This week we speak with experienced gravel athlete, journalist, podcaster and author, Selene Yeager who recently published the quintessential guide to gravel.&nbsp; It is appropriately named, Gravel!&nbsp; The book is a must-read for anyone trying to navigate the world of gravel equipment and events.&nbsp; Selene Yeager  Selene  Automated transcription (please excuse the typos) Selene, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. I'm stoked to talk about your latest book, Gravel!. I am very happy to talk about it too. These things are always I, I will confess that I always have a lot of anxiety before. One of the, one of my books goes out into the world. It's just, it's just kind of in my DNA. I'm that I'm that kind of personality, but you invest, you know, a lot. I invest a lot of myself into it anyway, so I'm always so happy when people receive it. The way I had hoped they would. Yeah, I mean, it's clear there's a ton of research went into it and all your personal experience. It really is a soup to nuts guide that can benefit a rookie athlete as well as an expert athlete because there's just so much in here and it's, one of the things I always have really loved about gravel is there's just a lot to unpack. There's a lot to unpack about the bikes, the courses, and how they're different in different parts of the country. Let's set the stage a little bit for the listener and just talk about how you got into gravel riding. I know you've got a rich background in both mountain biking and road biking, but where did gravel start to come into play for you? Well, it's funny, it's like a, I imagine it's like a lot of people. I live in a fairly rural area, so, you know, we, we were riding a lot of, you know, we didn't actually call them gravel roads necessarily. They're just unpaved roads, you know, the dirt roads. So we would ride a lot of dirt and gravel just naturally on our rides. And then I really liked it. Like I thought it was just kind of adventurous and fun and those roads always went by pretty places, you know, cause I really off the beaten path. But it wasn't, you know, the fun is always a bit limited by flat tires, you know, by your caliper or your brake calipers when with rim brakes sort of packing up. So didn't do it as much as I probably wanted to, but then I got involved in on the East coast here, there's a series a by crew, messy sport, but like hell of hundred in and it's all based off the spring classics, right? So they have us a certain amount of gravel sectors that you ride. And you know, we just did it on a road bikes. I had a Trek Medan with 23 is, you know, and I just would pump up to a hundred and pray to get through the day. But it was, but I really liked it. So when gravel per se came along, I was like, whatever. I mean honestly, I was just like, yes, sure. Whatever. A new segment. And it honestly is, I talk about in the intro to the book, it wasn't until I did a Jodie cancer for the first time that I was like, Oh huh, gravel is a different thing. You know, like, this is my Medona would not make it 12 yards and on this gravel. So I really started to understand what it was all about when I did that. And then I did a ton of events and you know, I've always felt like the iron cross is too, but I did those across bikes. It was a little different. So that was just sort of a natural evolution into it. And then as it grew, I, and the came along, this is one of the things where I think that the bikes actually knocked down the door. Like once they put a disc brakes on road bikes and the game just changed, you know? And I, and I feel like that's a huge part of what we're, what we're seeing. And it's so much more fun. I mean, I do all the same events here that I did a decade ago, but I'm having so much more fun doing them cause I'm not worried about my tires. I'm, I have tons of clearance. It's just the bike is better. I'm not pinballing all over the road. Yeah. So that's my experience with it. Yeah,...

Selene Yeager - racer, coach and author of Gravel!

