I experienced a wide range of emotions after standing on the podium at Unbound. Climbing up there and fulfilling a long journey of hard work and sacrifice filled me with elation. However, it also left me with a lingering question of “what’s next?” The following four days were mostly filled with snacking and sleeping as I basked in achieving my biggest goal of the year, only touching the bike to clean it.
Continue reading
Welcome to the Rodeo Labs Race Director Round Up! Over the next few weeks, as the gravel race “season” gets underway, we have decided to take on a mini-series focusing on gravel racing through the collective eyes of gravel race directors from across the country. Race directors are both the tastemakers and the police of the nucleus concept of “the spirit of gravel.” While race directors have a fantastic platform to voice their perspective for their own races, that voice is often limited to those narrow confines. The goal here is to use our podcast, as a small journalistically minded outlet with no skin in the game, to give them a collective platform to share their interpretations of the state of the sport.
In part one, Logan introduces the series through a field dispatch from the Gravel Worlds gravel race in Nebraska last summer and the dialogue that followed. The first conversation was with Andy Jones-Wilkins, who is not only Logan’s father, but also an accomplished ultra-runner and pundit. Using the conversation with Andy as a framework, Logan sat down with Jason Strohbehn, the race director of Gravel Worlds and the co-host of the Gravel Family Podcast, to learn more about the race and start at the question that is guiding the whole series: what is the state of gravel bike racing?
Continue reading
The Atlas Mountain Race sets off for its third edition next week. In anticipation of the bike packing race, we brought in Ashley Carelock to look back at her Moroccan experiences in last year’s October edition of the race, while Stephen Fitzgerald dropped into the chat to add his own perspective from his outing to Africa in 2020.
If you are interested in following along to the 2023 Atlas Mountain Race, be sure to check out the race website, here. Additionally, back in the depth of the pandemic, Stephen penned this expansive write up about what that race was like. You can find that here. Lastly, Ashley eloquently wrote more about her race on her blog, which you can access here.
Part one of the podcast picks up with Logan Jones-Wilkins rambling through the middle of America. After leaving the muddy grass field at the Rule of Three in Bentonville, Arkansas, Logan was on his way to Emporia, Kansas to race Unbound Gravel. With time to spare and capitalizing on his proximity to Stillwater, Oklahoma, an idea was born– a Rodeo Labs Podcast field recording. The first field recording is a ride in Bobby Wintle’s 4-Runner. Logan experiences some of Bobby’s favorite roads, which didn’t even make this years course!
Continue reading
When Daniel graduated from UC Santa Barbara, the Tour Divide was not on his radar. However, shortly after Daniel discovered a new passion– bicycle touring. His first bicycle tour was to Columbia, it was a crash course on touring and how to maintain a bike over a six month trip. Daniel has not stopped touring. When Daniel discovered the Tour Divide, he was hooked. The first foray was touring the divide, but the the following two years he has raced it. Now Daniel is patiently waiting for next year. On the podcast, Daniel recounts his experiences from the event. Rain was persistent throughout, start to finish. In between, there were awed moments with wildlife, mishaps with bear spray and quickly fostered friendships on the trail.
Continue reading
The more I go to events in the gravel world, the more I realize how serpentine the paths are to the start lines. Nowhere is that more the case than the Oregon Trail Gravel Grinder. Or at least, nowhere is it more apparent, since you have five days of mingling to share your life with former and future strangers.
On the Trail, there were olympians, world champions, graphic designers, architecture students, chefs, and wind energy executives. There were tech bros, soccer moms, emergency room doctors, and inflatable hot tub owners. There were snowboarders, triathletes, moto drivers, photographers and vloggers. All waking up in tents every morning – or in the middle of the night to drops of wayward sprinklers – to drag their tired, half cleaned bodies across one of the most spectacular ranges in the country. It is glorious, it’s weird, it is Oregon.
Continue reading
By Logan Jones-Wilkins
The last couple weeks I have been surfing. You know, the proper radical stuff. You know, getting stoked.
“You just drop in, smack the lip… Waapah! Just drop down… Swoopah! And then after that, you just drop in, ride the barrel, and get pitted, so pitted.” – Surfer Guy, 2012
That’s it — that has been me. Minus the ocean, and the water, and the surfboard, and the crazy Californian energy. Nonetheless, there have been waves, I have been riding, and I have been getting pitted. So pitted.
Continue reading
As bike enthusiasts or even, dare I say, bike nerds, we obsess over bikes, gear, weight, suspension (or lack thereof), geometry, and tires. We can’t help but keep track of what are the the latest trends and tech. So when bikepacking.com releases their the famous list of participants bikes and photos tackling an event, we can’t help but ogle at the myriad of choices. We are giddy with excitement for what is to come; often untold hardship and profound moments for the participants. On the other side dot watchers are all over checking in at various points throughout the day only imaging the vast terrain that yields slow, but steady progress.
Continue reading
My dad, a lifelong educator, has a favorite saying whenever he takes a group of his students camping:
“There are two types of people in life, like in s’mores making, there are ‘Browners’ and there are ‘Burners.’ Burners play with the fire, while Browner’s have trust in their time.”
While that saying is predominantly about soft, goopy, pseudo plastic desserts, the debate applies perfectly to an event like Unbound. In a world full of Burners, it can pay to be a Browner.
But enough about marshmallows! Here is the story of my Unbound:
Continue reading
If you had told me years ago that Rodeo would be sponsoring a gravel racing team in the future I would have laughed in your face. For a long time I was very anti sponsorship. I didn’t believe in “paying people to ride our bikes”. I also didn’t like the attitudes that I had seen in sponsored athletes in previous experiences I had had with some high level racing teams. I had seen a very offputting sense of entitlement on display in those teams and it bummed me out. More than once I’ve heard sponsored athletes telling me or a fan: “I don’t really like this product, I just get paid to ride it”. It made it seem like some racers had attitudes of entitlement, and few attitudes are a bigger turnoff for me.
Continue reading