Courtney O’Donnell leads two separate lives, and each is complete with its own job, responsibilities and even attire.
In one life, O’Donnell wears a set of green scrubs and helps save lives in the confines of operating rooms at UCLA Medical Center.
In the other, she sports a yellow leader’s jersey as she and her UCLA cycling teammates fly by the competition on their bikes over straightaways, hills and city blocks of Southern California.
O’Donnell, who is 25 years old and finishing up her third year of medical school, has to juggle academics and athletics just like any other student athlete, but for her, the pressure is considerably higher.
“A lot of people think medical school is hard,” O’Donnell said. “Honestly, I think that cycling is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s incredibly challenging mentally. They both take a lot of endurance and personal motivation.
“For medical school, you have to be willing to study around 10 hours a day, and nobody’s going to force you to do it. It’s the same thing when riding a bike. It takes a lot of personal motivation to get yourself out to ride a five-hour bike ride. You have to want to (do it).”
O’Donnell finished in seventh place in the women’s Division I road race at the USA Cycling 2009 Collegiate Road Nationals in Fort Collins, Colo., with a time of 2 hours, 29 minutes, 56 seconds, coming in just one minute and 35 seconds behind the race’s winner.
O’Donnell won nine races this season and placed in the top five in five more events to win the Western Collegiate Cycling Conference’s omnium, which is given to the best overall rider at the end of the season.
That sort of performance might be expected from someone who started racing her tricycle around the block at the age of 3, won her first race at 7 and has been cycling nonstop ever since.
O’Donnell is not that person.
“I actually just joined the cycling team … a year and a half ago,” O’Donnell said. “I bought my bike two summers ago and started riding with people from the cycling team. I originally didn’t think I wanted to race at all, I just wanted people to ride with, but then I got really into it.”
In fact, cycling was not even on O’Donnell’s radar when she was an undergraduate student at UC San Diego.
“I was originally a swimmer,” she said. “I swam and played water polo in high school, and when I got to college I started running. … While I was training for a marathon I got really injured (She suffered a stress fracture in her left tibia.), so I needed to do something that was not swimming-related or running-related. I thought cycling would be a fun thing to get into.”
And while O’Donnell has experience training in all areas necessary for a triathlon in the near future, she has expressed her dedication to being as committed as she can be to cycling to maintain her optimal performance.
“For cycling, you have to train from 12 to 16 hours a week just riding your bike,” O’Donnell said. “When you’re training for a triathlon, you actually have to be doing all three of the sports at the same time, and you don’t have enough energy to be as good as you want to be at one of them.”
O’Donnell also appreciates the more subtle aspects of team cycling over the lone-wolf nature of a triathlon.
“(Cycling) is a very tactical sport, and it’s very much a team sport,” she said.
“There’s a lot of tactics and strategy involved that make it more exciting that aren’t necessarily involved in triathlons. In a triathlon, you’re competing more against yourself, to try to get a better time or something like that, but in cycling if you’re not fast enough you’ll just get dropped from the race,” she added.
However, O’Donnell knows that her days on the road are likely numbered.
Instead of attempting to become a professional cyclist, she plans to trade her yellow jacket for green scrubs and receive her medical degree in June of next year and then start a residency program, most likely in surgery.
“I would love for someone to pay me to ride my bike, but unfortunately I don’t know if that would be possible,” O’Donnell said. “Unfortunately, cycling’s not really a very lucrative sport, especially not women’s cycling.
“Let’s put it this way: I won $60 in a race that I won.”
For now, O’Donnell will continue to ride out her time at UCLA on two wheels. What awaits her in the future is just around the next corner.