There’s something special about the regulars that sign up for the Iowa Gravel Series. Heather and her partner Bill are “regulars”, but not just to the races, Heather was on the podium an amazing 4 times in 2024. So, it was extra special to get time to chat with her.

In this episode of the Iowa Gravel Series Podium podcast, host Chris McQueen talks with Heather Benning, an athlete, coach, and avid gravel cyclist. They discuss a variety of topics, including Heather’s background in sports, her experience with gravel cycling, and her thoughts on the importance of community and inclusivity in the sport.  

Heather shares her insights on nutrition and recovery, emphasizing the benefits of a plant-based diet and cross-training. She also discusses the challenges of perimenopause and how she has adapted her training and nutrition to maintain her fitness goals. The interview concludes with Heather sharing her “magic wand” wish for the cycling world, which is to have more uniformity and transparency from race directors when describing the courses.

Chris McQueen I ran up the stairs and I haven’t been working out enough, so I’m winded. I’m going to let my heartbeat go down just a little bit. I’m okay.  

Heather Benning That shouldn’t be true. I saw in Strava you were skiing, so you’ve been at altitude, so you should be smooth sailing at 500 feet above sea level.  

Chris McQueen Well, welcome, everybody, to another episode of the Iowa Gravel Series Podium podcast. I’m your host, Chris McQueen, and it is a new year, but we have a very familiar guest and one of my favorite people to be on the Iowa Gravel Series. Absolutely adore Heather Benning, and she has been a major supporter and also possibly one of the most winningest folks that we’ve ever had on the Gravel Series. I have to go pull the numbers and see if she dethroned Michelle Kelsay. But we’re so excited. I’m so excited to have the chance to talk to you, Heather. Thank you so much for being here and giving us a little bit of your time.  

Heather Benning Oh, thanks.  

Chris McQueen Alright, Heather. Let’s get to know you a little bit. I mean, we see each other at least during the season fairly regularly, but I don’t think we ever sat down and had a quick lunch or anything to really get to know each other. I know you do some coaching and education stuff. You’re very big into fitness, but I don’t know the specifics. So maybe let’s start off with just like, who you are. What do you do professionally? Let’s make sure we get into how you got into cycling and gravel.  

Heather Benning Yeah. So, I think being an athlete is my identity and it covers both my personal life and my professional life. I’m fortunate that I’m able to marry those two things in those two spaces and pursue what I’m passionate about both outside of work, but also in the workplace. So, professionally, I work in intercollegiate sport. I was on a Division III campus for 19 years and coached track and field for a portion of that and women’s soccer for all 19 years at a Division III campus in Iowa. And then, right now, it’s my tenth year. In 2014, I pivoted from the campus to the conference office. I’m currently an executive director or commissioner of a Division III athletic conference that has schools in Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Our conference puts on championships and does student athlete programming for nine institutions in those states. So, that’s what I do for work. For play, I’ve been an athlete. I started downhill skiing and doing gymnastics when I was three years old, and I just really haven’t stopped exploring new sports. There’s a couple that I stuck with all through growing up, but have always dabbled in different things.  

Chris McQueen Yeah. I didn’t really get into cycling and things like that until after college, in a lot of ways. I mean, I played a little football in high school and stuff, but I feel like I’m still trying to understand the world of sports and what it means to be competitive, what it means to be a good sport. All those things, trying to instill those in my family. So, maybe I’ll start with this quick question before we get into how you got into gravel. This is a big, high-level question, probably need a beer or something. But why is sport so important? Why does the world keep doing sports? Why do we do this?  

Heather Benning Yeah, I think that, gosh, there’s so many things that sport can afford you if you’re in the right environment and you’re surrounded by good people. But I think the desire to be in community is probably one of the biggest draws for me in sport. That’ll tie into me getting into gravel biking later in my life. But I think that the idea of community and being able to engage in something with other people that share the same passion as you, and also inherent in that is the opportunity to meet people that you might not otherwise intersect with. A lot of my sports growing up, when I was very young, were doing recreational and community-based, but then had the opportunity through middle school and high school to do more select programs where I was playing soccer most commonly, and then volleyball I did a little bit with, but getting to play with student athletes from all over the state of Colorado where I grew up. Just having a chance to meet people that I wouldn’t otherwise meet, just by staying school-based or scholastic-based with sport. So, I think that’s one piece of it, is just it does provide an opportunity for community. I will say that most of the sports growing up that I did were team sports, and so my answer is a little biased towards that environment, but I also think in individual sports there can be the team dynamic as well. That is a culture that’s created by the coach and by the student athletes that are participating in it. I think the other thing, well, one other thing about sport for me is I’m a competitive person. I’m a person who likes to set goals. I’m a benchmark person. There’s that opportunity to measure growth and measure success, whether that’s self-referenced or against others. That’s something I think that draws people to sport. Even if you’re somebody who’s just watching sport, there’s that element of it, because I think generally in our society in the United States, there is a big desire to see winners and losers. Unfortunately, it’s part of the way that I think we’re raised. That may not always be a good thing, but I think that is part of what draws people to sport in this country in a way that we don’t necessarily see in other countries across so many sport disciplines.  