A conversation with John Kirlin from Wyoming's The Dead Swede Hundo gravel cycling event. The Dead Swede  The Dead Swede  Automated Transcript (please excuse the typos). John, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Awesome. I'm excited to learn about the dead Swede hundo. It definitely, I think captures my imagination as the most clever race name I've heard of in recent memory. But first let's start off by telling us where you're located and how you got into creating the event in the first place. Great. So yeah, located in, shared in Wyoming and kinda started looking around that, just the terrain. There are not a lot of folks that live in Wyoming. There are about half a million people in the entire state, but we're the 10th largest land mass in the United States. So we've got a lot of great terrain and a lot of big mountains and a lot of great gravel. And so riding gravel is just kind of an obvious choice for us out here. I moved to Sheridan from Casper, Wyoming and started just looking over the maps and just kinda seeing what roads were available, ride and started going into a local bike shop sharing bicycle company and chatting with who's now my business partner in the race. Jordan with Duke and looking at, you know, what the gravel scene lawns out here who's riding what, what's, what's big, what's Epic, how can I, what's a a hundred mile a loop that I could maybe sync up and everything started pointing towards the big horn mountains and cause we, we had the beauty of the big horn mountains that are just right in our backyard. And so it just started looking at potential ways we could loop up a a hundred mile loop and started looking on the map and everything drew me to kind of this grow that's kind of famous around here called red grade road. And it's just basically an old Jeep road almost that just goes straight up the mountain. You climb about three, 4,000 feet in a matter of seven miles. So it, it gets up and going, but we just started thinking, well maybe I'll put together a ride, maybe a group ride. And then I said, well, if I'm going to just formalize this thing and make it a real thing, how about we just put on an event and see if we can get some people more than just a handful of locals. The cheaper we can get some other people from around the state and the region to come out. And we at first year anticipated about 50 riders. We had about 150 show up for our first event and we just had our third year this year in June and that 580 riders show up. That's great. When you, when you moved to Sheridan, John, were you already writing a drop bar gravel bike or did you come from a mountain bike or road background? Yeah, I was riding a drop bar, gravel bike or cyclocross bike really. I'd actually yet to switch to a real specific gravel geometry. I'm currently on a, you know, a five year old specialized crops. Then just kind of retrofitted it. And I came from ride racing side cross and I raised mountain bikes and rode in college and I actually grew up as a cross country skier. And so that's where my real racing background came from. Great. And then you, you had mentioned, and I'm sure in people's imagination, the state of Wyoming, it just sort of screams that it probably has a lot of gravel roads. And you alluded to that. For those of us who haven't been to Wyoming, or at least in my case I've been through, but I haven't peddled in Wyoming at all. You know, what, what, what is the terrain and what are the roads like? I mean we have just all sorts of different regions over here. Anything from kind of where we're at on the Eastern side of the state is more high grassland. And so like Sheridan for example, is kind of rolling Hills with ranches and farm land and the kind of the open grassy lands. And then we've bought up to the big horn mountains. And so then we get into more like 9,000 vertical feet and mountain roads to track single track and rough feel, us forest service type riding. And then the opposite side, the...

Dead Swede Hundo -- Wyoming gravel with John Kirlin

This week we tackle training plans, gravel camps and the oldest gravel in America with Hunter Allen, founder of Peaks Coaching Group. Peaks Coaching  Peaks Coaching &nbsp;  Automated Transcript, please excuse any typos: &nbsp; Good day everyone and welcome to the gravel ride podcast. I'm your host Craig Dalton as we're in the middle of winter 2019 2020 I thought it'd be a good opportunity to talk to a coach, so this week I've invited Hunter Allen from peak coaching group onto the podcast. Hunter's got a background in professional road cycling as well as experience coaching thousands of athletes. At this point, we wanted to dig into some of the different elements when preparing for gravel events. Looking at your 2020 calendar, I was curious not only to explore structure and power workouts, but also the notion of grit and overcoming adversity because I think you simply can't Excel in gravel cycling if you're not prepared to have a left hook thrown at you at any point during the event, whether it's loose gravel, technical terrain or anything's going to take you out of your zone. You've got to be both physiologically prepared for these type of events, but also psychologically prepared to attack whatever's thrown at you. It was a great conversation with Hunter. He's based out in Bedford, Virginia, and is also producing a gravel camp in 2020. So let's jump right in with Hunter Hunter, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on For sure. As is customary on the gravel ride podcast. Let's start by learning a little bit more about how you came to gravel cycling. And maybe just for the listeners perspective a little bit more about your background as a cyclist in general. All right, excellent. Yeah, so I mean, I live here in a really beautiful place in Virginia with lots of beautiful mountains and small roads and you know, it's we've got all these incredible paved roads, but then we've got these amazing gravel roads too, which you know, just for years, ever since you know, I've been riding on the road, just kinda did, right. I mean, it was just, they were little connectors between other paved roads and such. And then all of a sudden, like gravel riding thing became a thing and it's like, wait, Oh wow, I can get a bike that's more specific to this and actually seek out these roads now and go have a lot of fun. So that was, that's kind of this the way that I discovered him. And did it start to take over more of your interests and mileage? You know, it's probably evened like a, I still love the speed of pavement and in our little country roads that we have here. And but it's probably even now, I mean for me, I can jump off a jump out both, you know, my office where my house and jump on a gravel road within two or three miles of, of either place. So it's kinda like, well, what's the mood? What am I, what am I in the mood for? To be honest. We're really fortunate that way. Yeah, you're lucky to have that option. And people should look at where Bedford, Virginia is just to get a sense of the type of roads and terrain that a Hunter's got in his backyard. Yeah, absolutely. You know, just a little of my background, you know, I came from a, I started racing BMX when I was a kid, so race, BMX all the way till I was 18, so have lots of that kind of a, you know, jumps and you know, background from, from thrashing on a BMX bike and then a race mountain bikes in college and rode bikes in college and was fortunate enough to get a pro contract in the middle nineties with the navigators team and raise for them for a few years. And, and I had a lot of fun and after that started the whole coaching thing. So it was a, it's been quite an evolution, but at the same time it's a, you know, cycling is the thread that has woven itself throughout all of my life, which I'm very fortunate and thankful for. So in your coaching career, obviously with a professional road background, I imagine your earliest clients probably came from a road background or had...

