Jess McWhirt

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Jess McWhirt

Copywriter | Social Media Manager | Storyteller Hi, my name is Jessica.

I've been training for the past eight years, helping friends and family achieve their athletic goals. Only did I finally become certified this past year, so I can start to make a living off my passion for helping others. I know from first-hand experience that when you start pushing your body out of its comfort zone and meet your fitness goals, that confidence spills over to other aspects of your life.

03/15/2026

Cactus Cup Day 1 - 1st
Cactus Cup Day 2 - 1st
Cactus Cup Overall - 1st

I’m giving myself credit where credit is due. Having a chronic illness for 21 years has made living so much harder than it needs to be, especially when it comes to racing.

Having less energy and more pain than my competitors means doing more with less. It means never letting my illness take control. And it means knowing I start my day with less in the tank than most people.

Day 1 was brutal. Going from 60°F weather to 90°F kicked everyone’s ass but with a chronic illness, it set me back further. I couldn’t eat without my digestive system protesting. My head was killing me, I lost my voice, and I barely slept.

Day 2, I wasn’t sure if I’d even make it to the start line without having to run to the toilet. I couldn’t get a full breath with my asthma, but that’s life.

I lined up with the other racers determined to give it all that I had.

And race after race, my body continues to push through its limitations. And damn, if I’m not grateful for all that it does for me.

02/22/2026

We took my mom to a kangaroo meet-and-greet for her 66tg birthday and learned that kangaroos’ fur is velvety soft. They’ll move on all fours as a sign of submission and trust. They can run up to 40 mph and they p**p 100 times a day.

These four live on a farm in Brighton but they were born in Texas. Their favorite snacks are carrots, romaine lettuce, apples, and granola.

My favorite stone-cold killer fact: Out of survival, kangaroos lure dingos into deep water then drown them. 🤘🏼

02/02/2026

Insert something about base miles.

Happy off-season to all those who celebrate. Now, go play.

01/23/2026

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
-Albert Camus

Even the dictionary has a hard time defining what happiness is. It states,
1. the quality or state of being happy.

When you look up ‘happy,’ it says:
1. delighted, pleased, or glad, as over a particular thing.
2. characterized by or indicative of pleasure, contentment, or joy.
But not all things make people happy and not all people are happy by things. To characterize it as “pleasure, contentment, or joy” is just using other words to define it.

Pleasure, contentment, or joy are their own states of being.

Maybe happiness is elusive. If it can’t be defined then how do you search for it? By searching for something that isn’t easy to define, that’s what creates lack.

Same goes for searching for the meaning of life. Everyone has their own definition and if there are millions of definitions of the meaning of life then is there such a thing?

So instead of endlessly searching for things that evade definitions, just be. Live. Follow what brings pleasure, what brings contentment, what brings joy - whatever that is for you.

12/27/2025

My bilateral salpingectomy turns four today!

This is a celebration of the freedom to choose what I wanted to do with my body. I never wanted to be a mother. I’d been asking doctors every year for this surgery since I was 16 and every year until I was 33, doctors told me no. That I was too young, that I didn’t know what I wanted, that I’d meet a man who’d change my mind.

And then I finally met a woman doctor who listened to me. Who agreed I knew best for my body.

This is for anyone who’s struggled to get the care they deserve, for those who were dismissed by doctors, and for the rest of us who were served patriarchy under medical gowns.

12/18/2025

37 things I’ve learned this past year:

1. get the tattoo.
2. my body doesn’t like candy as much as I do.
3. neuroplastic pain is when the brain/nervous system misinterprets messages from the body as if they’re dangerous because the nervous system is stuck in a chronic pain state.
4. while using spravato didn’t make a difference in my pain, anxiety, & depression, it did give me the permission to sit still for 2 hours.
5. i quickly lose my mountain biking skills & confidence when I don’t practice weekly.
6. being a homeowner means wishing whatever noise I just heard was a ghost & not something breaking/leaking.
7. matching someone’s effort reveals a lot about the relationship.
8. most-discussed topics in therapy: relationships, friendships, chronic pain, & work
9. more times than not, I’m outside my window of tolerance, & it’s hard to stay within it.
10. when I rush, I make mistakes, & then i beat myself up for it.
11. i hate losing.
12. you have to always advocate for yourself because no one else will.
13. some things are better left unsaid & other times, you’ll really need to push yourself to speak up.
14. stop to take the pictures because you’ll eventually forget what happened.
15. you’ll start to define friendship in a different way.
16. growth happens when you take risks.
17. even though you’re athletic and watch what you eat, your family’s genetics will still give you high cholesterol.
18. you have the power to break an anxiety tic (picking at my cuticles).
19. you need to set and uphold boundaries between work and personal life.
20. always take up Pete’s offer to ride in Vail during the fall to see the leaves changing. (Continued in comments)

10/29/2025

I haven’t been to a wedding since my divorce and while I sat there, watching two people exchange vows and promises to love each other forever—trying to quiet the cynical, divorcé side of me—I kept replaying the priest’s wedding speech in Fleabag in my mind:

“Love is awful. It’s awful. It’s painful. It’s frightening. It makes you doubt yourself, judge yourself, distance yourself from the other people in your life. It makes you selfish. It makes you creepy, makes you obsessed with your hair, makes you cruel, makes you say and do things you never thought you would do. It’s all any of us want, and it’s hell when we get there. So no wonder it’s something we don’t want to do on our own. I was taught if we’re born with love then life is about choosing the right place to put it. People talk about that a lot, feeling right, when it feels right it’s easy. But I’m not sure that’s true. It takes strength to know what’s right. And love isn’t something that weak people do. Being a romantic takes a hell of a lot of hope. I think what they mean is, when you find somebody that you love, it feels like hope.”