Chris McQueen Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. It took me a long time to realize that cheering on a winner is a great thing to do. Identifying yourself as having to be a winner all the time is not necessarily a great thing to do. So, celebrating the wins while accepting the fact that you yourself are not a winner, you’re an athlete. You have good days and you have bad days, can be a great place to build good mental health and resilience. But it definitely, for a competitive person, or even a non-competitive person, it can take a little bit. Okay. So, you’re all in soccer, you’re a gymnast, you’re doing volleyball. I know you do CrossFit, which is its own religion of its own. Maybe I’ve gone too far, maybe I’ve overstepped.  

Heather Benning So, gravel for me was, and I think we talked a little bit before the show about how much I listen to your podcasts or watch them, and I’ve watched, I think, all of them. I might not have finished your most recent one yet, but I think at one point I heard you talk about how you got into gravel in Iowa, moving here and trying to meet people and develop a community, moving from California, and that’s exactly what it was. I didn’t need one more physical activity, and quite honestly, it probably was like I was doing overtraining. But that’s not why I got into gravel biking. I got into gravel biking because my, I’m an empty-nester. My partner and I both do CrossFit, we both run, but both of our kids had graduated from college and it was time to try to grow our social network beyond our kids’ friends’ parents. You know, you go through that whole stage where your adult friends are your kid’s parents, and sometimes you don’t even remember their first name or last name. You just remember they’re so-and-so’s parent. We were looking for ways to get more engaged in our community and meet more people socially. Through CrossFit, we had two of the organizers of our local gravel bike group, and she had been encouraging us for a long time, “You should try gravel. You should try gravel.” One thing I never really grew up doing was cycling. I’ve ridden a bike. We had the old Huffys and we built ramps and the kids would go around in the neighborhood and ride them. I know how to ride a bike. I had a bike that I used generally for transportation in the small town that I live in, but I never cycled. I was like, “No, I don’t need anything else. I’m good with what I have.” Running is a lot, CrossFit is a lot. But then, Bill, my partner, and I were talking about it, and we were like, “Well, why don’t we just go see?” For us, it truly was purely social. We were actually looking at it as our recovery workouts, which I think is kind of, at this point, things have shifted a little from three years ago, but we never went out to go gravel biking to get a workout. We joked all the time that, “Are we ever going to get out of Zone 1?” Because that’s what it felt like when we first started. But we didn’t know what we were doing either. I mean, we knew how to ride a bike, but we just didn’t have any idea about what potential was there. That’s how we got into it. We have a pretty strong local gravel bike group for a town. My town has less than 9,000 people in it, and there can be rides in the summer where there’ll be close to 40 people out in our local gravel bike group. This is a Prairie Burn Bike Club in Grinnell, Iowa. Very, very active in the summer with rides on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Thursdays are the welcome rides to try to get more people into it and they’re shorter, slower paced. That group actually does do fat tire biking in the winter, but I don’t bike in cold weather, so it’s my true off-season for outdoor cycling right now.  

Chris McQueen You can’t feel your fingers and toes. I do understand all the equipment you can get and it doesn’t solve that situation for me.  

Heather Benning It’s not that cold in Colorado when you ski. There’s a big temperature difference.  

Chris McQueen Growing up in Utah, we had similar experiences. You’d have snow, but it’s not that cold. It’s fine. Alright. So, there’s a few questions that really come to mind. I definitely would love to hear a little bit about your nutrition journey, but maybe even before that, because I feel like that’s a journey for anybody if you’re coming from a team competitive sport to an endurance athlete sport. There’s a transition there for fueling. I’m curious how you made that transition. You’re very active and you mentioned overtraining. I’m curious about your recovery process because as I’ve gotten older, as I’ve gotten more into sports like this, learning what the right balance of recovery was, was actually much harder to figure out in a lot of ways than the training routine. I could figure out what to do. I could go hard and that was the problem. I would probably go too hard. With all this training that you’ve done, what have you learned about recovery and how do you manage the recovery that your body needs to keep going?  

