I was born in a country that does not exist any more, the USSR. In 1991, Ukraine announced its independence. It’s funny, a country with thousands of years of history started a new page at the end of the last millennium.
My parents had a car, a very unusual possession for people in the Soviet Union. I started driving at age 14 on remote villages’ roads, and by 18 I already had a license and some pretty good experience. As for motorcycles, I knew that my parents were strongly against them just by hearing their conversations with my older brother. He never got a motorcycle. I didn’t even waste time thinking about it. But I had a big black bicycle, and it was my ride. I rode the wheels off of it every summer, enjoying the speed and quiet moments of non-challenging maintenance.
I rode a motorcycle for the first time in my life at age 19. It was a cute small Minsk. It was very different from a bicycle and great in its own way. But life had other things in a store for me for a while.
The next time I came across motorcycles I was almost 30. Every time I’d travel to warmer states for work, I’d take a couple of days off, rent whatever motorcycle looked like fun and rode it to whatever seemed like a good end point and back. For example Miami – Key West and back, or the mountains to the north of San Francisco.
In 2015, my co-driver (yeah, I’ve been racing cars since 2002, but this is a different story) got an F800GT many years after a bad motorcycle accident. I watched him ride the bike for a few months and then started thinking about riding together…. The next year I bought his bike, while he got an Aprilia Tuono to replace it. This is how this page of my life started.
It was torture to try to keep up with the Tuono on an F800GT. So I replaced it with a R1200RS. This was perfect. I’d enjoy car racing on most of the weekends, and when there was no race we would ride to Vermont or New Hampshire or Maine. We traveled to France to ride in the Alps and to Portugal to ride around the entire country. And then the pandemic happened. The racing season of 2020 was cancelled and people started learning to stay away from each other.
That summer my husband stumbled across and showed me the GS Trophy website. Having no racing on a schedule, this looked like an interesting challenge. I got a KTM 390 Adventure thinking that it would be a light, easy-to-manage learning tool. And it was fantastic. It gave me my first exposure to the challenges off-roading presented. By the end of the season, I rode part of the New England BDR on it.
I met amazing people that year, learned a lot from them as well as from my KTM, including that to train for the GS Trophy, you need the corresponding tool – a BMW GS. I sold both the RS and the KTM to pay for a BMW R1250GS. I also learned how challenging riding off road is. Don’t tell my racing buddies, but car racing (other than single-seaters) hardly asks for anything from your body. Riding a motorcycle is asking for you to be one with it, 200%.
So, this is the beginning of my new journey. My goal is to become one of the best off-road riders. To be safe and to have fun. I want to show people that this is a skill that can be learned and that body size and gender do not matter. Experience does. Ultimately, I want to share my path, so that others can learn and become great riders.
Go here to listen to more about my motorsports story on the Shifting Points Podcast.
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