Hunter Allen - Peaks Coaching Group talks gravel training for your 2020 plans.

Crusher in the Tushar founder, Burke Swindlehurst talks about his 10 year journey around this unique Utah event. We talk about his journey and reveal his new partnership with Life Time and what it means for the future of the event. Crusher &nbsp; Crusher  Automated Transcription. Craig:  Burke, welcome to the show. Burke:  Hey, thanks, Craig. Craig:  As is customary, always like to start off by learning a little bit more about you as an athlete. Obviously you had a professional road career, but when did you start riding drop bar bikes off-road? Burke:  I would say probably the first time that I really delved into it was in 1996. I was preparing for the Tour of the Gila and I wanted to get some really big climbs in at high altitudes, and at the time I was living up in Logan, Utah. The training up in Logan is actually phenomenal, but they just didn't have those like massive clients that I knew I was going to be facing at Gila. And so I decided to take a trip with my buddy and we actually just packed credit cards and a change of clothes and just started riding from Logan to ... The ultimate destination being Beaver, Utah, which is where I grew up, and knowing that we were going to be climbing some big mountains on the way and also taking in some gravel roads. Burke:  But it's funny because, I mean, that essentially was where the Crusher was born because our final day, we rode up out of the Paiute Valley, which is on the backside of what is the Crusher course now and we actually rode up what is now called the Col de Crush, the big, defining climb of the race. That's when things started to click in my mind about how cool and how much fun it is to basically ride a road bike on gravel. Primarily, you know, not just the experience of what it takes to actually ride a road bike on gravel, the skills and all that stuff, but mostly the places that it takes you. It's off the beaten path and that really spoke to me. Craig:  Yeah. I think there's something amazing about when you put together your first mixed terrain ride, about the sense of adventure you felt. You may end up from point A to point B in a radically different fashion than you ever did on the road. Burke:  Yeah. And nine times out of 10, there's going to be some sort of calamity in there too. And that's part of the fun is you get a flat tire or you go off course, whatever it happens to be. Like you said, there's a sense of adventure involved that arises from taking those roads less traveled. Craig:  Yeah. I got to imagine that that's been a big driver for the industry as individual athletes discover those things about the types of riding they can do and the thrill you have at the end of it all. Burke:  Yeah. Craig:  In 2010 I guess, it was you and your wife founded the race known as Crusher in the Tushar. Can you talk about why you started the race and what the original vision was? Burke:  2010 was the end of the final year of my professional cycling career, and I was 37 years old. Honestly, I'd been thinking about retiring from cycling for a while just because physically it was just becoming a tall ask by that age. But I found a way to extend it and started to actually have a lot of fun with it. But I knew by the middle of the 2010 season, I'm like, "This is it. I can only hit the ground so many times, and I'm not getting up the same way that I used to." It was one of those, "Oh, shit," moments. It's like, what's next? At the time I'd been working with the Tour of Utah and I'd been volunteering with them for probably five years up to that point. I think I started in 2005 with them, and had been doing course design and I was like the athlete and team liaison. Burke:  It eventually evolved to the point where the race director asked if I would like to come on and be the assistant director for 2011. I'm like, "Yeah, that sounds awesome. Here we go." How perfect is that? You get to transition from being a bike racer straight into something that you know, and a world that you've...

