A Season of Lessons, Pt II

Summarizing a 10-month season of racing is complicated, but in an effort to take you all along with me through 2023, I’m going to try. Events like Mid South in mid-March now seem so distant compared to the more recent sweltering heat of Foco Fondo in July.  Now it’s December, and I’m deep into prepping miles for the 2024 season. My brain wanders while on the trainer: What is it that defines a season as a success or a failure? Is it really either-or, or is it neither-nor?

Continue reading

A Season of Lessons Pt 1

For the last 10 months, I have been racing professionally in CA, AZ, OK, CO, NE, KS, and AR. My TrailDonkey tells the story of long, dusty miles and many lessons learned. This is the first year I have raced full-time and it has been an enlightening experience. More than a tool for fitness, a bicycle is a teacher. The lessons are usually tough and sometimes take more than one confrontation with challenges. I entered the season wanting to dive deeper into the sport than ever. Over the season, I’ve grown as an athlete physically, mentally, and professionally. I’d like to share some of the things I’ve learned so far in 2023. I can’t wait to see what new lessons the next season will teach me.

Continue reading

Edyn’s Adventures: Rebecca’s Private Idaho

Editor’s note: We’re thrilled to welcome Edyn Teitge, a young (14 years) endurance racer and gravel rider hailing from Colorado. Edyn is rolling on a purpose built Rodeo Labs TD4 for the remainder of the 2023 and the 2024 season, and we’re excited to see where he takes it, including a planned ride in the 2024 Tour Divide.

Photos courtesy @adventurescoutmedia @stellar_media. Now on to the story!


Rebecca’s Private Idaho or RPI is a multi-day gravel bike event in Southern Idaho. I decided to race the Queens Stage Race (QSR), which goes 186 miles through three timed stages and one rest day/social ride. The first day is one of the most beautiful and technical stages as it winds up the Harriman, a non-motorized double-track trail at the foot of the Boulder Mountains.

Continue reading

UCI Gravel Worlds: Getting to the start is the hardest part

How I tried making it to the World Championships gravel racing.

So, my buddy Jan, who used to be a world champ on the track, asked me back in May to join a gravel race in Drenthe, The Netherlands. He said, “Hey, it’s a chance to qualify for the World Championships gravel.” He had already qualified a few months earlier at another event in Limburg. To be honest, I had no idea what I was getting into, but I thought, “Why not?” So, I coughed up 60 bucks and waited for more info. It came a bit later. The Gravel One Fifty is a 150-kilometer race, and let me tell you, it wasn’t a walk in the park. I scouted the course two weeks before the race and quickly realized that 45mm tires would’ve been a good idea.

Continue reading

Gravel Worlds, and what Singlespeed has taught me

2023 has been a great year of bike racing at Rodeo Labs. We’ve scooped up quite a few podiums and victories between Donkeys and Flaanimals, and beyond race results it’s been great watching owners and community members line up and ride for reasons other than trying to win. As for myself, for a number of reasons this has been the year of ditching geared drivetrains and instead racing singlespeed. I’ve learned a lot about myself in the process.

Continue reading

Robididn’t: Open Range Tornados

I experienced a wide range of emotions after standing on the podium at Unbound. Climbing up there and fulfilling a long journey of hard work and sacrifice filled me with elation. However, it also left me with a lingering question of “what’s next?” The following four days were mostly filled with snacking and sleeping as I basked in achieving my biggest goal of the year, only touching the bike to clean it.

Continue reading

Podcast: The Race Director Round Up — Part One

Welcome to the Rodeo Labs Race Director Round Up! Over the next few weeks, as the gravel race “season” gets underway, we have decided to take on a mini-series focusing on gravel racing through the collective eyes of gravel race directors from across the country. Race directors are both the tastemakers and the police of the nucleus concept of “the spirit of gravel.” While race directors have a fantastic platform to voice their perspective for their own races, that voice is often limited to those narrow confines.  The goal here is to use our podcast, as a small journalistically minded outlet with no skin in the game, to give them a collective platform to share their interpretations of the state of the sport. 

In part one, Logan introduces the series through a field dispatch from the Gravel Worlds gravel race in Nebraska last summer and the dialogue that followed. The first conversation was with Andy Jones-Wilkins, who is not only Logan’s father, but also an accomplished ultra-runner and pundit. Using the conversation with Andy as a framework, Logan sat down with Jason Strohbehn, the race director of Gravel Worlds and the co-host of the Gravel Family Podcast, to learn more about the race and start at the question that is guiding the whole series: what is the state of gravel bike racing? 

Continue reading

Podcast: The Atlas Mountain Race with Ashley Carelock

The Atlas Mountain Race sets off for its third edition next week. In anticipation of the bike packing race, we brought in Ashley Carelock to look back at her Moroccan experiences in last year’s October edition of the race, while Stephen Fitzgerald dropped into the chat to add his own perspective from his outing to Africa in 2020. 


If you are interested in following along to the 2023 Atlas Mountain Race, be sure to check out the race website, here. Additionally, back in the depth of the pandemic, Stephen penned this expansive write up about what that race was like. You can find that here. Lastly, Ashley eloquently wrote more about her race on her blog, which you can access here.

Continue reading

The Rodeo Podcast: A field recording with Bobby Wintle

and Drew at Rodeo Labs talks about launching the Show Pony

Part one of the podcast picks up with Logan Jones-Wilkins rambling through the middle of America. After leaving the muddy grass field at the Rule of Three in Bentonville, Arkansas, Logan was on his way to Emporia, Kansas to race Unbound Gravel. With time to spare and capitalizing on his proximity to Stillwater, Oklahoma, an idea was born– a Rodeo Labs Podcast field recording. The first field recording is a ride in Bobby Wintle’s 4-Runner. Logan experiences some of Bobby’s favorite roads, which didn’t even make this years course!

Continue reading

The Rodeo Podcast: Daniel Connell on the 2022 Tour Divide

When Daniel graduated from UC Santa Barbara, the Tour Divide was not on his radar. However, shortly after Daniel discovered a new passion– bicycle touring. His first bicycle tour was to Columbia, it was a crash course on touring and how to maintain a bike over a six month trip. Daniel has not stopped touring. When Daniel discovered the Tour Divide, he was hooked. The first foray was touring the divide, but the the following two years he has raced it. Now Daniel is patiently waiting for next year. On the podcast, Daniel recounts his experiences from the event. Rain was persistent throughout, start to finish. In between, there were awed moments with wildlife, mishaps with bear spray and quickly fostered friendships on the trail.

Continue reading