Kenna Pfeiffer was exactly where she wanted to be, in the race and in her dogged quest to become the best in the world.

The Upperco native had persevered in her 19 years, through surgeries to repair both shins and shredded tendons in her left ankle, through terrible grief after her closest childhood friend — the person who’d introduced her to skating — was killed in a motorcycle accident.

But here she was in Germany, in the lead pack and pushing for more. She slowed rounding a turn, and the field of in-line roller skaters bunched up behind her. Then she felt one of them clip the back of her skate.

Seventeen months later, Pfeiffer does not speak with regret about that instant when her athletic life careened onto a different path. Maybe she needed to crash to figure out where she truly belonged.

On a bike, as it turned out.

When Pfeiffer, 20, rides in the Maryland Cycling Classic on Saturday morning, she’ll measure herself against some of the best, most experienced riders in the world. But, as she snakes through 17.9 miles of Baltimore roads, she’ll also take stock of how much has changed for her in so little time.

At this time last year, she was still a world-class speed skater, albeit one who’d missed the biggest races on the calendar as she recovered from that scary concussion she suffered in Germany. Now her ambitions ride on two wheels, following a path to enduring professional success in Europe, if all goes as planned.

“The reward in cycling is so much greater,” she said. “Skating, it was so exhausting mentally and physically. I was pushing through injury all the time, and I was isolated, always training by myself. In cycling, the camaraderie, the people you get to do it with, is so different. There’s so much more riding in the United States. The level is so much higher.”

The cycling experts who’ve helped Pfeiffer through this transition will tell you she’s doing astonishing things for a novice in a sport ruled by technique and tactics.

“I don’t know if it has clicked with her yet, but I keep telling her, ‘You have done things that not many athletes have done,’” her coach, Iván Dominguez, said. “A lot of these girls, they start racing as a junior, so for her to come from a different sport, and in a year she’s already winning big races in Europe — she doesn’t realize what she has done.”

Growing up in northern Baltimore County, Pfeiffer discovered an engine inside that belied the understated face she showed to the world.

Her older sister, Mackenzie, went gaga for horses, riding competitively in high school and later becoming an on-air handicapper for Maryland thoroughbred racing at Pimlico and Laurel Park. It made sense, given the Pfeiffers lived in the heart of Maryland horse country.

Kenna Pfeiffer wasn’t having it.

“She tried to get me to do it,” she recalled, laughing. “But she’s just so particular that it was always misery every time I rode horses with her.”

She found her purpose when a neighbor, Heidi Herzog, invited her to a nearby roller rink, Sportsman’s Hall, for a weekend spin. It became their ritual, and one Saturday the middle schoolers noticed a team of skaters practicing high-velocity turns around the rink.

Herzog dared Pfeiffer to join. “I kind of did it as a joke at first,” she said.

Not for long.

“I’m a very competitive person,” she said. “When I put my mind to something, I kind of get obsessive about it. I was always the fastest girl, and then when the speed skaters came to the rink, they were beating me, so I was just like, ‘Oh, no.’ So I had to join them, and I quickly started beating them too.”

Pfeiffer’s parents had never glimpsed this side of the girl they’d thought of as a quiet soul with only a few friends at St. Paul’s School for Girls.

“She doesn’t like to be defeated,” her mother, Keri, said. “She was always the quiet one. You could probably count on one hand her close friends. So to see her out there performing, going through these rugged sports, it was like, ‘How is that even my child?’”

Pfeiffer rose at 4:30 a.m. to train before school, then left immediately after the last bell at 3:30 p.m. to drive 90 minutes to Hagerstown, where her team practiced in the evening. She often did not find time for dinner until after 10 p.m.

She had tried on a looser, party-centric identity for a stretch of high school but found that rigor suited her better.

She moved to Florida after graduation to train full time with her speedskating coach (while pursuing an online degree from Seminole State College). She made the national team, representing the U.S. in Argentina, Colombia and other far-flung locales.

“I wanted to be a world champion so badly,” she said. “That was my thing in skating. That’s what pushed me.”

So much so that she kept her head down through successive difficult surgeries and recoveries, kept pushing after her best friend, Herzog, was killed when her boyfriend’s motorcycle collided with a pickup truck in May 2023.