Burke Swindlehurst - The Crusher in the Tushar. Special Annoucement

Former World Tour Pro, Peter Stetina joins the podcast this week to discuss his decision to leave the World Tour to race gravel in 2020. Peter Stetina   Automated Transcript (please excuse all typos) Greetings everybody and welcome to the gravel ride podcast. I'm your host Craig Dalton. This week on the podcast we've got professional cyclists, Peter Stetina. If you're a fan of professional road cycling, you'll probably recognize Peter's name from his time in the pro Peloton, most recently with the Trek SegraFreddo team, and if you follow the gravel cycling scene closely in November of last year, Peter dropped. What dare I say is a bit of a bombshell. He decided to forego a future in the European Peloton, which was available to him and take a crack at being a gravel privateer. Peter's contract in 2019 allowed him to dabble in a few gravel events and his impact was immediately felt at the front end of the race, having one Belgian raw full ride come second at dirty Kanza and put in a pretty stellar performance in the Leadville 100 mountain bike race. It was great to learn a little bit more about pizza process and making this decision. What is 2020 calendar is looking like and how he plans on modifying his training as a gravel athlete versus his time in the pro Peloton. With that, let's jump right in. Pete, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Well, I usually start off by asking my guests to talk a little bit about your background. I think you've been in the press enough lately that I'll do a little summary in the show notes that people can look into. But suffice it to say your announcement in November of 2019 sent shockwaves through the gravel community when you decided to not continue pursuing your prayer road career over in Europe, which was definitely an option for you and sort of embrace this alternative calendar. Let's start by talking about 2019. Obviously you put your foot in the water and gravel racing and winning BWR and racing and DK and getting second there. What was going through your mind in 2019 as you were doing double duty and what led to the decision for what you're going to be doing in 2020? Yeah. You know, it was, um, it, it started even back in my mind at the end of, uh, 2018 last year. Um, I had had some health problems. I was actually suffering with, um, Epstein BARR virus, which is the precursor to mono all season. And it was undiagnosed and the, the road results weren't clicking, my body wasn't firing. And I was, I was struggling to get the, the contract renewal and you know, I've been doing this a decade. I felt like I had a place in, in the world tour, but it was, you know, just things weren't clicking. And I was second guessing myself and my body and the longevity in the sport. And, um, I kind of saw these races, you know, starting to gain traction. And, you know, I, I started thinking, you know, I wanna I want to experience these. And, um, and then, you know, Trek came back to me and they said like, yeah, you had a good to season, you represent the USA at the world's, like you had some good Italian classics, like, let's jam again. You, you know, we trust you. And so I, you know, I was gonna I was able to sign on again with Trek, but I kind of said, you know, Hey, like some of these events are big in the U S and they make sense and I want to try him. And this is actually totally independent to what the guys over at ETF were doing. I had no idea they were planning this even though Alex houses one of my best buds. Um, you know, he's one of my groomsmen in my wedding. He didn't tell me that was going down. And, uh, um, so it was kinda funny how I, I went to Trek and I said, Hey, I want to do these. And the road team, you know, it's, it's Italian run more or less over in Europe. Uh, they went to Trek marketing in Wisconsin and they just were like, Hey, you know, Pete is kind of putting his foot down. Like he's, he's really adamant about doing this. And Trek Wisconsin said, hell yeah, that makes...