Heather Benning Probably two things that are the biggest X-factor for me are, one, is that I, as you mentioned, I do CrossFit, I run, and I bike. Part of my recovery is just by having diversity of physical activity. I typically am not training the same systems two days in a row, and so I get my recovery through cross-training. I know some people feel like they’re still, “What is your day off?” I will be honest and say I very rarely have a day where I just simply do not fitness, but I feel like I really listen to my body. Yesterday, I woke up, I did not feel great. We had a gym session planned and I just said, “I need to take today off,” and I did. I don’t do it very often, but I really do try to listen to my body. Back to the original piece, is that I think the fact that the diversity of training that we do, my background is a coach in a number of different disciplines, I’m also a personal trainer. Bill and I, we understand periodization of training, and so when we put together our macrocycles, we are thinking about what demand our body, or what the workout is demanding of our body, and trying to make sure that we don’t overload that. I think the second thing that allows our bodies to do that, I’m 51, so it definitely has changed over the last couple years. We’ve been plant-based. About 95% of what we eat is plant-based. We occasionally, we are plant-based to try to eat healthy food, so we don’t get really caught up in something like, we’re not worried about cross-contamination of food or getting occasional dairy or a little bit of meat in. All of the research and our experience having lived this way for five years is that it reduces inflammation substantially. That’s honestly, we both say it, there’s really nothing else to attribute the fact to that we can go work out really hard and turn around and do the same thing the next day with a different type of exercise and not feel the muscle soreness. A funny, little anecdote on that, there’s a young man who’s the same age as our kids, went to high school with them, he works out at the gym with us in the mornings and he jumped in on one of our CrossFit workouts that we had put together. We don’t have an actual CrossFit gym any longer. It was sold, but we still go do the CrossFit workouts. He jumped in with us and he came in the next day and he was just shaking his head. He said, “How do you guys do this? I am so sore.” He’s a former collegiate wrestler. He’s come back here now. He coaches here at the high school. He’s very fit and he’s 22, and just everything hurt for him. He’s watching us in there every day, seeing what we do, and he’s like, “How do you do this?” I honestly do believe that eating plant-based is significant in our ability to be able to do what we do for training. It’s probably not a popular answer. I don’t know that everybody can do it, but what we’re doing, what I’m doing right now, I’ve dialed back a lot. I’ve shifted to where I don’t work out twice a day anymore. It was, I knew that I was overtraining and I couldn’t get enough calories in my body and it was having an adverse effect on my systems.

Chris McQueen How many years of two-a-days did you maintain?

Heather Benning Probably about three to four. Last year is when I switched to realizing that I can’t do that. With the transition that my body’s going through at this age and things, it’s just too much. It’s driving up my cortisol levels. It’s having inflammatory effects. That’s, all of a sudden, I knew that’s the thing that needed a shift for me and it’s really been working really well. That was heading into this last summer, and that’s honestly why I did a lot of the 50Ks. I was really grateful for the 50K opportunity this summer because part of that was I needed to dial back the volume, not to have to train for the 100Ks, and be able to still do the other sports that I talked about was important to me. The 50Ks were a really good sweet spot and remind me a lot of running. I think my best distance is a half marathon. Having those 50Ks was just like someone who could only ever sign up for a marathon, and all of a sudden you can do a 13.1 and you’re like, “This is where I can really excel.”

Chris McQueen I’ve always been the “hour hero.” I had a commute back in the Bay Area and it would take me an hour to get into work. It didn’t matter if I took my car, a bus, or my bike, because it’s just Bay Area traffic and everything. Over six or seven years, I built up an ability to go hard for an hour. You ask me to go hard longer than an hour, and I struggle a little bit. I’m not putting on gravel races because I know I can’t podium on these distances, but I respect those that can, especially those that can put in the hour or two hour effort, hour and a half effort or so on a 50K and really crush it. So, let’s dip into a little bit more on that nutrition stuff because I’m really interested. I’m not a huge meat eater, but at the same time, we still eat meat. We opted for steak instead of turkey this year for Thanksgiving because I have a sous vide and it makes making steak incredibly easy. But at the same time, the biggest challenge that I have when I think about being plant-based is really the recipes. I’m curious, what is your meal, what does your common meals look like? How are you fueling day-to-day? How does that translate to on the bike so that you’re getting all the right calories? I’m guessing you’re still tracking macros, or maybe you just track calories. I don’t know what you track. I’m curious how this all works in your life. You know, just the at-home stuff and then on the bike stuff.

Heather Benning I’ll go in reverse real quick. I don’t track macros. I’ve found that that’s not healthy for me. The big thing that I right now am trying to emphasize is protein intake. That isn’t about the fact that we’re plant-based. There’s a misnomer that if you’re plant-based, you can’t get sufficient protein. It’s not that, it’s just again more where I am in my life and where my hormones are and what all the research says about women who are perimenopausal, is that we just need more protein. That’s been a point of emphasis for me because I know I’ve had enough, but it’s about where the distribution of it is over the course of the day. As far as meal planning, it’s been an evolution. We started going plant-based during COVID, which made it so much easier than it probably otherwise would be because you couldn’t go out anywhere. You didn’t have any of those enticements to eat otherwise. It was just like what we brought into the house. We were all in on it and it made it a lot easier at the start, but we also were learning. When we first started, there was a lot more ultra-processed plant-based eating. What we’ve learned over time are ways, as you said, to make recipes and to create our meals from whole foods and really minimize the ultra-processed foods and sources of plant-based proteins. I’m pretty consistent with what I do with breakfast and lunch. That has always worked for me, even before I was plant-based, just to have regularity in what I’m doing for those meals. Typically, my breakfast is one of two things. It’s either going to be whole wheat toast with peanut butter, chia seeds, and honey, and then whatever berry is reasonably priced and in season. This week, it’s been a lot of blueberries on top of my toast. The other breakfast food that I will do is oats. I do “fashion oats” and mix in nuts, honey, sometimes a scoop of peanut butter, berries, bananas. Something like that. It’s going to get about 18 to 20 grams of protein in that food item. I do supplement with a plant-based protein drink in the morning. I do almond milk and a plant-based powder just to get that closer to 40 because we do our CrossFit workouts and running in the morning.

