Her bike is customized with small bars and short crank arms so she can slip through traffic. “I couldn’t even work a full week when I started, I could only do like four days a week, averaging 67 miles a day.” Her specialties include rush jobs and release jobs—when one pick-up includes multiple deliveries. One release job took her from Madison and 34th St to Park and 60th St, during which she made eight deliveries within an hour. This, Ruiz says, was only possible because she's focused on learning the fastest routes throughout the city. "Routing is the hardest thing about messengering, but now they have this new app that tells you how to route,” Ruiz explains, “but traditional messengers do their own routing.”

Her routing practice gave her a 3rd place finish—and first female finisher—at the Parks and Wreck alleycat race. Alleycats are bike races that emulate messenger work, where bikers race through a manifest—a list of checkpoints that must be hit, sometimes in a specific order. Often she’s one of only two or three women who race. “These girls have been out here way longer than me. I have mad respect for them. I’m a rookie.”

Her rookie status didn’t stop her from creating an all-female courier collective, Mala Bruja, with her friend Kenya. “Kenya and I are usually the only girls that race. She always wins by the skin of her teeth, and I’m really competitive so I hate it. If it’s not me t-boning a car and catching a flag, it’s me going the wrong way or something.” Mala Bruja sponsored New York's first-ever female-only Alleycat, Hellcat 2015. “We organized it in a month and got 30 plus sponsors. We planned for 30-50 women to show up, and everyone said it was too much. So we only printed 30 manifests, and more than 70 ladies showed up.”