The Rodeo Labs Podcast

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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. 

Part three is just two conversations, but they are with two folks who are undoubtedly two of the most influential promoters in gravel. First up is Michael Merckx (6:15) of the BWR series. Michael started BWR as an extra long cyclocross race over a decade ago in Southern California.  Since then, BWR has become an international brand, with events planned throughout North America for 2023. Then, Stephen joins me to interview Amy Charity of SBT GRVL and FNLD GRVL (46:00). Amy, and her GRVL brand, started in 2018 and immediately made an impression with the SBT GRVL event in Steamboat Springs. This year, Amy is bringing the GRVL brand international with FNLD GRVL in Finland. The race is a new venture for an American gravel brand and is supported by F1 star Vallteri Bottas. 

Both of these conversations are unabridged, with the only editing meant to boost sound quality and clarity. We found that the quality of the interviews was interesting enough to run in full, so excuse the length. We won’t blame you for splitting it up! If you do, we recommend taking the break at minute 46 when the conversations swap.

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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. 

Part two of the Race Director round up focuses on the directors of the “mid majors” in gravel racing. These races are the bread and butter of the discipline. They are the independent heartbeat of dirt road racing. Often, the promoters are the heartbeat as well – investing so much of their time and money into the ventures that are never guaranteed to pay off. With this investment, and with those race promoters shaping their races from their own personality and geographies, the different races offer both comparisons and contrasts. This offers us at the Rodeo Labs Podcast a chance to get a little non-linear with our stories. 

In this episode the over five hours of recorded conversations with the race directors of these independent “mid major” races. Thank you to all who agreed to chat, and, for those interested, attached is a list of the race directors and their races. 

Rebecca Rusch — Rebecca’s Private Idaho 

Jess Cerra and Sam Boardman — The Last Best Ride

Andy Chasteen — Rule of Three

Fabian Serralta — Gravel Locos 

Whitney and Zack Allison — Foco Fondo

Gordon Wadsworth and Emily Hairfield — The Appalachian Journey 

Bobby Wintle — The Midsouth

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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 nebulous 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? 

Thanks to Jason and Andy for the conversations and follow the Rodeo Labs Podcast on your favorite podcast player for the rest of the series! 

Thank you to Drew Van Kampen for the transition tunes and thank you to Pure Gravel for the cover photo!

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Adventuring on dirt is what brings everyone to Rodeo Labs. Yes, there are other contributing factors, but if your intention is not to adventure on bikes, on dirt, you might want to find a different bike company. With that ethos at our core, Logan wanted to do a bit of a deep dive into a fellow dirt adventure based cycling company: The Gravel Adventure Field Guides. 

Nonetheless, while reporting on the guides themselves, Logan found the project was a gateway into a discussion about adventure on bikes, on dirt, in the 21st century. So, in hopes of not ignoring those other voices, the podcast grew into something different from the standard Rodeo Labs production. 

In this episode you will hear from Juan de la Roca and Stephen Beneski from Gravel Adventure Field Guide, but you will also hear from Wally Wallace from the economic development office in Trinidad, Colorado; Kevin Prentice from Ride With GPS; and Gordon Wadsworth and Emily Hairfield who are cyclists from Roanoke, Virginia, and helped builds routes for the recent guidebook there.

We hope you enjoy it.

As always, thanks to Q for the theme song and thank you Drew for the exit strums.

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In this season of the Rodeo Adventure Labs Podcast, we are doing a little bit of ‘one for you, one for us’ action. But, actually, it is really one about the world, and one about our world. Today, Logan talks to the Cerakoter In Chief, Ryan McMahon, to understand a little more about the painting operation in house in Denver, his journey to finding himself in the Rodeo Labs Cerakote booth, and what his hopes are for developing more tools of the trade. 

Then, in part two, we bring on a special guest to talk more about design philosophy, the power of color, and how Rodeo has grown around a design philosophy that centers around tinkering differently. You never (and by never, we mean almost certainly) will guess who it is.

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The Atlas Mountain Race sets off for its third edition next week. In anticipation of the bikepacking 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 posted 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.

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It is 2023 and we have a little New Year’s resolution. With more folks on Rodeo bikes than ever and the possibilities of the adventure cycling world growing all the time, we felt like it was time to make a concerted effort to tell more of our story — beyond the Instagram-able moments that are not going anywhere — on the platforms of the journal and the podcast. The goal is to both look internal and external, with more Rodeo rider features, more connectivity with the events and adventures, and journalistic storytelling of the world around us. 

For the first episode, we turned the mic inward. Logan Jones-Wilkins, who is now the host of the Rodeo Podcasts, sat down with Drew Van Kampen, Rodeo’s Director of Product Development, to discuss the development of the brand-new iteration of Trail Donkey. Then, Stephen Fitzgerald dropped by to share a little bit about the context of the bike in the overall story of the company.

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