Peter Stetina - World Tour Pro turns to Gravel for 2020

A conversation with John McCarrell, founder of the upcoming Mt. Lemmon Gravel Grinder in Tucson, Arizona.&nbsp; &nbsp;This event will test riders' equipment choice, skills and climbing legs as they tackle the backside of the formidable Mt. Lemmon.&nbsp; Episode Links: Mt. Lemmon Gravel Grinder  Mt. Lemmon Gravel Grinder  Automated Transcription (please forgive the errors): John, welcome to the show. Well, thanks. It's a pleasure to be here. As is the tradition. I'd like to start off by asking a little bit just about your background as a cyclist, how you got into the sport and how you eventually found yourself in the gravel sector. Well yeah, so I moved to Tucson in 2002 and started working at, , , right after college and started working at a destination resort here and my folks were living here as they retired and, , got my first taste of mountain biking actually. So that was my intro into cycling, was mountain biking here in the Tucson area with so much great terrain here. So I, I progressed, , into actually becoming a mountain bike guide. So I have a outdoor adventure, cross functional hospitality background at the resorts, , where I started my eight year career basically, and outdoor adventure. So mountain biking was the first part of that. , and then, , through, , friends got onto the road side was very, always was interested on the road side. , as a kid growing up, , riding my bike around our neighborhood and so on and loved the speed and the freedom. So, , but the problem I had was I didn't have a road bike. And so through some friends, great friends actually, , I inherited a road bike and, , did my first El tour to Tucson, , about a month later and I was hooked on the road side as well. So I was bouncing back and forth between, , mountain biking, , somewhat professionally as a guide and also a on my own, but, , also loved the road bike as well. So a lot of, a lot of folks around here in Tucson go back and forth because there's a lot of great roads and great mountain bike trail. So that was, that was through, , through that time period of the early to mid two thousands for me. , and then, , sort of moved away for a couple of years from Tucson, came back, , married and looking to grow a family and, and got back into both of those things. And, , and then just sort of, , fell into the gravel side of things I suppose because, , you know, also I just love riding my bike on dirt roads. So I was just doing that with my mountain bike. , and then as things evolved in the gravel world, , you know, I now was able to get a gravel bike and , and start hitting some of the, , terrain around Arizona. Yeah. It seems pretty natural. As someone who's got a, a knowledge of Tucson through my family down there, I've seen so many dirt roads, , and obviously the mountain biking's great down there. So I can imagine kind of the combination of a drop bar bike that enables you to go off road and combine some of the great road riding there just opened up a whole new type of riding for you and types of destinations that you might head out to on the bike. Yeah, absolutely. And, and you know, some folks who are familiar with Tucson over the years. We're also, we have a lot of great writing, but we also have a lot of horrible roads getting better, much, much better than the recent, , last two or three years. But a lot of rough chip steel and, and, , in monsoon season always brings the gravel and the sand, you know, onto the road surfaces. So I think some, some of the pure roadies felt like they were doing gravel already. , and so going wider, Tyler, you know, for that reason, and then going to bliss for that reason and then saying, Hey, I can, I can now take this thing down my gravel driveway. You know, a lot of folks here still have gravel driveways and such. And then, and then of course, just the freedom of, I can pretty much take this bike anywhere. , and then, you know, as you mentioned, things evolve in the tire. The tires now have knobbies and...