During that period, Pfeiffer cross-trained on a bicycle, never taking it seriously, though some of the experienced riders around her said she should.

She met Marc Lefkowitz three years ago when she bought a bike from his Veloccino shop in Butler.

“We have group rides that go out of here that are pretty hard-core,” Lefkowitz said. “Professional riders, former pros, national champions. And you could tell her strength. She didn’t know how to ride, how to draft, all the technicalities of how to save power. So she would get dropped at the end of the ride, but you just knew, as soon as she started doing that, she would be awesome.”

“Skating was my passion,” Pfeiffer said. “I really liked riding. Everyone at the group rides would say, ‘Oh, you’re so strong. What are you skating for?’ But I was kind of in denial, I think.”

Everything changed in April 2024 when that competitor clipped her skate in Geisingen, Germany. “I kind of scorpioned and hit my chin on the ground,” Pfeiffer said. “I was laying on the track, and I looked over. There was blood all over the floor. I wasn’t unconscious, but I couldn’t see very well.”

Watching on her laptop in Maryland, Keri Pfeiffer saw medics put her daughter on a stretcher.

Doctors at a German hospital told Kenna she wasn’t badly hurt, but she was so out of it the next day that she struggled to put on her skates. She flew home, visited her doctor in Maryland and learned she was severely concussed.

The next four months felt like something out of a horror movie. She couldn’t focus through simple conversations, couldn’t listen to music, couldn’t stand extended exposure to daylight. If she went to dinner with her family, she’d spend the next day in bed, crippled by headaches. Even modest training set off explosions behind her temple.

Her injury kept her from Team USA tryouts in June 2024.

“It was just heartbreaking,” she said. “I had trained so hard. I was super fit. I had become the first American in 16 years to win a national event in [skating-crazed] Colombia. And it was all taken away from me.”

Late last summer, she entered a few cycling races around Miami, still on a lark. She finished in the top three in several and had a blast.

By late September, Pfeiffer knew it in her bones: She belonged in this new world. Confidantes in her skating circle did not get it, and their negativity fueled a gnawing worry that she was simply quitting in the face of difficulty.

The good vibes from her new cycling comrades helped override her doubts.

“It was a really emotional decision for me,” Pfeiffer said. “I was upset for a while. I felt like I was quitting, like I had come so far and I was giving it up to go be a beginner in something else. But I have no regrets. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.”

Friends in Maryland suggested she link up with the California-based Dominguez, a former pro cyclist from Cuba.

He spent a few days watching her ride in Miami. “I think you have something special,” he told her, recognizing the power and work ethic she’d built through skating.

Pfeiffer’s results this year have backed up his view. She won two races in Belgium this summer, represented USA Cycling as an under-23 entrant in a major French race and recently signed a two-year contract with the Virginia-based Blue Ridge TWENTY28 pro team.

For now, she’s a sprinter, still out of sorts on the unyielding climbs that define the world’s most famous races. But she hopes for a life in Europe, riding on the professional world tour, and Dominguez said coaches there have eyes on her.

“There’s no reason she can’t get to the top level,” Lefkowitz said. “When somebody like her rides in with a national jersey, and 50 people are out here [at Verloccino] drinking coffee and getting ready for a ride, they see her and it’s inspiring. Here’s a local person out there trying to make the best of the sport.”

Pfeiffer’s hometown race this weekend could help her take another step toward achieving these big goals.

The Maryland Cycling Classic is back — with a redesigned course and a debuting women’s race (four circuits for a total of 71.6 miles) — after the 2024 edition was canceled because of traffic impacts from the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse. For those outside the sport, it might be simply another weekend spectacle on the calendar. For Pfeiffer, it’s a rare local showcase against the elite riders she hopes to call peers.

“I’m just hoping to learn as much as I can,” she said. “I’m fairly tired. Everyone is tired; it’s coming to the end of the season. But this is a super-big event, and it’s going to be hard. If a result happens to be there at the end, it is, but I’m not going to put a ton of pressure on myself.”

Pfeiffer did enough of that in her previous athletic life. Now, no matter what happens in the short term, she believes she’s on the right course.