'Epic Legends:' Montana women finish grueling trio of mountain bike races

After completing a bruising trio of international mountain bike races spanning 18 days and enough vertical feet to reach the summit of Mount Everest four times, a pair of Montana women recently joined an exclusive club as inductees into the “Epic Legends Hall of Fame.”

For Livingston-area resident Kim Greene, 47, that journey started 13 years earlier when she lived in Kenya and finished a punishing eight-day stage race in South Africa known as the “Tour de France of mountain biking.” She capped off her trilogy with a five-day race across the Swiss Alps last summer, nursing a painful injury in her leg muscles and guided across the finishing line under the encouragement of her teammate Heidi Johnson-Fry.

“I’d been a single mom for a long time. I owned my own business, and my family and my dad showed up,” she said. "To be able to close that loop of 13 years and still show up with that much grit, not a lot of people had a span of 13 years from their first and last race.”

Not a lot of people are able to withstand the physical and mental toll of any of those multi-day races in the first place. Each day, or stage, has a time cutoff for the racers, and both teammates must finish each stage together. A single day might amount to 80 miles of biking while climbing over 8,000 vertical feet. They sleep in tents, and then wake up and do it again the next day.

And far fewer women compete — last summer’s SPAR Swiss Epic race included 217 men’s teams compared with just 21 female teams. So it was a surprising twist of fate that Greene and Johnson-Fry would link up — the result of a chance encounter between their partners at the Harley-Davidson dealership in Belgrade.

After moving to Montana from Kenya, Greene’s then-husband had stopped at the shop, which Johnson-Fry co-owns, and noticed the distinct Absa Cape Epic biking jersey on the business’s wall. The husbands traded numbers.

“I called her up and said ‘Hey, I heard you’re type-2-fun crazy, and I think we should be friends,’” Johnson-Fry remembered.

They decided to train together, riding frequently in Bozeman’s Sourdough Canyon and comparing their experiences finishing the Absa Cape Epic race in South Africa, which Johnson-Fry had completed with her father four years after Greene.

For Johnson-Fry, a former college track star who grew up road biking in Alaska, the challenge had been transitioning to a mountain bike and weathering the heat of South Africa in April. For Greene, it had been 50 mph wind gusts lashing her with cold rain and giving many of the racers pneumonia. They eventually decided to do it again.

“It’s kind of like childbirth, where you forget the next day and say, ‘Hey, let’s do it again,’” Johnson-Fry joked.

Greene takes it a step further: “I labored for 14 hours with twins,” she said. “And I would take labor over it.”

But she added that the competitions can also be addictive, and her love of mountain biking dates back to her childhood in New Hampshire, where she’d cruise gravel roads on a rock hopper with her dad.

The biking duo began training for the 4 Islands Epic in Croatia, a five-day race they finished in 2024. Johnson-Fry, who had a nutritional misstep early in the race, said there was no real way to train for the terrain they encountered.

“It’s just gnarly rocks, and you ride up a hill and then all of a sudden there’s a 12th century Byzantine church, and you go a little longer and it’s a moonscape,” she said. “It’s just crazy, crazy terrain.”

That time it was Greene who kept her teammate going, helping her to navigate treacherous descents after her teammate started “bonking” — which refers to the shutdown that happens when a body burns through all its stored sugar.

“When you’ve lost all control of your body and you’re bonking, the idea of bombing down rock ledges is so scary,” Greene said.

But after completing two of the “Epic” mountain races, Johnson-Fry said it didn’t take much convincing to go for the third: “We had a blast and were like, well, if we’ve done two, let’s do another and become legends.”

Then last year, during their five-day stage race across the Swiss Alps, it was Greene who was in trouble. Despite training extensively ahead of the race she pushed herself too hard on the first day, which required 10,000 total feet of vertical gain. For the next four days, the adductor muscles on the inside of her thighs were seizing up.

“On day two, I had to push my bike up almost every hill because I was seizing,” Greene said. “It was brutal. When you know you’ve got something that might set off any minute, you have to ride really deliberately but conservatively.”

She used a mantra to keep working through the pain — “Knees up, audible exhale” — and credited her teammate with keeping her on pace to complete each stage.

“I think we often, us females, make better partners of each other in these events,” she said. “We are caretaking, and we’re pushing each other, but not to the point of breaking.”

Johnson-Fry added, “It was us working together and trying to beat the time cutoff, but also telling dad jokes going uphill.”

Finally eking themselves across the finish line was “surreal,” she said, with their families waiting for them with champagne. Greene felt proud to show her sons that she persevered with “grit and determination” despite the injury.

“The fact that those athletes can show up and do that again and again day after day, it’s a crapshoot. No one knows for certain where their mind’s going to go, where their heart is going to go,” Greene said. “It’s pure luck to be actually able to finish.”

Johnson-Fry is already training for another multi-day stage race later this year in Patagonia. Greene said she’s still on the fence, but that hasn’t stopped her friend from trying to pull her in.

“She knows that peer pressure is an amazing tool with me,” Greene said.