Barbara Edelston Peterson is a woman who lets very little stand in the way of her workouts. Even when her two daughters were very little, she'd explain to them it was her exercise time and out the door she went.

"When the girls were babies, I told them, 'I'm going out for a bike ride for two hours. And I'll be back. It's Daddy time,'" she says.

"That's what they knew as babies," Peterson, a semi-professional mountain bike and triathlon world champion, says of her daughters, Hilary and Foreste. The family lives in a rustic cottage nestled in the hills of Berkeley, Calif.

"Barbara Peterson's daughters have only known an extremely fit mother," Peterson says of herself, in the third person. But she's quick to add: "I am a mother, first and foremost." It might be safe to say she's one of few extreme mothers.

Extreme Motherhood
Many people get a natural high from exercise. But it's not their spiritual font. Exercise is, however, the source of both for Peterson. "It's my church, my sanctuary," says Peterson, 5 feet, 3 inches tall and 108 pounds.

Mother, extreme athlete, author, marketing consultant and jewelry designer, Peterson says exercise is her fuel for spiritual and physical wellness, and it has been part of her life since her late teens. Fitness has led to her athletic and literary careers and has helped shape how she parents her also very active girls, alongside husband Dick Peterson.

"Regular exercise and getting fit is everyday fuel for excelling in everyday life," says Peterson, a four-time XTERRA USA National Champion, whose sponsors include CliffBar, Oakley, TYR Swimsuits and Specialized Bicycles. She adds that exercise is the "motor" behind being a good mom. At about 15 years of age, she discovered this "motor"; it was to serve her for life.

Moving into the Light
As a high school student in the early 1970s in Armonk, N.Y., Peterson struggled with depression. Always an active child ("I had an athletic orientation," such as swimming and skiing, she says) she had yet to view exercise as an outlet for her stress, not to mention a cure for her dark moods.

She took up running, eventually becoming the only girl on her school's cross-country team. "Nobody ran back in 1971 and 1972," she says. "And I ran." She did so in tennis shoes, in the days before cushioned, specialized running shoes. She also practiced yoga, another unusual undertaking in that era for a young woman.

Once in college, at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colo., Peterson tapped into her Jewish heritage and studied both German Jewry and U.S.-Israeli politics. (Later, she earned a master's degree in clinical psychology, but never practiced it.) Fitness counterbalanced her academic and professional pursuits: She joined the tennis, ski and squash teams while keeping up lap swim and running.

Her approach to "mood-enhancing" was different than most, she says. "Where there was darkness and frustration and confusion and disappointment, as a young woman, when I exercised I found light, calm and pools of positive energy," she says. This was the energy Peterson would need for the next sport she was to discover.

Racing off the Road
After college, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she worked for the office of American-Israeli foreign affairs. While in the Bay Area, she met like-minded, high-intensity athletes who were pioneering a new sport: mountain biking.

In the early '80s, Peterson became part of a group of rigorous biking enthusiasts who wanted to proliferate knowledge of and interest in their relatively new sport for both its health and environmental benefits. Again, she was one of few women in the field. "I was absolutely one of the only women who did mountain-bike racing," she says. Perhaps this made it easier to meet her future husband, Dick Peterson, also an avid mountain biker and skier.

Her love of and devotion to mountain biking parlayed itself into participating in competitions called XTERRAs, rugged, off-road triathlons that require a 1.5K open-water swim, running for 12 kilometers across soft sand, rivers and trails and a 35K mountain bike ride on extremely rugged terrain.

"I do this sport because I love it, and because of what it gives me on many different levels," she says, including boosting her writing career. Author of The Bed Rest Survival Guide (Avon, 1998), and an ongoing series of inspirational books – under the "Power of Exercise" moniker – aimed at girls and mothers as well as seniors and busy professionals, Peterson says her athletic success has given her name recognition and depth of experience.

She is one of the most well-sponsored female XTERRA participants, is undefeated season after season and travels all over the world to compete, including the Czech Republic, Italy, Germany, Hawaii and Canada. And in June, she travels to Budapest, Hungary, to participate in XTERRA.

Sticking to a Schedule
Her daily schedule, of course, is rigid and chock-full. Her day starts at 6 a.m. with a two-mile swim, followed by hours of writing and working on jewelry designs until early afternoon. When most people are having their late-afternoon slump and coffee, Peterson is either practicing 90 minutes of bikram, or "hot" yoga, running or swimming for up to two hours.

So where does Peterson sneak in time to be a devoted mom? "I am, like, a really regular, normal mom," she insists. Peterson says, should her girls get ill, have an appointment or their own sports event, she drops everything to see to Hilary and Foreste's needs.

Hilary is a competitive equestrian; Foreste is a former elite gymnast, and both girls are competitive alpine ski racers. Their father is a former ski racer. "They get their spirit of athletics from their mother, but their dad passed down his passion," Peterson says of her girls and husband.

"She manages to get done in a day what most people would get done in a week (or maybe a month!)," says Pam Smilow. She and Peterson attended middle and high schools together. "She is a loving mother to her two daughters and is active in their schools, baking cookies, serving on the diversity committee, chaperoning on field trips," Smilow, a painter and mother of two, says.

Peterson says family time at home isn't a challenge; for example, she prioritizes carving out time in the evenings to pore over her daughters' homework. But family time must sometimes take a backseat, due to her travels to XTERRAs. Yet every once in a while the foursome heads together to far-flung locales for Peterson's competitions.

So the majority of the food preparation – mostly vegetables, grilled fish and lots of carbs like pasta and rice – falls to Dick, for whom cooking "is like a little meditation," Peterson says, chewing into the phone during the interview and, when caught in the act, admits to enjoying her daily home-baked chocolate-chip cookie. (She also admits to downing two heaping tablespoons of peanut butter with lunch daily.)

She is aware her focus on a fit body and hours of exercise seven days a week could send the wrong message to her daughters; Peterson's level of activity could fuel girls' sometimes precarious body image. Peterson does her best to shore up her girls' positive body image and self-confidence. She says she works hard to send the message that food is important not only for a strong body, but especially for a strong mind. She believes food should be entirely enjoyable, and special indulgences – candy and ice cream, for instance – should be allowed. "I don't believe in rigidity" where food is concerned, she says.

Active Family Time
Peterson may not like rigidity regarding food. But her schedule leaves very few moments for downtime. Still, she finds time to read – particularly enjoying authors Anita Diamant, Barbara Kingsolver, Anna Quindlen and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Thich Nhat Hahn – and make collages out of family photos. The latter she works on during the family's weekly four-hour commute to and from Squaw Valley, Calif., for weekend ski trips and competitions.

Long-time friend Sara Stamey remembers this about Peterson, as well as the active vacations Stamey and her husband, Winston Saunders, used to take with the Petersons before either couple had children. "It was always something physical and outdoors," says Stamey, formerly of Berkeley and now of Hillsboro, Ore. "With Barbara, you don't go on vacation and sit around the cabin."

Stamey's husband, Winston Saunders, agrees. And he adds that Peterson, his friend since 1982, recently took her daughters to Europe for a month. There, the girls spent one week at ski-racing camp and three weeks touring Europe while supporting their mom on the XTERRA Euro Tour. "It would have been easy to take the trip solo," says Saunders, a program manager and father of two, 12 and 16. "But by combining that, she was able really to get her personal fulfillment and simultaneously enrich the lives of her kids."

And that's ultimately the most important part of life for this extreme mom.