Three weeks with a gravel bike. Zero prior experience on drop bars off-road. That was the preparation sheet for Isla Short heading into the 3-Peaks Cyclo-cross, and it was enough for her to win it outright, on her first try, while breaking the women’s course record.
The 30-year-old Scot crossed the line in the Yorkshire Dales in 03:36:30, beating three-time winner Bryony Halcrow to the title and lowering the women’s mark for the brutal 61km course. The old record, held by Louise Robinson, had stood since 2003.
Short only announced her retirement from World Cup cross-country mountain biking at the end of August, closing out seven seasons at elite level that included a career-best top-10 finish at the Leogang XC World Cup and the British National XCO Championship in 2025. Rather than easing into retirement, she went looking for a new kind of suffering.
“I had two goals going into the race,” she said the day after. “They were kind of pipe dreamy goals because it was my first time and I really didn’t know what would happen. And I achieved both of them.” Those goals, she explained, were simply to win and to break the record.
The 3-Peaks format bans mountain bike geometry outright, forcing riders onto drop-bar cyclo-cross bikes with limited tyre width, over a course that climbs Ingleborough, Whernside and Pen-y-Ghent and includes long unrideable stretches of fell. “I only got my gravel bike three weeks ago. And I’ve never ridden on the drops before either,” Short said, describing the buildup as “putting my heart and soul into trying to be as prepared as possible.”
What she didn’t lack was hiking fitness. “I do quite a lot of running, I would say, for a mountain biker,” she said, adding that regular running and hiking left her feeling “like a bit of a secret weapon” on the race’s carrying sections, despite racing with a metal plate in her collarbone from a previous injury.
The race with Halcrow, a three-time champion and accomplished fell runner, swung back and forth all afternoon without the pair ever riding together for long. Short led every summit, only to lose ground to Halcrow’s superior descending. The decisive move came on the climb of Pen-y-Ghent, where Short timed her effort to open a gap she then had to defend, at speed, on the descent to the finish.
The men’s race produced its own story: 1961 was the last time it went down to a sprint finish, and this year’s edition matched that history when Lachlan Morton edged out Giles Drake in a photo finish.
For Short, the win looks less like a one-off than the opening chapter of a new phase. She is already targeting South Africa’s Gravel Burn next, and has said she wants to return to the 3-Peaks to chase the sub-3:30 mark she believes is now within reach.