Chris McQueen Question about the oats. Are you boiling these oats or are these in almond milk cold soaked or something like that?

Heather Benning In the summer, I will do overnight oats where I do the cold soak. I will say, when it’s gravel competitive season, that is a good go-to because I can make it and take it. We usually stay in an Airbnb and then I can just nibble a spoonful throughout the morning and slowly get that into my system and it’s a way to make sure that we have a plant-based breakfast on the road. I do them cold in the summer, and then in the winter, I boil them.

Chris McQueen Get that warmth in you. So, what does lunch look like? That seems doable. I could do that.

Heather Benning Lunch varies, but right now I’ve been doing cold weather things. We’ve been making a ton of soups and curries. With just two of us, once we make something, I usually have six servings. Lunch oftentimes will be a leftover from the previous dinner or I’ll supplement it. I always do lentils for lunch, again, to try to get a high protein item in there. Sometimes I’ll put it in miso broth and add tofu chunks and then if I have any vegetables left over from the night before, they get, I mean, it’s literally just a one-pot dump. We had done a curried cauliflower and sweet potato and green beans dish earlier this week and there was just enough left that I had the miso broth, the lentils, the tofu, and then I just dumped the rest of the vegetables in there and I ate that soup. Right now, I’ve been doing vegetable, lentil, tofu soups. In the summer, I’ll do salads occasionally. Lunch, honestly, is the hardest for me to try to come up with something consistent that I want to do because I don’t typically want to do bread again. I try to not do that more than just for breakfast. Beans, we can do some different things with that, too. Cowboy caviar, which has three different types of beans in it, red onions, jalapenos. Essentially, it’s like something that people would dip tortilla chips in and eat, but you can just eat it as is, as like a bean salad. I will do that or put that up. For dinner, we’ve been having a lot of fun learning. I never enjoyed cooking before, but now I kind of enjoy looking and seeing what’s in the pantry and modifying recipes based on what we have. Lots of cruciferous vegetables, tons of sweet potatoes, cauliflower, cabbage. We love curries. We just made a Thai soup the other night which was delicious and served that over rice. We’ll do a lot of whole grain rice again for protein and for fiber. In the summer, we do eggplant fillets as a substitute for burgers. You can do the same type of thing. Tonight we had lentil walnut burgers. You press those together instead of having your beef. Really high protein, really flavorful. It takes work. It takes work for sure and there, but there’s so many resources on the websites and then start to find things that you like and there’s more and more restaurants in Iowa that have plant-based food which is really nice. Surprisingly more than sometimes when we go to what we would consider more major cities. I consider Grinnell more like a minor city, and there’s quite a bit of options that way.

Chris McQueen My wife, Emily, has been hitting the Asian market in Omaha for us and we’ve been having misos and curries and things like that. Everything that you described for lunch, I’m like, “Oh yeah, we just chop up some baby bok choy.” We’ve really enjoyed that. Everything you described sounds super yummy and feels like something that I could see us doing. I think the hardest bit is we have a 10-year-old and a 14-year-old at home still and they’re going to look at that and go, “Thanks, Mom and Dad.”

Heather Benning Yeah.

Chris McQueen But we also had, Emily made a really great meatloaf yesterday that was her mom’s recipe and tried a new glaze over it and the boys are like, “Oh, I just want more of that.” Which brings me to another question. Are you comfortable talking about perimenopause and how that experience is going? Emily and I have talked about it a little bit. It’s not something that I ever really knew existed until probably a couple years ago. Menopause was a thing that people talked about. But it seems like more and more, it’s the years before menopause are actually much more tumultuous for women. I’m not an expert, so I’m just looking at it from the outside trying to understand and be empathetic. It’s like, congratulations, you’re going to go through, essentially, some of the weird, not the same experiences, but an equally weird experience as puberty, but you’re in your 40s and early 50s and you get to have this journey that can be very unusual.

Heather Benning No one’s told you about it, by the way.

