Hailing from the sparsely populated and nature-packed territory of Yukon in Canada, Mara is new to the team for 2025.
Living in her own words a bit of an “alternative lifestyle”, for the first ten years of her existence Mara grew up in a large camper van where she and her family travelled around Canada and the United States of America; normally heading southwards in the winter and returning to Canada in the summer.
It’s no surprise then with an outdoor focused lifestyle that hiking and rock climbing were two of Mara’s main activities as a youngster until she found cycling, where she initially fell in love with mountain bike riding.
“I did it for fun but then we met an American family down in the States that did mountain bike races, and we became quite friendly with them, and they encouraged me to sign-up for a race.”
Taking it in her stride, Mara rocked the “cotton t shirt, heavy bike and not clipped in” look; where she “had a blast” and fell in love with the competitive side of things. From there, she took part in more races in the USA and Canada, making her way over to Europe and progressing through the ranks year-on-year to where she is now.”
Not one to back down from a challenge, the outgoing and bubbly Mara is excited for the jump to WorldTour level with the team and everything that comes with it. This next step in her life will see her make the big move over to spend the majority of the racing year at the team’s Keep Challenging Center in Sittard; where she’ll get to know a lot of the other Women’s program and Development riders – something she’s ready to dive feet first into.
For Mara one of the key things is to “take things each step at a time”, and she has a mature outlook on life that belies her young age. Alongside her now full-time bike riding, she also wants to finish her Kinesiology degree, so will be mixing up training days with studying in the evening.
Describing herself as an “enthusiastic”, “determined” and “passionate” person, an air of excitement and energy exudes from her when she’s discussing anything related to her favourite activities. Something that she no doubt applies to her lifestyle as a professional athlete, and she thinks that she can bring a good atmosphere to the group within the team.
Mixing that idea of one step at a time with dreaming big, 2025 is a year of discovery for Mara where she wants to learn as much as possible from the riders and staff around her; helping the team to the best results she can. However, she also has ambitions and dreams too, and in the future wants to grow into a finisher role for certain races.
“I know I have a long way to go before that becomes a reality. There are lots of steps along the way such as doing my first WorldTour race with the team, doing a Grand Tour, learning from the others on how to win races; but I want to gain that experience and development so I can ultimately see how far I can go in the sport in the future.”
Interestingly, Mara was the first ever Yukon female to win a medal in cycling at a multi discipline event (at the 2019 Western Canada Summer Games) and was also the Yukon’s flag bearer at the 2022 Canada Summer Games. Speaking of Yukon, she also dropped the fact that where she’s from, there are more bears than humans; which is possibly an unbearable thought for us Europeans…