John McCarrell - Mt Lemmon Gravel Grinder Tucson Arizona

A conversation with gravel guru, Yuri Hauswald of Gu Energy Lab looking at nutrition for big rides and gravel bike suspension.&nbsp;&nbsp; This week's tech corner sponsored by  covers the range of suspension options for gravel bikes. Yuri Hauswald   Tech Corner sponsored by  Automated transcription (please excuse the typos!) Welcome everyone to the gravel ride podcast. I'm your host Craig Dalton. This week on the podcast we've got Yuri Hauswald from Gu Energy Lab. If you followed the gravel scene at all, you've probably seen Uris name come up from time to time. Yuri is a past dirty Kanza champion and you'll find them all over the world racing his gravel bike and advocating for people to get outside in his capacity working for Gu Energy labs. Yuri's got some great tips and tricks around nutrition and hydration that really came to bear in this year's dirty Kanza as well as some great insight into suspension for gravel bikes and when we're going to see them start to have some impact in the market. But first we've got this week sponsored tech corner with Randall from thesis bike. Thanks Craig. So today we're going to talk about suspension on gravel bikes. Tech Corner with Randall from Thesis: Today, we’re going to talk about suspension on gravel bikes. A gravel bike, for me, is a bicycle that performs at a high level on everything from road with a set of road slicks to borderline cross-country riding with a set of knobby 650Bs. For gravel bike suspension, what we want is comfort and control while still maintaining the performance of the bike in all the conditions it’s going to be ridden. So, in order, the first thing I’d be looking at is my wheel tire package. What I want is a high volume tire with a supple casing, set up tubeless on a rim that’s wide enough to support that tire at low pressures without the tire squirming around. The next thing I’d be looking at is seatpost. A traditional seatpost can give you some flex, but it’s pretty limited, so from there you might look at a suspension seatpost. But really, if you’re adding that weight, you might as well add a dropper post. A dropper, again, is going to take your weight off the front wheel - which means off your hands - and put it more over the rear wheel, while at the same time giving you more distance between your butt and your saddle so that you can use your legs as suspension. That is going to make a considerable difference in the amount of shock absorption of your overall system. Next up: touch points. Cushy bar tape and a slightly cushier saddle than you might run on a pure road bike are going to take a lot of the edge off, they add a trivial amount of weight, and they’re relatively inexpensive to add. Now, at this point is where I would stop, but some people might want even more cushion. For them, I’d recommend a suspension stem. What I like about a suspension stem is that it doesn’t compromise your steerer tube or the front end of your bike, and it’s entirely non-proprietary, so you can swap it in and out of any bike. If all of these things aren’t enough, what you might be looking for is a drop bar mountain bike. This means a suspension fork up front or even a rear suspension. However, keep in mind that while that sort of bike is fantastic on the dirt, it’s going to be a bit compromised on the road because it’s going to have some slop and extra weight in the system that are going to take away that snappy feel that you’re used to a road bike with road slicks. What’s great about a gravel bike is the ability to ride at a high level on any sort of terrain, whether it be road or dirt. So my take is: start with your wheel tire package, add a dropper post, add some cushy touch points, and go have a fantastic ride.  Yuri, Welcome to the show Well thanks for having me, Craig. I'm stoked to stoke to be on right on. I've always wanted to ask you this question every time I've, I've seen you, but can you describe your background as a cyclist?...

Yuri Hauswald - Gravel Ambassador Extraordinaire

The Salsa Cutthroat has been THE gravel bike for the bikepacking set. If you look at the sport on a spectrum from 'road +' to 'bikepacking', the 2020 model is squarely on the 'bikepacking' side of the spectrum. In this episode, we hear from Salsa engineer and product manager's, Peter Hall and Joe Meiser about everything that went into the Cutthroat. Salsa  Salsa &nbsp; &nbsp; Automated transcription (please excuses the errors). Good day everyone and welcome to the gravel ride podcast. I'm your host Craig Dalton. This week on the podcast I've got two guests from salsa cycles and QBP talking about the 2020 salsa cutthroat. We've got Peter Hall and Joe Meiser from the team that have been intimately involved in the design and manufacturing of the salsa cutthroat. It's a really interesting bike for this podcast as we've sort of tended towards middle of the road gravel bikes. In terms of tire width, we've touched on some gravel plus, excuse me, some road plus bikes, but we've never really danced on the other end of this category, which is where the salsa cutthroat clearly occupies with 29 inch wheels, 2.4 tire inch tire capabilities. It's a pretty massive departure from sort of the more road oriented gravel bikes. So I was really excited to talk to them about this bike and the intention behind the design. It was really heavily influenced by the 2,700 mile tore divide route and those ultra distance events that we've talked about a little bit on this podcast. So with that, let's jump right in. Gentlemen, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Absolutely. It's always a good place for us to get started. To learn a little bit more about your backgrounds as cyclist and since we're going to be talking about a very specific product, maybe you guys can also talk about what your roles are over there at salsa professionally. Sure. Yeah. So I'm Pete hall. I'm one of the design engineers here at salsa. Ah, I, I think the best way to describe what kind of cyclists dimes I'm at. At my core, I'm a mountain biker. Certainly don't discriminate against the like gravel or pavement and absolutely love them. Love both, especially gravel. But you know, I think single track will for me always be the best. I don't know how many years I've been in the bike industry now have, I've never held drop outside the bike industry. I know that like shops [inaudible] Yeah. So my name is Joe Meiser. I'm the senior product manager here at salsa cycles. I was a lead product manager on the new 20, 20 cutthroat. You know, I've been at QBP for 15 years. I've held roles as an industrial designer. I've led product development across our brands and I've led product in salsa full time for the last four years. I came into the brand at the time when the first Cutthroat was being launched and had the opportunity to work on the second generation, which has been pretty cool. My background as a cyclist is pretty wide ranging. Like P I would say I'm a mountain biker with a drop bar problem and I think that's probably reflected in a lot of our drop bar bikes. I started racing gravel in two and seven. The first gravel race I ever did was the trans Iowa and it sorta quickly Korean from there. You know, the vernacular here is gravel roads and rural roads. And so I was racing events like Ragnar rock 100 in Redwing in the Driftless region in Minnesota. I was racing the on Monzo in 2008 and about that time and decided that I would go out and do the tour divide and we as a brand team had kind of started to see this niche of gravel and started designing bikes, kind of led that direction with big tire fit, just breaks, so on. And so I actually raised the tour divide in 2009 and was able to do that on the Fargo, which was really the predecessor to the cutthroat. And and then got to be part of the team when we launched the first gen cutthroat and now this one. That's awesome. That's awesome. I'm actually really excited to talk to you guys because as I mentioned offline, I...