Chris McQueen Nobody’s like, “Hey, you know, you’re doing great and you will continue to do great, just know that something’s going to happen and it’s not going to be you, but you’re going to have to roll with the punches.”

Heather Benning No one talks about it. I always say I got sideswiped. Everybody talks about puberty and no one talks about this. Once it happens, it’s like other people are like, “Oh yeah, well, that’s just part of being a woman.” “Nobody ever said this was going to come. At least I could have been preparing to get sideswiped.”

Chris McQueen I didn’t do the research to know, to really give it a name, but we all know our bodies change over time. I’m curious what you have learned about your body being an athlete and putting a lot of stress on it and what you’ve had to adjust because you’re in your 40s to early 50s and what you discovered and what you’ve done to make that experience what you want, to achieve your goals. What are some of the lessons learned that you’ve had? Maybe we just start with the problems. What were some of the early problems you discovered and then what did you do to solve them?

Heather Benning I started going through perimenopause about 15 months ago. As I said, I had never knew there was such a thing. I came off of what I thought was a really successful competitive season. I was probably what I would consider the fittest I’d been. I honestly thought at 50 I was probably more fit than I was in my 20s. I felt like my training was amazing. I was training for marathons. I was winning half marathons. I had started this gravel thing that, a year in the summer of ‘23, I did some events and I just signed up for them. I had no idea how I was going to do and all of a sudden I was winning things in a sport that I was just doing for fun. I felt amazing and then I hit the fall of 2023 and all of a sudden my body was having symptoms I had never experienced before and I honestly thought something was very wrong with me. I started wondering if I had cancer. That was my biggest thing, “Do I have cancer or what sort of disease do I have right now?” My body was just not responding to my fueling in the way that it had in the past. My body was putting on weight at an unreasonable pace. That was probably my most alarming thing, is that I identified as an athlete my entire life. I know how my body responds to training, how my body responds to fueling, and everything that I was doing to keep my lean, strong body was not working, and it was very quickly going the opposite direction. I was inflamed, which again, with the plant-based eating for three and a half years by then, never feeling puffy and swollen. I went on about a four-month journey with doctors before I could finally, it was always myself, my research that I did myself to discover what was going on with my body. Selene Yeager, who’s a gravel cyclist who was just inducted into the Gravel Hall of Fame, does a great series on, it’s called Feisty Menopause. It’s a whole series about menopause and its effect on middle-aged women. That’s where I started to learn that these things I was experiencing are very common among middle-aged women that are in perimenopause. The more that I learned about perimenopause, the more I think as others learn about it, there’s a laundry list of symptoms. I think no two women experience the same thing. It’s hard to know. Some people, and I thought self included, I feel like if you’re doing all the right things from a health standpoint, then maybe that will mitigate the symptoms. Everything that it said that I could do to try to make these symptoms be better, I was already doing. I was turning up an empty bucket of what could I do to make my situation better. It’s still a journey. I feel like I’m in a better spot. Part of that was figuring out how to down-regulate what I was doing with fitness, and that was a big part of the shifting back in my load a little bit to see if that would help, and increasing the protein as I talked about earlier to see the impact that that might have. My body is still adjusting. It’s definitely psychologically really challenging for me to not feel like I’m in a body that I’m familiar with. On the upside, and I know there’s other women on the series that I’ve talked to about this, the mental fortitude that I found in approaching things is really what keeps me going. I just focus on what my body’s able to do and am grateful for what my body can do. That’s how I’ve pivoted to keep moving forward because there’s things I can’t control about my body, but there are things I can control and the things I can control bring me joy. Those are the things I’m going to keep putting my energy into. Just being able to be around the people that are on the Iowa Gravel Series. I’m so grateful that there’s a 50K distance because that was just the perfect timing for me. I honestly think had there not been the 50K distance this last summer I wouldn’t have done the events.

Chris McQueen You’re saying I can’t, you don’t want me to get rid of the 50Ks? Don’t do that.

Heather Benning To wrap up the perimenopause. I appreciate you asking about it. I think it’s something that people should be aware of and I do think that men go through similar things. The reality is that we’re all losing testosterone, and in a space where sport performance is pivotal to what we’re doing, the fact that as we age we are losing testosterone, it does have an impact on the way that we train and the outcomes that we get from training. To be mindful of that. I think also just for people to be empathetic to understand the chaos that women’s bodies are in at this age and how there is, it’s not within our control. The analogy that I’ve given to people is, having been someone who was pregnant, you also don’t know who’s going to get morning sickness, and I got the short end of that straw. I was sicker than sick for the first three months of my pregnancy. But there’s nothing you can do. Some women are going to have morning sickness and some are not. I feel like with menopause, there’s nothing that women are doing that’s leading to these side effects. It’s just part of the aging process for us.

