering that visual component so people see my struggles, not just my triumphs," she said about her sponsor Competitive Cyclist offering a 20-minute film on their YouTube channel on her achievement.
"Like the first time doing Kokopelli, when I fell short, I think that's really important for people to see and understand that even pros, even the people who put everything into this, still fall short sometimes. That's OK, you just keep going.
"That first attempt on the Kokopelli, it completely changed me. It's the hardest thing I have ever done, and it completely changed my perspective of what hard is, whether it's life hardship or if it's on the race course," she said of missing the best time by 15 minutes as she endured snow and cold temperatures on the first attempt. On the second attempt she crushed the old mark by more than an hour, in 11 hours 53 minutes.
"I have a new barometer that I get to compare to, and it feels a little bit like a super power."
