Episode 171: Claire Stevens

Cycling for Pure Experience: Birds, Bliss and Ultra Cycling

“All there is is the experience in front of me,” she says. “And so I ride for that.”

If you’ve been following Claire Stevens’ dot across any number of race trackers, this will make complete sense to you. If you haven’t, welcome to one of the most beautifully honest conversations about why people push themselves across vast stretches of country on a bike.

The Kid Who Rode to Go Birdwatching

Even as a kid, Claire was already doing something that looks a lot like what she does now. She’d ride down to the local park to look at the birds. She wanted to camp and be in the bush and learn about the Australian landscape.

From Crits to Ultras: A Long Way Around

Before ultra cycling, Claire raced bikes on the road. She was lining up for criteriums in Adelaide, doing mountain bike stage races, completing 24-hour events and she even raced against Australian Olympic Gold Medalist, Kathy Watt.

Claire shares how she was always slightly allergic to the seriousness of road racing. She’d bunny hop potholes in the bunch and get told to settle down. The mountain bike scene suited her much better, because the slow bits on tough terrain meant she could actually look at things. She first learnt to mountain bike in Alice Springs, riding before sunrise and after sunset to avoid the heat, and it set the direction for everything that came after.

Racing Ultras for the Experience

Claire is clear that she does sign up to race. She wants to do well. She takes it seriously. But the race format, for her, is really just a structure that guarantees maximum experience in minimum time.

“My why in bikepacking races isn’t necessarily the competition,” she says, “but the influence of urgency and the experiences that are unlocked as part of the immersion in the landscape through long hours in the saddle and distance covered in a short time.”

Claire believes riding with that sense of urgency turns up the dial on everything. Your senses get heightened, you can’t look away and the landscape comes at you an intensity that you don’t experience on a casual day ride. It’s a complete presence but it’s not flow state exactly, which she associates with concentrated focus and something she experiences when she’s performing her job as a surgeon. Rather, it’s letting the ‘world happen to you’.

Riding the Silk Road Mountain Race: Kyrgyzstan at Its Most Brutal and Most Beautiful

During our conversation Claire has her Silk Road Mountain Race backdrop up on screen behind her. It’s a photograph of the top of the Soviet Road in Kyrgyzstan, and it is, as I tell her, the best backdrop any guest has ever had.

Getting to the top of the Soviet Road turns out to be her favourite experience of the entire race even though it wasn’t straightforward. She went up the wrong hill to start with, realised her mistake when she spotted her friend Bajo as a tiny pin dot on the actual route far below, and then had to drop Gertie down a massive scree slope and follow the bike on her backside. When she finally made it to the top, she just stood there laughing because the view, after everything it took to get there, was that good.

The Surgeon’s Approach to Gear

It turns out being a surgeon also carries over directly into how she sets up her bike. Everything has a place and everything she takes with her has a reason. She learnt this the hard way when her rain jacket was buried in her saddlebag and she went from cycling in 30C+ to shivering uncontrollably in the space of half an hour because a thunderstorm rolled in and she couldn’t get to it fast enough.

Now, every item on Gertie (her beloved Curve GMX+) lives exactly where it needs to be for the conditions she might face. She thinks of it the same way she thinks about an operating theatre: the right tool in the right place, accessible when you need it, so you can keep going with the least amount of suffering and the most amount of smile.

But I have a theory that everyone packs a luxury item with them. For Claire, that’s a blow-up pillow (non-negotiable), an inflatable sleeping mat, and her newest acquisition: a monocular. She’s had binoculars before, but they don’t fit in a pocket. The monocular does. She is, as she says, taking weight savings seriously.

A River Crossing That Could Have Gone Very Wrong

Claire shared her account of attempting to cross the Macquarie River during the 2025 Race to the Rock, after it had been raining for nearly 24 hours . At that point she knew that a detour existed but she chose not to take it. She wanted to ride the bridal track to Hill End, and she was confident because she’d crossed rivers before.

This river crossing was different though and she was in above her waist almost immediately. The situation was serious with fast-moving water, she was holding Gertie by the crossbar while branches and logs piled up around them. Claire still doesn’t entirely know how she managed to get out and she describes standing at the river bank shaking for five minutes gathering her thoughts. Then she had to ride 30 kilometres back uphill because all the other crossings were flooded too.

Birds as Markers: Birdwatching and Ultra Cycling

We spend a genuinely wonderful stretch of this episode talking about birds. Claire is fascinated by them and is excited to see them in the landscape every time she rides.

I loved hearing her share how two lyrebirds flew across the road in front of her on a descent near Lake Mountain once, and how she considers that the perfect example of something that only happens because you’re on a bike moving fast through wild country.

Arriving at Uluru

Both times Claire has ridden to Uluru she has stopped at. Curtain Springs the night before. This is because she wants to savour the moment of arriving in such an awe inspiring place by riding in slowsly at sunrise.

That summarises Claires approach to racing in a nutshell. She rides for the experience, for those pure moments of bliss when you are a million percent immersed in your surround landscapes.

It’s all the things you see that make you feel along the way.

Claire is currently preparing for the 2026 Trans Balkan Race in May. You can follow her adventures on Instagram @surgeonabike