Chris McQueen Thank you so much for sharing that. I think it is really important for all of us to understand, be sensitive to, and also just warn the younger people that, “Man, yeah, you’re doing great and you will continue to do great, just know that something’s going to happen and it’s not going to be you, but you’re going to have to roll with the punches.” Just as you were telling the story, I realized, I lived in Russia for a number of years and we jokingly would talk about what we would call the “Bob effect.” I’m going to try and tell this story as sensitively as I can, and there’s a reason for this. Genetics plays such a role in it. You said with morning sickness, you don’t know who’s going to get it and who isn’t. That’s how your endocrine system reacted to things. But I do wonder, Russia has a fairly homogeneous gene pool. Because of communism, it was fairly homogeneous, and they also tend to have a very homogeneous diet where there’s only certain types of food and it’s basically the same everywhere. There’s Russian food and you can maybe go find Western food, but that’s a weirdness. Most everybody just eats a very simple diet of pasta, potatoes, some pork, maybe some beef, onions, hearty vegetables. Thinking of the normal Russian diet, there’s not a lot of fiber. There’s not as much leafy greens and things like that. What we would observe, being obviously young, I was 19 to 21 when I was there, so please forgive this short-sighted thinking from a young boy, but we would observe a society that had amazingly beautiful teenage women into their 19s and 20s that seemed to just be able to eat anything that they want and do anything that they want. Then something would happen and things were hard, work was hard. There was a lot of hard work and labor as well, but we distinctly noticed that everybody as they turned 40, their bodies just changed completely. We would talk to women about this. They’re like, “Yeah, I used to do these things and these things and then I turned 40 and now I look like this.” I would love to have a study because that gene pool is so homogeneous, about what changes and what things happen and what happens if you have a control group that doesn’t do this. The science side of me takes over. I’m like, “Wow, what would happen if you use that group?” Interestingly, maybe not an interesting sidebar, but the, what we not sensitively called the “Bob effect,” meaning babushka, which is the word for grandmother, is probably just perimenopause and the natural progression of life. So, let’s shift a little bit. I try to keep these to the 30-minute area, and I think we might have gone over a little bit. I could ask you so many things. We really could chat all night, Heather. I want to be sensitive to your time. Let’s talk about the magic wand question because we hit on that and I’m trying to think if there was anything else that we needed to hit on before the magic wand question. Okay. So, let’s hit on the magic wand question. This is one that I pull out quite often and you’ve heard it on the podcast and you were prepared for it, it sounds like. The magic wand question is like if you could change anything in the cycling world with a magic wand, what would it be and why? So, what’s your magic wand wish, Heather?

Heather Benning Since I do listen to your podcast and because I am somebody who likes to prepare for things, I did think about this. I’ll give you the answer. Part of it goes back to the fact that I’ve only been doing this sport for two and a half years. The first year was just here in our local group. I was just like, I said that was just to socialize. We didn’t even look at it as exercise. Then I did a couple of events in the summer of ‘23, four of them, and was just trying to figure out what the environment was as a distance runner. I’ve done races because I want to see how the community is and just navigate them, understand what this event was going to look like and then going to this last season where I did about twelve events and was being competitive. I had goals. I say that, there was so much and there still is so much that I’m learning about gravel biking. As somebody who’s really new to the sport but who has a really strong background in athletics, I think one thing, and you talk about or use this word often and it’s something that I use in the work that I do, is that I want sports to be inclusive and I want them to be inviting. We do a lot of work in that regard in the conference that I lead and when I was on campus that was really important to me in developing culture and community and it’s important just the way that I live my life. I’m going to be that person that goes and sits with the people who may not be sitting with the in-group. That’s just who I am by nature. I say this because I feel like one of the things that I’ve experienced with gravel biking and I listen to a lot of different podcasts is there seems to be this, I don’t know how to capture it, but this whole thing like, “Well, that’s just gravel.” This attitude that you should just be prepared for whatever the course director puts on the course and if it happens to be Unbound one year and people are trashing their $10,000 bikes because it’s so muddy and everybody just still had to get through that course and they are willing to do it, they do it. Or if you’re going down a “not road.” That’s my term from, I think you used the term that I coined this summer because I was in an event and it was a not road. It wasn’t a B-road. It was not a road.

Chris McQueen That could have been Soldier Valley. That could have been, oh, someone else’s. Yeah. There. Yes. I am looking at some not-roads in Glenwood.

