Denise Mueller not only holds the world speed record for women’s cycling which she set on the Bonneville Flats in 2016, she’s now intent on beating the men’s speed record for cycling as well. Her intensity makes one think she will do it – and it was her intensity that got her on the cover of the Wall Street Journal.
Jeffrey: So Denise I think people are really going to be interested in how not only you set the world speed record but how you got such great publicity including making the cover of the Wall Street Journal. So where do you want to start, Denise?
Denise: Well, definitely there’s a two parts on the how the heck did I end up doing this it’s the actual part about how the logistics of doing a land speed record, which was accomplished in September at the Bonneville Salt Flats in 2016 during an event called world of speed and it was in the draft of a Range Rover that we were using and I had a specialized bicycle that was sponsored by KHS that had double rejection gearing, motorcycle tires and wheels, a set of gearing stabilizers, shock absorbers in the front, there’s a technical effect as far as what I did but then on top of that there’s also the “why the heck would I do this?” element of how I also accomplished it was the thought of it; but then also the mental and physical preparation that went into that.
But to answer a little bit on the cover of the Wall Street Journal sometimes it’s just too lucky break when it comes down to some of this and also the connections with people that you know. My bicycle racing coach John Howard did this land speed record in the male category in 1985 at a 152 miles an hour and he have been long time friends with Bill Walton and he was being interviewed by Wall Street Journal for a story that they were doing on Bill Walton and happened to interject about this whole land speed record that we were doing — the first ever female pace bicycle land speed record and they actually had an interest in covering the story. And they were very active — you would think it will be something like sports magazine or something a little bit more in line with the sporting side, but Wall Street Journal was really interested in it and Jason gave one of their reporters who is also a cyclist and they happened to be looking for opportunities with virtual reality because we had a virtual reality 360 degrees video made that’s about 13 minutes long that the Wall Street Journal…
Jeffery: Okay. So lets me interject a couple of things. So it pays to be friends with someone who had done a similar thing and have already gotten press because they are probably still getting interviewed and stuff and they mentioned you. And now you mentioned that you have a technology angle that was part of your endeavors. So that’s interesting because if people add a new twist to something like a bicycle land speed record and the bicycle that’s interesting — an interesting angle on the story as a journalist. Tell us about how did the thing VR thing happen?
Denise: The virtual reality side of it really was a pure opportunistic situation with the Wall Street Journal; they have an app and they were wanting to get more virtual reality video up on that and this was one of those very high speed ones that was going to test some of the technological abilities of doing this because it’s like a series of 6 to 8 go pro cameras facing in all directions to be able to capture the 360 degree video and they thought this would be a great opportunity because of the speed we were going, it was going to test some of the limit. With virtual reality that you’ve seen out to there a lot of times is very fix objects or very slow moving object and this is going to be an extremely fast moving situation that sort of pushed the envelope for them, I believe, in a way and they saw that as an opportunity so that was almost like the cherry on top, as they say.
Jeffery: You did get a little press earlier and I think you even did [inaudible 00:04:13] to raise money and there were other things that that you did that generated smaller press for your endeavor along the way. Tell us about those things, you know, we started at the top we should work our way backwards. How did you begin this project and then who helped you in the early stages getting early publicity to help rally funds and those kind of things? Tell us about that.
Denise: A little bit of two-fold. One, again, it comes to who you know and having a great story or a great angle — being the first woman ever to do this was a great angle to get people interested. So where we really started was home town. So some of our first interviews were not only a friend of mine freelance for a local magazine which is where I happened to live. So she very early on did an article, which then, once you have one article printed then you can start mentioning that towards getting other articles because now you’ve already received a press, so it’s almost like a little bit of a tipping point. Once you started receiving press then more people want to start covering that in different venues.
The other thing is that we sourced out different angles; one of which is I happen to be a business owner and my business is a security company and so we went to the security journal, which is a very different group than the cyclist and a very different one from the [inaudible 00:05:41]. So we went and we asked everybody that we know who they have contacts with and would they be interested in doing a story so again who you know and also having a bit of an angle. So we started with local little area code, you know, [inaudible 00:05:55] and 92009 Magazine a year and a half, two years almost before this..
