ugh its such low hanging fruit.
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you have a gift and you must use it
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Specialized’s new line of aero bikes don’t just suck, they make lower pressure!
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Clearance sale on these stickers I guess
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amazing
frantically searching amazon for this dyson v7 attachment i dont own
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There’s a Dyson store at the fancy mall in an Jose, next to the Lucid Motors store and other tech stuff. I guess eMTBs will fit right in???
TC: I’d vacuum a lot more often if I had one of these.
Follow up?
Any clue about Gravel events that predate 2004 Trans Iowa? It seems to be the “first” because of received wisdom from PLP/GTed himself but there’s ghosts of earlier “gravel road race/ultra endurance cross race/mountain bike road race” floating unnamed in the ether.
I’ve been looking at I guess the first gravel race in Georgia and it’s funny to see them grasping for a market that was coming in the future.
Also, there was a 1000+ rider gravel race in the early 2010s in Minnesota that everyone just sort of forgot about after it petered out?
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I drafted it and consulted with a team of experts over thanksgiving and then forgot about it. Pm me your email address and I’ll let you into the current draft
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When did southern cross and iron cross start? There were some east coast long distance CX inspired things that went back a ways.
Battenkill was pro-gravel before there was pro-gravel.
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Was gonna ask this same thing. I did it in 2011 or something and it had been going a while I think.
Oh wow Iron Cross goes back to 2003. GTed high on his own supply “invented gravel racing”.
Seems the evolution of gravel is more regional than I first thought listening and reading what’s out there now. The races here in the Southeast have generally grown from NE/Appalachia Iron Cross style of event, we have almost no Midwest Unbound/Trans Iowa type events. Those that exist have come in the past few years.
I forgot about Battenkill. The road->gravel connection is a big blind spot.
Earliest I can find for Southern Cross is 2009, might be something earlier with a different promoter?
iron cross was absolutely the hardest ride i’ve ever done, both times i did it (‘13 and ‘14 give or take,when it was still in michaux)
first year fucked me up because it was “63+ miles” and homie i was riding next to confirmed that it was mile 64 and we were descending from the start/finish elevation. if it pointed down one more time i think i would have actually cried
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paris to ancaster is like OG north american gravel which according to their wabspace has been going since 1994
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Oregon outback that mattered was 2014
Did I hear ira ryan rode or won trans iowa?
There were a few events before then though.
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Tro-Bro Leon was an amateur gravel race from 1984 to 2000 Cyclisme - Tro Bro Leon. De 1984 à 2017 : votez pour votre affiche préférée ! - Le Télégramme
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Isn’t the “Leadville Trail 100 MTB” consistently all actually just gravel mountain forest roads with a bit of highway and little to no singletrack since 1994?
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That seems to be the consensus from what I’ve read.
Here’s a timely interview with one of the early GDMBR guys. That race also started in 2004, that time period seems to be a good inception point for a few events setting the tone in current year: http://www.thebicyclestory.com/2014/10/mike-curiak/
How does that 2004 race compare to what the race has become ten years later? Has it evolved over the years?
I have largely tuned out. When that route was presented by Adventure Cycling they really trumpeted it as a mountain bike route. You know: very remote, very difficult. They wanted to have you believe it was trail. Having ridden the entire route, I am here to tell you it is a dirt road. At times a rough dirt road, but effectively a dirt road from start to finish. If you include the new Canadian section there might be something like 20 miles what we as mountain bikers would consider trail on the route. You can get away with riding drop bars. You can get away with riding aerobars. On the most difficult parts of that ride I was in my aerobars chugging along in my big ring. It’s just not a trail.
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