Heather Benning It wasn’t one of your events, but then I heard, I saw that when you were promoting this summer series, you used that term. I say that because it’s interesting. You listen to these podcasts and there’ll be this debate about, “Well, that’s just gravel and you need to be ready for whatever.” My thing is that I think that, yes, that’s some of what can be fun and for some people, but for others, either getting into the sport or for people who are coming off of having a really bad wreck or who, people are trying to think just the equipment, what tire they want to have, that there could be some sort of more disclosure on races about what people who sign up for that race should expect with it. My magic wand would be if there was more uniformity when race directors post an event, is to indicate if there are going to be segments that are B-roads, if there are going to be segments that are single-track, if there’s going to be segments where, I mean, there’s some people who do not want to be on pavement with cars, period, and then all of a sudden can find themselves on a five-mile stretch on that. To me, I just wish that that would be something where there’s just a, in the notes part, if directors would think about the fact that it does have real implications for people. One of the things I’ve gotten more comfortable with is I’ll ask the director because I know after I had a bad wreck two years ago that I was doing Kohlsburg and I knew that there were some really aggressive mountain bike elements of that and I am not a mountain biker and I wanted to know as I approached that mile marker where I was going to walk my bike and get off of it before I got already into trouble realizing that it was more than what I could bite off. The other piece related to that that’s used in, I see all over Europe, is just if we would integrate the standard guide for gravel and give a sense of how chunky the roads are going to be because again it makes a difference on your PSI on your tires. There’s already standard charts for that. Give you a sense of, okay, well, maybe I want to bring this bike on this ride or maybe I want to put my PSI at this level knowing that if you’re going to come to Pawnee County, you are not gravel biking, you are rock biking. You do not want to have tubes in your tires because they are going to go flat. My first three rides with the gravel group, my tire went flat every single ride.

Chris McQueen I would say roadside. We at one point I did actually think about, I was like, “Man, how do I get Park Tool to sponsor one of our races?” “What if we had a mechanic mayhem where one of the things you had to do in the race is like, no matter what, you had to change a tube on it or…”

Heather Benning Yeah. Oh, you had to change a tire. Gravel bingo.

Chris McQueen Or yeah. Or you had to, something where you’re going to have you draw a card and suddenly you’re like, “Congratulations, you just broke a spoke. Congratulations, your pedal just fell off.” You have different things. If you were to rate the Iowa Gravel Series, how are we doing on a scale of A being like, “Oh my gosh, you’re ticking every box,” F being like, “Geez, Pete, you have a long way to go.” In terms of this disclosure stuff, we don’t do the rock chunkiness, although that’s an interesting idea. I haven’t considered that one.

Heather Benning I don’t think anybody, I haven’t seen anybody do that, but I think since there’s already a standard piece out there and if you sign up to do any gravel tours, they’re going to tell you what to expect. That’s where I got that idea. There’s already a standard measure there and that would be interesting. That one I’m not as passionate about as the other. I think the Iowa Gravel Series, one of the things I love about the Iowa Gravel Series and also what I appreciate about you as a director is that I think that you do give good information. I love the videos. I think you go above and beyond. It’s really nice because if I take the time to watch your video that you’ve done on the pre-course then I know where those harried areas are or know that there’s a water crossing and things like that that some people are like, “Hell yeah,” and they want to do that and I’m like, “Okay, well then I’m going to need to make sure I slow down and get way over to the side and then I know I’m going to have to make up the minute and a half I lost there somewhere else.” I love the stuff that you’re doing and I wish more events would do that. I think that that would be more inviting for people who haven’t spent a decade doing gravel biking or aren’t 20-somethings and their body’s resilient and is going to bounce right back and they’re just going to carry on. As someone who’s 50, I do want to know, I’m very, I don’t enjoy mountain biking. I don’t enjoy single-track. I avoid those courses. So, I think you do a great job. I love the videos. I think there’s other directors that do elements of it, but I think that the Iowa Gravel Series does a really awesome job with that.

Chris McQueen Oh, thank you. So, B-, B?

Heather Benning You’d be getting the A. I don’t know anybody else matches what you’re doing right now from at least the things I’ve been at.

Chris McQueen You’re like, “Well, the bar is really low for the industry, so you’re doing pretty good.”

Heather Benning No, I think you do an awesome job. It’s helpful to know. Some of that can happen if people put up their courses in advance because you can see how much is paved or how much is unpaved and then, I haven’t done Core 4, but even that where they tell you how many miles are going to be single-track or you pick your distance if you don’t want to do single-track, there’s a mile option to do. You can do the 40 at Core 4 and then you don’t have to do single-track. Things like that that if you know that’s somebody’s bucket list, they still can go do Core 4. They just aren’t going to do the 60 or 100 if they want to avoid sugar bottom.

Chris McQueen I think what I like about your magic wand is I feel like that’s doable. That’s reasonable. There’s some more difficult things like inclusivity and stuff that feel so systemic that you’re like, “Wow, how do we change that?” Heather, this has been delightful. I really could chat with you all night, but I’m sure you have things to do. I don’t know how many people would sign up for an eight-hour podcast, although they exist.

Heather Benning Yeah.

Chris McQueen Alright. Heather, thank you so much. This has been wonderful. I hope you have a wonderful evening. This will be fun. We’ll see you and Bill and all of our gravel friends out on the full season. Go sign up. 2025 is going to be fun. So, thank you, Heather. Good night.