Salsa Cutthroat -  Peter Hall and Joe Meiser (Salsa engineer and product manager) go deep on the Cutthroat.

A conversation with Mike Kuhn and Gunner Bergey about Pennsylvania Gravel and the Unpaved and Ironcross events. Upaved  Unpaved   Ironcross  Ironcross  Thesis  Thesis  &nbsp; TECH CORNER sponsored by THESIS Thanks, Craig. In recent years, 1x drivetrains have taken over the mountain biking world. Today I’m going to argue why 1x should also be the default for most gravel riders. 1. With no front shifting, there’s less to go wrong, and less skill needed to dial things right. 2. With 1x, the user interface is vastly simplified. There’s no possibility of rubbing or cross-chaining, and you can just focus on the terrain ahead. 3. 1x drivetrains are cheaper to buy and generally cheaper to maintain. 4. In the case of some mechanical front shifters, you can modify them to activate a dropper post. This is actually super slick because it puts your dropper post at your fingertips at all times, whether you’re on the hoods or in the drops. Now there are two primary objections that I hear. First is range. This one’s actually a non-issue. You can get the same or greater range these days, with consistent jumps between gears as well. The second thing that often comes up is gear spacing. However, on dirt, the terrain is generally changing so frequently that you’re never at the same cadence for very long. Additionally, many riders, especially those of shorter stature, are running cranks that are too long for their inseam. Having a crank length that’s proportional to your inseam will allow you to spin at a wider range of cadences, which would in turn cancel out much of the perceived benefit of tight jumps. So that’s why, for most gravel riders, I recommend a 1x drivetrain. I’d love to get your feedback on this topic. In the meantime, back to Craig and this week’s guest. FULL EPISODE: Automated Transcript (please excuse the typos) Mike, Welcome to the show. Okay. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Yeah. I'm excited to talk about unpaved, but before we dig in, how did you get into event organizing and what attracted you to being a gravel cyclist? Uh, I, I know we don't have a whole lot of time so we'll try to keep it brief, but um, but many years ago and in Lewisburg where we based on pay from a, I went to school and I got involved in collegiate cycling at the time and we, we put on a couple of events and I put on my, my very first, uh, event production involvement was, was there, um, we did, we did road race weekend, we did a mountain bike event at Arby Winter State Park. And that over the years has blossomed into other things eventually. Uh, I was, I was part of that crew that brought an event called iron cross together, which, uh, is now 15 plus years in two years. Sort of a mixed, um, mixed surface type ride. Uh, and then the Transylvanian mountain bike epic was one that I did for almost a decade. And through those experiences in some bike racing experience too, we got to know the folks in Lewisburg and the tourism office there, the, um, Susquehanna river valley and, uh, have built a really wonderful relationship. That's why John Paved this point. For those of our listeners who don't know exactly the region you're talking about, can you describe where it is in the state of Pennsylvania? Yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty central in Pennsylvania. So, um, you're, you know, a couple of hours from Philadelphia. You're a couple of hours from Pittsburgh and north of both, both of them, um, and, and pretty central in the state. It's into what we call the ridges and valleys, uh, portion of Pennsylvania at Lewisburg itself. That's sits on the Susko Hannah River, which is one of the, uh, made perhaps the main, um, you know, uh, body of water that flows into the Chesapeake Bay. So it's a pretty big river. And then, uh, we, uh, we ride west from there. We ride West from there into, uh, towards state college, Pennsylvania. I'm at Penn State University and through the ridges and valleys of Pennsylvania. So what's your [inaudible]...

