The Good Nurse: An Interview with Justinas Leveika

“I don’t believe in sacrifices. One door closes and another one opens. You just live.” 

This interview took place across three occasions: during the Atlas Mountain Race in 2023, the Desertus Bikus in 2024, and before and after Badlands in 2024. During these three encounters, I was on my bike covering the events, and I always ended up meeting and spending time with Jusinas. All pictures were taken while riding alongside him.

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Morocco, a few months ago. It’s six o’clock in the morning or so. I had to leave the room early and jump on my bike. We are near CP3 on the Atlas Mountain Race. I found a bar that was open near the bus station, had a quick coffee, and went to post up and wait for Justinas.

As I look at the tracker to see where he is, I hear his freehub buzzing. Rookie mistake. It’s already too late. Justinas is right around the corner. I have no time to set up. I point the camera as quickly as I can and capture something like the light trail of a fighter jet.

Justinas and I don’t know each other yet, but we are already friends. We have chatted often over the years. It’s a small world, and he happens to be sponsored by brands I also work with. 

At the time, Justinas held the record for the fastest ride of the Tour Divide, and that alone is enough of a resume to make him one of the best ultra-cyclists around—if not the best. He has won the Atlas Mountain Race, too, among many others. He’s mad, and he races full on, always with a happy-go-lucky attitude. Even in the most serious of situations, he retains his easygoing demeanor.

At the Badlands race in Spain, I hear a friend say, “He passed me four times today. Every time, he just flashed by, ridiculously fast, sprinting full on!” Later, I manage to catch him.

Justinas tells me, “I like to ride fast, sure, but look, here I am sitting at this fountain since who knows when.” Justinas could have scratched in Gor after only 230 kilometers. He looked like a ghost. He could have bailed and said he needed some time to recover from the Tour Divide and Colorado Trail, and nobody would have questioned that.

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He continues, “Many people scratched in Gor. But the thing is, with me, scratching is not an option.” I ask him if he has a coach, because it seems unbelievable that he is racing here again, so soon. He tells me he has a coach, Peta McSharry. “She tries to guide me and make me do the clever stuff, but you know me, I am not really coachable!” he adds.

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Back in Morocco, I jump on my bike after the shot of a blurry torpedo on tarmac and rush to the checkpoint, a hotel-restaurant in Tafraout. Justinas is already ordering brekkie. He’s stamped his card and plugged in his derailleur battery to charge. The whole staff of the place is charmed by him. Justinas, I can’t get bored of saying it, is the Raymond of ultras, and “Everybody loves Raymond.”

I even notice that he gets everything faster than his main rival, Dirkus Coetzee, who just can’t be as nice as Justinas, even when trying his best. No one can. When you go somewhere with Justinas, you just accept to be invisible and kindly ask him to order for you. This way, you might get a drink at the same time as him. Kindness wins races.

Doors

“I played football for too many years and too many hours. I think I might have played a bit too much, because when I went to study biology, I realised I wouldn’t have the requirements to become a doctor, but I could be a nurse instead, or at least study for that. 

After a year, you could try to make the jump to doctor studies. So, I studied and had great teachers and did some practice in hospitals. That’s when I saw how the life of a nurse was different from that of a doctor. Doctors would just be in and out, have hundreds of patients, and barely remember their names. Nurses, though, were close to the patients and did most of the work. That made for a more meaningful relationship, and I found it more interesting to have a life close to the patients, you know?

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That’s how I chose nursing and never looked back. I thought I’d leave Lithuania and go to England to study because my mom and sister were already there, but I ended up deciding to go to Norway instead. I landed in Bergen in 2014.”

“When I came to Bergen, I still found a football club to play with, but I also knew that football wasn’t going to pay the bills. I wanted to be a good nurse, so I took shifts of all kinds just to get as much practice as I could. All kinds of cases, all kinds of wards. Playing football was not an option anymore, and that’s when the bike came into the picture. I could take the bike between shifts and go explore the countryside.

I went to buy a cheap second-hand bike. They showed me a pile, and I took one. It needed a chain and some tuning, which I fixed myself on the spot. They offered me a job at the shop straight away. I used that job to perfect my language and just learn more stuff about bikes. My pay was in bike parts, so I could build my own bikes there, which was really cool too!”

I get out of the control point and head a bit further down the road. I don’t want to spend too much time in the way of the Atlas Mountain Race’s official media team. Nils and Lloyd are gracious enough to let me shoot a bit around them, but I don’t want to take advantage of the situation. I have a feeling they won’t follow Justinas down the road, so I get on the bike again.

The slight downhill we’re on gives me confidence I can stick with him long enough to make a shot or two. When he sees me, he says, “Oh! There you are. Tagging along for a bit?!” I figure I can hang on until the start of the long climb ahead, as I’m unlikely to be able to follow him up there.

Balance

“At the beginning, I would do four weeks of shifts and then have two weeks off. That was lot of traveling and lot of time in airports. In the end, I didn’t feel like I lived anywhere, you know? It would be just out of a suitcase all the time. In Norway, I would work, work, work 60 or 70 hours a week, then I’d have the two weeks off, get back home, and it felt like I wasn’t living during those four weeks back on. It wasn’t a perfect life, far from any kind of balance, but it taught me some good lessons, and after two years of this, I decided I wanted to move to Norway permanently.”