Heather Benning Thank you. I appreciate it and looking forward to this summer.

Zach Isaacs, co-founder of Movemint, joins the Iowa Gravel Series Podium Podcast to share his insights on the gravel scene and the future of event registration. A 2021 podium finisher at the Lost and Found 100, Isaacs brings a unique perspective as both a racer and a tech entrepreneur. He and Chris dive deep into the features of Movemint, including its user-friendly API, Google Sheets integration, and robust support for series events. Isaacs also shares his vision for Movemint’s future, emphasizing its potential to become an invaluable tool for race directors and athletes alike.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the evolving landscape of gravel racing and event management. Tune in to hear Isaacs’ thoughts on:

• Building a Platform for the Endurance Community: Learn how Isaacs’ experience at Strava inspired him to create Movemint, a platform designed to celebrate and elevate endurance events.

Ross Hansen, a physician’s assistant and lover of all things endurance sports, joins the Iowa Gravel Series Podium Podcast to share his origin story. A relative newcomer to the gravel scene, Ross dove into the world of gravel grinding after a stress fracture effected his running goals. Fortunately, he signed up for a two gravel races and has been on the podium each time! Seems like he’s made a good pivot.

In this episode, two IGS races:

• Silver City: A crash-filled (but ultimately successful!) first race.

We also dig into:

• The challenges of navigating loose gravel and steep hills.

It’s a fun chat, so we hope you get inspired to tackle some new adventures (and maybe a few hills) yourself!

If you’ve been on an Iowa Gravel Series race in the last two years, it’s likely you’ve seen Camden sporting his Ames Velo jersey near the front of the pack. Except for a broken clavicle, nothing much slows Camden down. So, it was exciting to see him come in 3rd at the Albia Holy Cow this year.

I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out with Camden at RAGBRAI and to chat with him at the races, but it was nice to get to know him a little better and learn how he fuels, what he’s learned from his trainer, and that he struggles up 138th and Fulton in Pisgah just like everyone else.

Camden’s a great guy and he has an extra ticket to the Glenwood Superbloom in September. So, if you’re looking to get into that race before it fills up, reach out and we’ll get you connected with him, cause… “have you met Camden?”

It’s the small and simple things that, in aggregate, bring about the big results. Linda Cooper has enjoyed riding her bike for a long time and that consistency over years has paid off. She’s a regular on the group rides in and around Des Moines and that consistent effort to show up, week after week, might well be the key to her super powers.

Linda took the top spot on the podium at the Waukon 100 and Albia Holy Cow. Those are very different courses and it goes to show the strength that Linda has to take on a challenge.

It was a blast getting to know Linda and I hope you enjoy this episode as well. My cat even makes a cameo, so it has all sorts of good stuff in it.

What would you say the chances are of making the podium on your first gravel race when you had just picked up your bike the day before? If you’re Jason Smith, you know there is at least a chance, because he made it happen at the 2024 Albia Holy Cow. Jason is part of team OYRB and really new to cycling… like really new. He got a fat bike last year and has already added MTB, road, and gravel to his quiver. Jason is an example of what can happen when you are “all in” and frankly we like that kind of attitude.

Trevor Irwin is a Math and Science teacher and active triathlete. The 50km distance is right in his wheelhouse and at the Albia Holy Cow he went out strong to make the podium. If you have a triathlete in your life that you just know would love gravel cycling, this might be the episode to send them. We dip into training, nutrition, a little bit of the gear to get you started and what it’s like to race on a perfect day. All good things.

Meeting new people was something I assumed would happen with the Iowa Gravel Series. Having people come back time and time again and getting to follow along with their journey was something I didn’t think about too much, but it has been something I enjoy so much now. Jen Sheffield has been on the IGS podium a number of times. She’s pushed through the challenges of getting started in the sport (being a self described “runner”), and then working through injury, and now she’s working on balancing running and bike races and all the nutritional challenges that come with endurance sports.

Since we’ve talked to Jen a bit in the past, we focused on her new experience working with a fitness coach and a dietician to help her achieve her goals. Lots of good stuff to learn here, but just remember everyone is different. Carbs, salts, protein, strength training, caffeine are all common tools, but it takes time to figure out the right combination.

Something that makes gravel events unique is the people that come from all over to attend. The Abia Holy Cow is pretty close to Des Moines, but folks from Missouri, Nebraska, Illinois and even from further away show up to ride the Monroe county roads. One of our 50km podium winners, Gwen Barrett made the trek with her husband to Albia and came away with a 3rd place finish!

It was great getting to know Gwen. She has used cycling to strengthen her marriage, make some transformational fitness changes, and challenge herself in so many ways. We talk a bit about her 500 mile ride across most of New Mexico, signing up for back to back races, and what life on a tandem bicycle might mean for her soon. It’s a great episode!