This article was produced in association with MAAP
“Cycling is how I process stuff. It was the only thing that helped my mental health, it was way better than therapy. For me, it was like my medicine.”
Riding a bike has both shown Haley Smith light, and, at times, taken her into darkness. The Canadian cyclo-cross and gravel racer has had a turbulent relationship with the sport which has ended up shaping her life so far. In her decorated career, in which the 29-year-old has won a Commonwealth Games medal and competed in the 2020 Olympics, Smith has reached the very pinnacle of professional bike racing and felt what it was like to hit the very bottom. It’s been a long journey of learning how to finally shape competitive sport into something that works for her.
“I've ridden recreationally since I was 13 or 14 but grew up playing hockey. When I was 14, I was hospitalised with an eating disorder,” Smith explains. “When I was released from the hospital, there were lots of mental health issues that were accompanying that and I wasn't ready to return to team sports right away. I started riding with my dad and my brother, just mountain biking to start. I'm a competitive person, so eventually I started racing, first locally, then nationally, then World Cups, and eventually the Olympics. When I tell it, it sounds like a linear, cookie-cutter progression through the sport, but there were ups and downs.”
Smith explains that making selection for an Olympic team was always a lifelong dream. She talks about how in women’s sports specifically, the Olympics is the most professional and respected competition in the world – for Smith, the Olympics would mean she had finally made it. However, with such expectation and drive came pressure, the kind of pressure that made Smith’s previous mental health issues resurface, especially due to the conversations in cycling surrounding power to weight ratios.
“At first, I wasn't weighing myself. I didn't think about power to weight. I didn't actually have a power meter until I'd been racing for many, many years, so it just wasn't part of the conversation for me,” Smith remembers. “When I started to get to the very high level, when the Olympics became a possibility it started to become more negative, I had trouble balancing the eating disorder part of my brain.
“For me, the lead up to the Olympics was incredibly stressful. In that two year period, from making the qualification until actually racing in the Olympics, I completely lost any joy, love for the sport and forward drive. It was honestly really negative and damaging.”
Smith explains that she was disappointed with her performance in the Olympic cross-country mountain bike race, believing that the extended build-up to the Games (which were postponed an additional year due to the Covid-19 pandemic) caused her to lose focus and motivation: “I woke up the morning of the Games and I was like, I'm never racing bike again after this. This is it. Obviously that didn't happen in the end, but it’s how I felt at the time,” she remembers.
It became clear to the Canadian rider after the Tokyo Olympics that if she was to continue riding professionally, change was essential. A beacon of hope was offered to her in the form of gravel racing: a non-Olympic, off-road discipline that wasn’t dependent on national governing bodies to make selection for key competitions. Smith was able to use gravel racing to rediscover the things about cycling that originally got her hooked.
“I haven’t weighed myself since I switched to gravel after the Olympics. Obviously, I still try to improve my power, but it's just not something I use anymore as any metric. I got really lucky that I have a coach who has never, ever spoken in power to weight for me, it's not part of his vocabulary,” Smith explains.
“Gravel racing is not something that's quite as institutionalised. There's some downsides to this, but it also means that you're not part of a system, and I needed that freedom. I needed to teach myself how to value things that I valued, as opposed to whatever we have built them up to be. It was a more relaxed social environment and very welcoming. I've made better friends in the last two years in gravel than I ever had in mountain biking. Genuine friendships, the social scene is really fulfilling.”
The relaxed atmosphere and more laid-back approach to gravel racing was transformational to Smith’s performance. She won the Lifetime Grand Prix series in its first year (the premier gravel racing series in the US), but was still able to remain measured in her expectations when it came to racing afterwards, unlike at the Olympics a few years before.
“After I won Lifetime the first year, I was coming back as a defending champ and some people tried to make a narrative that I felt pressure in order to make a story. But there's no pressure about it. Every race that I line up in, I generally try to win because I just enjoy the competition. I find it really fun. If it works out then great, but if it doesn’t then I’m still racing the way I want to race,” Smith explains.
Perhaps part of the 29-year-old’s ability to keep her racing in perspective is that she’s also working on bigger things than solely her personal performance. While her innate competitiveness means that results on the bike will always be important to Smith, she’s also currently completing her PhD in sports psychology and has become a beacon of mental health advocacy, sharing how an understanding of her own mind has helped her develop a more positive relationship with the sport.
“In my degree, I mostly focus on youth development and adult development through sport participation, in particular cycling. I don't focus my research on performance, I focus my research on the value of bike riding to people's psychology, and how it can be a positive or negative thing in their lives,” Smith explains. “For me, that research has provided a lot of perspective on the fact that this is a sport which should be a joy in our lives, and it should be something that improves us. My degree hasn't helped me develop better mental performance skills in the traditional sense, it's just helped me understand bikes and myself better, which then translates into a more free performance.”
Looking ahead to the future, Smith still has performance-orientated goals on two wheels, but also speaks passionately about wanting to use cycling to see more parts of the world, as well as help the next generation of young people experience the magic cycling has to offer, without needing to suffer to find it.
“I have unfinished business at every race, and I will keep racing until I'm just not able to make any improvements. But also from a young age it was always an exciting thing for me to see the whole world on my bike. This year, I'm really motivated to add a few new destinations, trying to go to the races that are in Kenya in June, I'll be in South Africa in March. I'm hoping to go to The Rift in Iceland,” Smith explains.
“But the biggest, overarching reason for why I still want to do this, and what I hope it leads to in the future, is showing how you can use the bike to improve people's overall wellbeing, particularly mental. Whether that's through performance consulting or psychological consulting, or if it's maybe just trying to share that joy and introduce people to the sport, that’s my purpose. Trying to spread the potential of bikes to improve us."
Smith is adamant that when it comes to mental health and wellbeing, open conversations are imperative to ensuring that momentum within the sport continues. She believes that it would have been transformational if she’d had a role model or felt empowered to speak about her eating disorder when she was diagnosed, and doesn’t want anyone else to suffer in silence. It’s been a long and challenging road, but Smith appears to have found her calling in bike racing, and it’s an ambition much greater than just making it to the top step of the podium.
“When I first was diagnosed with an eating disorder, I didn't know a single other person who openly had one. I kept it really close to my chest for a long time. I spoke about it initially because I needed to be the person that I didn't have access to. I was thinking about people who were exactly like me,” Smith explains.
“I do feel like it's slowly getting less taboo, but I also think it's something that we still don't really understand. People are less judgmental and they're less shameful about it, but a lot of people just still don't get it, or don't understand how to understand themselves. We need to continue to talk about it.”
