The race doesn't break you at mile 900

 It breaks you at 3am, in the dark, when you've forgotten why you started.

Coaching for Tour Divide—and the races that demand the same level of preparation.

Most athletes training for Tour Divide focus on fitness. Fitness is necessary. It is not sufficient.

The riders who don't finish are rarely the least fit in the field. They're the ones who ran out of mental scaffold, who hadn't planned for the moment their plan fell apart, who didn't know themselves well enough to know what they'd do when everything went wrong at once.

This is what we prepare you for.

What makes this different

 We've done these races. We know where training and planning fails.

You can't plan for what you don't know.

There are coaches who offer bikepacking packages. They can write a training plan with long rides in it. What they can't do is look at your Tour Divide road book and tell you exactly which resupply window you've underestimated, which section will destroy you if your pacing is off by 10%, or what the terrain actually feels like at hour 60 when the map stops matching reality.

We can. Because we've been there.

Peta McSharry has raced Tour Divide, the Silk Road Mountain Race, and the Taurus Mountain Race. She has coached athletes through these races and read more road books than she can count. She knows what fails.

Meaghan Hackinen has raced Tour Divide, SRMR, Atlas Mountain Race, Hellenic Mountain Race, and Taurus. She contributes to every coaching cohort from direct race experience — not theory.

Between us, our knowledge of these routes is not academic. It is the kind that comes from making mistakes in remote places and learning from them so you don't have to.

The coaching framework

 Training is one layer. We work on all of them.

Most coaching starts with fitness. We start with something harder: knowing yourself.

Every athlete is different. Before I can help you, we need to understand how you plan, how you respond under fatigue, what your risk profile is, and what your mental bedrock looks like when you're destroyed at 3am and want to quit. These aren't soft questions. They are the questions that determine whether you finish.

1. Know yourself — planning personality, risk profile, self-monitoring.
2. Physical durability — not just endurance, but fatigue resistance: the ability to resist slowing down, making errors, losing appetite and decision-making when already exhausted.
3. Comfort systems — bike fit, contact point protection, hygiene protocols. Pain ends races. This is engineering, not luxury.
4. Route intelligence — three-phase research, road book construction, resupply mapping, pacing strategy.
5. Mental bedrock — your why, your dark moments script, your quitting rules, written in advance for the version of you that can no longer think straight.

We work through all of these. In a group call format, monthly, along with your 1:1 calls and in the training plan.

Your coach

 Peta McSharry

The routes are in her legs. The knowledge is in your plan.

Peta began bikepacking in 2012, racing ultra-distance events since the inaugural TransAm Bike Race and TransContinental. She raced Tour Divide, the inaugral Silk Road Mountain Race, Route 66 Bike Race, the Hope 1000, Paris-Brest-Paris (to mention a few), and will be on the start line for the Taurus Mountain Race. She is a qualified performance cycling coach, sports massage therapist, and myofascial therapist with over 20 years of treating and coaching athletes.

She holds a qualification in designing and delivering learning for adults, this shapes everything about how she coaches. The frameworks she built for bikepacking preparation are not borrowed from

conventional coaching methodology. They are structured around how people actually learn, process information under fatigue, and make decisions in remote and stressful environments. Combined with years of deep analytical work studying how athletes perform and fail in these races, it has produced a coaching approach that is specific to bikepacking in a way that generic plans simply are not.

She only coaches bikepacking athletes. Bikepacking demands a fundamentally different kind of preparation—physically, mentally, and logistically—and her entire practice is built around that reality.

Her coaching philosophy starts with one principle: know yourself. Everything else follows from that.

Featured contributor

 Meaghan Hackinen

Racing experience you can learn from..

Meaghan is an experienced ultra-distance bikepacking racer. She finished and won Tour Divide in record time, won the women's category at Silk Road Mountain Race and Hellenic Mountain Race, 2nd in Atlas Mountain Race and will be starting the Taurus Mountain Race in October. 

She contributes to our monthly group calls, sharing what she has learned from doing these races at the highest level — on fuelling, packing efficiency, gear decisions, and the psychological reality of multi-week racing. Her knowledge comes from experience, not from reading about it.

Meaghan is an author and I can highly recommend reading her books, there is great bikepacking insight in them..

Who this is for?

 Tour Divide. But also races that demand the same preparation.

Filtering out what you need from the abundant information available is sometimes harder than working through a structured process of self-discovery.

The coaching framework was built for Tour Divide but the preparation it demands — detailed route research, fatigue resistance training, mental bedrock work, comfort systems — is identical to what any serious mountain bikepacking race requires.

If you are preparing for the Silk Road Mountain Race, Atlas Mountain Race, Hellenic Mountain Race, or Taurus Mountain Race, this coaching applies directly. These are races we know from the inside.

How to work with me

 Two ways in. Limited places for both.

Option A — Start now: Coaching places are available now on a rolling basis. If you're ready to commit and want to begin building your preparation immediately, apply for a coaching spot. We'll schedule a 15-minute call to understand where you are and recommend the right plan.

Option B — October commitment: The 2027 Tour Divide cohort begins in September/October. Joining the waitlist now secures your place and gives you insight into my coaching approach so you can make an informed decision. Athletes who commit by October get the full preparation block — the complete journey from base building to start line.