Our hearts get broken over and over again and yet, somehow, we still find a way to love—whether that be another person, a family member, a pet, or ourselves.

We take chance after chance at love because we don’t want to do it alone. Because life isn’t meant to be lived in solitude. Because what the f**k else are we going to do with our short, little lives than to love someone (or something)?

To love someone takes a helluva lot of strength. It takes small egos and medium-sized gestures, hard conversations and full hugs. And while it takes hope to love someone, it also gives it back.

10/20/2025

13 years ago I was living in Ireland working on my master’s degree. International Security and Conflict Studies.

The life I imagined I’d be living and the one I’m in are completely different. I thought I’d help catch terrorists for the government or become a researcher and contribute to the literature about terrorism and how people get indoctrinated and how to prevent it. I imagined living the rest of my life in Europe, learning French, doing European things. I hoped to make my parents proud, making a difference in the world.

Instead, I moved back to Colorado and became a marketer. Not by lack of trying. I spent five years trying to get into the field I really wanted.

This video popped up in Facebook memories and I remember working on an essay, wanting a distraction. I practiced this probably for an hour, in the cold, cold kitchen I spent hours in—reading and writing when my roommates weren’t home.

I think about Ireland and my goals when I was younger every day.

Life rarely ends up being what we imagine or hope for. Sometimes it’s worse. Sometimes it’s better. Sometimes it just is.

10/12/2025

You can’t have a weak mind in racing.

Sure, you need to train and your legs better show up, but when you’re out in the middle of nowhere, no one to distract you from the pain, the boredom, the wanting-to-be-done-already, it’s your mind that’ll get you to the finish line.

I hung on to Scott’s wheel. He was disciplined when everyone around us surged up the hills, and he set a pace I could sustain without burying myself.

I wish my bike behaved a little better though. The chain dropped on a downhill (on the paved road 😒) so I lost the group I was with to pull over and throw it back on. I spent five minutes trying to catch them, seeing them in sight the whole time, but couldn’t close the gap again.

I caught up with Mike and we rode with another guy for a while until Mike was gassed himself. I found a new group to ride with and noticed I’d only pull for maybe 30 seconds before the men started surging in front of me. And they weren’t dinky pulls. I kind of got the vibe that they didn’t like a woman pulling them along the road.

So, I let them stay in the front. If they didn’t want to let me pull then I’d save my energy. That’s also when the negotiating started. I was getting tired. I wanted to stop riding so hard, for so long. Every surge up a kicker, standing on the bike to keep up with these dudes, I had to keep telling myself to not lose the group. That it’d be so much harder solo.

At mile 58, I somehow forgot the total mileage was 75 miles, not 65, and got really excited thinking I only had 7 miles left to go. I got a burst of energy at mile 61, pulling to the front of this small group again, and it was at that moment, when I tapped on my Garmin to see the watts and how long I was in the front, that I actually had another 14 miles ago.

The 75-mile course was my first long-distance gravel race, and I’m already thinking about how I can do better next year. It was also such a morale boost seeing Jackky, Eric, Karl, Mequi, Kevin, Mike, Dawn, and Scott at the start and finish. Couldn’t have done as well as I did without them all.

09/29/2025

Damn good weekend.

Shuttled to the top of Pikes Peak with then mountain biked down.

Sunday, we went up to Vail to ride through aspen groves with our buddy, Pete. Best way to see the leaves.

Getting out in nature helps when things get a little too dark. I know I’m struggling when it comes out physically. I rode extra cautiously. I second-guessed my abilities. My contacts were dried out so I couldn’t see the trail clearly. My legs were sore because I held too weird of a position descending the day before. I couldn’t find a rhythm or comfort on the bike.

And it’s hard not be an as***le to yourself when you know you can do better. When you observe your mind wrestling with itself. One part is saying, “Give up and start bowling,” and the other is like, “you’ve done this before and faster, just go,” and there’s this third part watching, frozen.

But that’s life (with anxiety, depression, chronic pain, neurodiversity, and TBI). We all struggle with s**t, we all want things to be easier, safer, more fun. We want to feel like we belong, we matter. That our lives mean something. And we have to remind ourselves this is all temporary. All of it. To latch on to the moment as hard as we can because it won’t last. We’re closer to death every day and we don’t get to take our life with us.

06/05/2025

“If being mean to yourself worked, it would have by now.”

I always thought being a dick to myself got results, but it was destroying my mental health and causing me physical pain.

I’ve been I’m learning how to be kind to myself, even during grueling bike races when I lose. And it’s not just because self-compassion is a nicer way to interact with yourself but it’s also connected to chronic pain.

Read the full blog here (or listen, because I wrote this by hand, then did talk-to-text to type it for me, and I recorded it at the same time): https://jessicamcwhirt.com/self-compassion-chronic-pain-competition/ [link in bio]

I’d love to know your thoughts on it too. Did it resonate? Did you learn something new? Was it boring (okay, maybe don’t tell me that).

If you do take the time to read/listen, thanks for spending ten minutes with me.

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Pueblo, CO
81001-81012

Website

http://www.jessicamcwhirt.com/

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