Pennsylvania Gravel

This week we speak with @cyclingtips, Chief Gravel Correspondent / Man in a Van / Gravel racer, Marshall Opel about his 2019 gravel tour and take-aways from the numerous great gravel events he attended over the year. Cycling Tips  Cycling Tips   Automated Transcription, please excuse the typos. Good day everyone, and welcome to the gravel ride podcast. I'm your host Craig Dalton. This week on the pod we've got Marshall Opal, he's the chief gravel correspondent for cycling tips and last summer he went on a journey all around the United States racing gravel races out of a van. He was affectionately known as the man in the van. What's awesome about Marshall's experience last year was that not only did he get to experience all these phenomenal races that we'll get into in the podcast, but because he was camping out in his van, he really got a sense of the community in these events, which is something I think we all look at when choosing gravel events. We want to go somewhere that the racing is going to be fun, the terrain's going to be awesome, but the community's there. That's really the big draw. That's why it's so worth traveling outside your comfort zone and outside your local area to get into one of these races. Because the community, it's just fun to hang out and meet people. And what better way to do it then spending your time in the van and driving between races and just taking advantage of everything the local community has to offer. Marshall's a talented racer in his own right. So he got to experience some of the front end excitement in the race, but also that deep level of community across the country. So I was super stoked to meet Marshall down in Bentonville at the end of the year at the big sugar gravel reveal and talk to him about his opinions on where gravel's going, where it's been, how do we keep it fun and awesome. So I really looked forward to recording this interview with Marshall and I hope you enjoy it. So with that, let's dive right in. And Marshall, welcome to the show. Craig. Thanks for having me. I am stoked to talk about the endless summer of gravel you had in 2019. But before we get started, let's explain to the listener a little bit about your background and how you came to riding bikes off road. I grew up in Montana, so a lot of our riding is off road in the first place. But yeah, we used to have a, a road race called the Rocky mountain route Bay and that had a gravel section on a circuit. And I remember it being, you know, Oh, it's a off road race. I'm gonna put 20 fives on. And so it was very much riding road bikes on, on dirt and gravel. And it's only been pretty recently that I have gotten in this, the new wave gravel. I would say I did Belgium Walsall rod in 2016 and I did the way for that year and that was, I would say that was when I really started to see the, the new gravel movement. And you'd spent a couple of pretty intense Years in as a junior and later as an older, a rider racing on the road. Right? Yeah. I was determined to be a European professional road cyclist from the time I was like 12. I was like, Oh, this is definitely going to happen. And I'm, I chase that pretty hard. Dropped out of college and lived in a campground in Brittany France and raced for a French team and spent some time with the U S you train three national team and you know, looking back it was cool that I chased, chased the dream to that level, but I also, it was, it was an opportunity where I kind of realized that I needed to make adjustments for for myself that that wasn't going to be for me to be a full time pro cyclist. And I never really left the bike world though. I became a bike tour guide and then I got a job at Rafa. And now I'm sort of in the cycling journalism world and so bikes have never left. But the racing is, has evolved quite a bit. That makes sense. And the equipment has as well. So your, your role at at cycling tips puts you basically on the road, I would say beyond the summertime. It looks...

The Gravel Ride Podcast