KOSTÜME PRESENTS: Dr. Sarah Ruggins in Conversation

What does it take to discover the limits of your capabilities - and then keep moving beyond them?

Dr. Sarah Ruggins is one of the world's most remarkable endurance athletes - holder of multiple outright world records, including two previously held by men. But hers is anything but a conventional story of an athlete destined for the top.

Growing up in Canada, Sarah was a hugely promising middle-distance runner with Olympic aspirations. Then, aged 15, she developed Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, a debilitating neurological condition that left her unable to walk or use her hands, requiring round-the-clock care and years of painful recovery and rehabilitation.

When an attempted return to running ended with a broken femur, she decided to try her hand at cycling instead.

What happened next is extraordinary.

Despite only learning to ride a bike two years prior, in 2025 she broke the outright LEJOGLE (John o' Groats to Land's End and back again) record, riding 2,700km in just over five days. 

Then, in June 2026, she went considerably further.

One Way North saw Sarah ride more than 6,000km from southern Spain to the northernmost tip of Norway in just 13 days, 20 hours and 27 minutes, beating the previous outright world record by more than three days and setting a new women's seven-day distance world record along the way.

But the records are only part of the story.

For this special live event at Arnolfini, Sarah joins Kostüme founder Ed Bartlett for an intimate and wide-ranging conversation about ambition and adversity, resilience and vulnerability, success and failure, the psychology of endurance, and what happens when we start questioning our perceived limits.

Following an intermission, Sarah and Ed will be joined by members of the team behind her record-breaking rides for your chance to ask your own questions, via an interactive audience Q&A.

You don't need to be a cyclist to find inspiration in Sarah's story. 

This is a conversation about what happens when life doesn't follow the route you expected - and what might be possible when you're willing to find another one.

Image Credit
James Busby Photography