Bend's Sarah Max races in the Belgian Waffle Ride North Carolina, near Hendersonville in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Sarah Max has competed in a staggering variety of endurance sports throughout her life, including distance running, triathlon, nordic skiing, road bike racing, cyclocross and mountain biking.

Lately the longtime Bend resident has found her calling in gravel bike racing, competing against and beating some of the top pros in the country.

Max, 47, won the 129.5-mile Belgian Waffle Ride North Carolina on June 11 in just under 81/2 hours, only one week after finishing 11th (11:19:06) in the 200-mile Unbound Gravel race in Kansas, widely regarded as the most prestigious gravel race in the world.

Max was in third place 170 miles into the race, but a creek crossing damaged her electronic shifting. A fellow rider helped her fix the issue, and she ended up 11th.

Max, along with several other top riders from Bend and throughout the country, is set to race Wednesday through Sunday in the Oregon Trail Gravel Grinder, a five-day race of 362 miles and 33,560 feet of climbing through the Central Oregon Cascades.

The event starts and finishes in Sisters and includes four nights of camping set up by race organizers.

A four-time winner of Bend’s multisport Pole Pedal Paddle race, Max started gravel racing in 2018 and in 2019 she finished third at Unbound after getting a flat tire while in the lead.

“It was enough of a challenge that it really scared me into training harder,” Max said.

She did not race much in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but she connected with Alex Candelario, a professional racer and the chief operating officer of Bend’s Argonaut Cycles, which makes custom carbon bikes.

“I asked him to coach me,” Max said. “He got me training in a way that I hadn’t done in the past. That really set me up for what so far has been a really great season.”

Gravel racing has supplanted road racing as the most popular and prevalent form of bike racing in the United States. That is evident on a national level but also on a local level — gone is the longtime Cascade Cycling Classic road race but now we have the Oregon Gravel Grinder Series, which includes the Oregon Trail race this week and the Ochoco Gravel Grinder July 16-17 in Prineville.

Max said that cyclists enjoy gravel riding because it is safer than biking on traffic-filled paved roads and it provides a vast amount of routes through forests and backcountry. Gravel bikes resemble road bikes, but they have more clearance for wider tires, which provide more comfortable riding over long distances on gravel.

“To have the option to put together routes of dirt and pavement really opens up what you can do,” Max said. “You can go anywhere.”

Events like the Oregon Trail race also include shorter routes for cyclists who approach the event more like a tour than a race.

But among the top riders, the competition in the Oregon Trail race is “insane,” Max said.

Expected to race is 2022 Unbound winner Sofia Gomez Villafañe, of Heber City, Utah, and 2021 Oregon Trail winner Sarah Sturm, of Durango, Colorado. Also in the field is Bend rider Serena Gordon, who finished second last year, and Bend’s Rebecca Fahringer, who was third last year.

The men’s field includes 2021 winner Peter Stetina, of Santa Rosa, California, and Edward Anderson, of Richmond, Virginia, who finished second last year. Bend riders Jim Barkow and Carl Decker, who both finished in the top 20 last year, are back to race this week.

“It’s attracted strong competition from the start in 2019,” Max said. “Among the people who are racing the big gravel events, this is an event that is on their list. A lot of people love it because it’s competitive and hard, but it’s also a lot of fun.”

Max said that some people have been taking note of her age lately, but she said she appreciates that most of her younger competitors do not seem to care about her age.

“Cycling can be a very level playing field in the world of sports,” Max said. “It is low impact. Maybe I’m lacking things that my younger competitors have. Maybe I’m not quite as fast or strong. But I have some of the experience of racing, a lot of accumulated fitness over the years.

“In the world of gravel there is this thought of no boundaries. It’s the nature of the sport, that you can just get on your bike and go wherever. Maybe that does apply to my age.”

While traveling frequently for races, Max works full-time, mostly remotely, as an editor for Morgan Stanley Research. She also is the mother of twin daughters, Isabel and Fiona Max, who run cross-country and track for Princeton University and led the Summit High School girls cross-country team to a national championship in 2018.

“I was a runner when I was younger,” Sarah Max said. “I’ve done triathlon and all these other things. I don’t know that I will keep doing gravel the rest of my life, but I’m going to keep doing something.”