This story originally appeared in the Adventure Cyclist magazine feature “Get it in Writing” in the Summer 2025 issue. Become a member today to read the full feature and gain access to our entire digital magazine archive. Follow Meaghan as she rides Adventure Cycling’s Golden Gravel Trail this summer. Who knows, maybe this ride will inspire another book.
In 2018, author and elite cyclist Meaghan Marie Hackinen found herself unemployed, living with her parents in Saskatoon, Canada, and “feeling like a loser.” Her mom shook her out of it, insisting that this was her chance to write her next book. Hackinen had just finished the 2017 Trans Am Bike Race, a self-supported competition across the United States. She sketched out 30 memories that stuck out most from the ride, and after writing a 200- to 500-word scene every day, she showed them to her mom, who said: “You have the beginnings of a book.”
“I thought, Nooo. How am I going to weave this together?” says Hackinen, who currently works for the Federation of British Columbia Writers as a coordinator, a flexible job where she includes a race tracking link in her out-of-office email responses. “Then the pandemic happened, and I dove in.”
That work turned into her second memoir, Shifting Gears: Coast to Coast on the Trans Am Bike Race (NeWest Press, 2023). The book was shaped by her “Beta Babes,” her mom’s well-read, retired friends who had a lot of pandemic time on their hands to generously give feedback. They consistently suggested simpler, more direct language, which helped Hackinen with her goal.
“I wanted to create a book that would best invite the reader into my life and sport,” says the women’s 2024 Tour Divide winner, whose record time completing the 2,745-mile solo mountain bike race between Banff, Canada, and Antelope Wells, New Mexico, has only been bested by Lael Wilcox’s individual time trial.
To that end, Shifting Gears reflects the fast-paced rhythm of racing and is more accessible than her first memoir, South Away: The Pacific Coast on Two Wheels (NeWest Press, 2019), which documents a tour from British Columbia to the Baja Peninsula with her sister. More literary than the typical cycling memoir, which tends to read like a travelogue, South Away was a finalist for both the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and Alberta Book of the Year (trade nonfiction).
“Writing is a way to understand an experience more deeply than my thinking mind allows,” Hackinen says. “I might not be able to express something perfectly, but I connect ideas while writing in ways I can’t do otherwise. It goes beyond documenting.”
South Away, like many books, almost didn’t get published. In 2016, the same year she earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Saskatchewan, Hackinen pitched the manuscript to just one publisher and was turned down.
Discouraged, she shelved the book and focused on her job as a volunteer coordinator at a health clinic. Then, one night on a frigid climb near the Colorado-Wyoming border during the 2017 Trans Am Bike Race, her fellow cyclist Rolf Moser asked her, “If you’re a writer, why aren’t you getting your work out there? Why aren’t you writing?”
After the race, Moser continued to check in about her manuscript. At first, Hackenin was tempted to give him excuses. “Not every awesome adventure makes a great book,” she says. “It’s challenging to decide what to write about to create a great story that balances external and internal journeys.”
Despite self-doubt and the obstacles of everyday life, she finally committed herself to getting South Away published. Newly single and living in a dingy basement room with no windows and a shared kitchen, she dove into significant revisions while subsisting on tofu stir-fries and big pans of Rice Krispies squares. Then she started pitching presses. After a steady stream of rejections, NeWest Press, the last publisher to reply, accepted her manuscript.
That perseverance and grit continue to propel both her writing and her racing. While the 40-year-old stays the course as a competitive athlete, including winning the women’s title at May’s 880-kilometer Hellenic Mountain Race, she plans to do a creative residency in November, where she’ll work on a book about her victorious Tour Divide adventure.
“Writing and riding are both endurance activities,” Hackinen says. “My goal with both is to find the flow state. But that means persistence in the face of challenges and mundanity, whether that’s making packing lists and planning travel logistics or taking feedback and cutting word count. In writing and riding, I always remind myself that I chose to do this — I could be working nine-to-five in an office cubicle, but instead I get to craft my own path.”