The next time I meet Justinas is before the Desertus Bikus in Hasparren, a little town at the foothills of the Pyrenees in the Basque Country, not far from the border with Spain. Justinas is totally relaxed, as this is only a rehearsal for him. He has no intention to win anything here, so he has a sneaky beer at dinner only a few hours before the start. He is laughing with fellow rider Sophie Potter and plotting another beer for dessert.

“Sorry to disappoint you, but I am an open book. You are not getting any special treatment from me. That’s just the way I am. I share everything, and if someone asks me a question, I never answer with a simple yes or no. I give the whole story. It costs me energy sometimes when I prepare for a race or stand at the start line, because even though I’m trying to be fully in the moment, if someone wants to talk, I can’t help but really talk.”

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No matter who you are, Justinas has this amazing capacity to make you feel at ease and even special. He has a warm demeanor and a contagious smile. Generous and genuine—there’s no understanding his graceful manner.

Badlands

Alcohol-free beer, a cortado, a lemon Fanta, and a bocadillo for breakfast at 7 a.m. before he’s back out into the Tabernas Desert and on the last stretch of Badlands.

“I couldn’t sleep on either side for a year because I had so many bruises on my body. When I moved to Tinset in Norway, and I took up cycling as a sport, there was this pro mountain bike team that I wanted to be on, and that became my big goal. 

It took me two years because I wasn’t a mountain biker, and being a Lithuanian—where mountain biking is basically park riding—there was a bit of a gap there with actual mountains and all. I would crash a lot, testing the limits. If you are not on the limits, you are not fast enough. Yeah, that was it. I made it to the team in 2019, and in 2020, well, you know, COVID. 

There were no races, and everyone was social distancing. On the other hand, I had crazy shifts as a nurse during that period. So, when I had free time, I would just ride my bike alone. I got a backpack and rode 1,000 kilometers in five days, and then in four days. I wondered how many kilometers I could ride in just one day, so I made a 700-kilometer route for myself.

A good friend of mine from the bike shop in Bergen had moved back to Spain and made his own shop, Cyclofactoria, and told me about races like Transpyrenees. That was my first race, and since I like to do things a bit spontaneously, I signed up for Transiberica too, which was only a month later. And I also signed up for Badlands, which was two weeks after Transiberica. In that first year, I did those three races—almost in a row—to test myself. Transpyrennes was climbing, Transiberica was ultra-long and involved a free route, and Badlands was my first off-road race. That’s how I started.”

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Justinas didn’t scratch that night in Gor while racing Badlands. He took a nap, woke up an hour later with cramps, and decided to sleep another hour. The same thing happened when he awoke again, so he snoozed again (and again), and by the time he was up and running, he was in 80th place. Throughout the next 20 hours, he stopped only to share ice creams and beers (alcohol-free and normal ones) with other riders.

Justinas told me, “It’s nice, you know? It’s so different out there because when you are in the lead, it’s very lonely. I took so many selfies with people and had so much fun meeting them. I put in a good shift of playing real-world Pac-Man today, and my sister sent me a text saying I went from 80th to 20th. Not too bad!”

Essence

“I think it’s the simplicity of it. Life gets so much simpler, you just gotta ride and push the pedals and then get food and maybe sleep a bit. That’s about it. It’s straightforward. You don’t have all these things to think about, you see messages maybe on the phone, but you don’t even have to answer; you get to disconnect and connect with what’s around—your bike and the world.”

When I asked him about his Tour Divide record, which is something of a holy grail in the bikepacking world, he was very nonchalant. He told me how he loved seeing people so excited about it but that he didn’t want to get too attached to any record. He knows folks with come for his records and try to break them, which is what they’re for, after all. He said he didn’t feel strongly about returning to the Tour Divide, but Robin Gemperle’s incredible effort this year may have stirred the beast.

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“The worst part of the Tour Divide in 2023 was New Mexico, toward the end. My gears had stopped working, I couldn’t shift from single speed, and I broke a spoke. I felt like everything was falling apart. 

But last year, it was maybe even worse, because the hardest part was day one. I was about to reach Fernie, so not even into the United States, and I had pains in places I never had pains before. I was cramping, and I was feeling like just lying down there and doing nothing. That was really hard, because it’s not like I didn’t know what was to come. I knew exactly what the next 14 days or so were going require. To feel like that, to feel so low on day one, was daunting!”

Onward

We all want to know what’s next for Justinas, and the fact is, he would love to know too. The future is wide open for him at this point. He has made a huge mark on the sport already, and he has no plans to slow down soon, but his plans are loose and ever-changing for now.

Justinas works on instinct, immediate pleasure, and fun. He goes with the flow, and it’s far too early in this flow to try to anticipate where it could ultimately lead him. He hasn’t won the Silk Road Mountain Race in Kyrgyzstan yet, which may well be an upcoming goal, but he remains loose and free for now.

Someone once told me not to dream of reaching my goals or objectives. Rather, it’s better to dream of feeling content along the way. Dream of feeling fulfilled rather than always chasing after things. Dream of happiness rather than ticking boxes on a bucket list. Justinas seems to embody this way of being, happy and satisfied but still hungry, and I can’t wait to see where his intrepid spirit and infectious positivity take him.

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