Gravel racing, as an upstart discipline, has endeavored to be taken seriously so has Strickland. Strickland has strongly appealed to fans and to commercial sponsors these include Red Bull, which spends hundreds of millions each year associating itself with sports that have an air of risk. Another racer has observed that his cool, earnest self-assurance evokes both the cowboy and the hippie. He’s lean and good-looking, and has the deliberate enunciation of someone who’s a little more stoned than he’d planned to be. Strickland, a thirty-six-year-old Texan, won in Emporia in 2019. The crime was soon understood to be connected to her friendship with Colin Strickland, the biggest star that gravel racing has yet produced. Hours after that article appeared online, Wilson was fatally shot, in an apartment in Austin, Texas. In May, VeloNews described Wilson as “the winningest woman in the American off-road scene.” In California in April, she won a major competition by twenty-five minutes. This spring-a year after her first gravel race-she seemed poised to dominate the women’s field. She had died three weeks earlier, in what Amy Charity, who was riding that morning, described to me as “the most tragic and shocking thing that’s ever happened in this small community.” Wilson grew up in Vermont, the skiing daughter of a champion skier she graduated from Dartmouth in 2019, then moved to California. The early-morning cyclists were about to begin a memorial ride for Moriah Wilson, one of the sport’s leading athletes. The manufacturers of rival anti-chafing creams had set up stands. Banners printed with the muddy faces of past winners hung from street lamps. Gravel evangelists sometimes like to compare this mix to a mullet haircut: “Business at the front, party at the back.” Emporia, a low-rise college town, had been filling with video crews and podcasters. Like a big-city marathon, a typical gravel race is both an élite contest and, at the rear, something less pressing. Indeed, the Kansas event, Unbound Gravel, can now fairly describe itself as the most important in all of American competitive cycling-even if many of the hundreds who pay to ride in it each year have little competitive ambition beyond not giving up. Gravel bikes, and gravel racing, have since proliferated-at a time when American participation in racing of the Lance Armstrong kind (skinnier tires, lighter frames) has been in decline. “Gravel” became a cycling term only about a decade ago, to describe machines that are a compromise, in weight and handling, between road bikes and mountain bikes. The event is the biggest in the new niche sport of gravel-bike racing-a form of slog that presents itself as both a solo endurance test and a party in the mud. These cyclists had travelled to Emporia to compete in races the following day, in which most of them would ride for two hundred miles, on rolling unpaved roads, for at least nine and a half hours. By five-thirty, a few dozen women and men had collected in the dark. The riders hugged their bike lights blinked. These were professional athletes as well as serious amateurs, on high-end bikes that click-clicked loudly while coming to a stop. I am not a technical rider so when I do hit trails I am looking for wide flowing tracks to ride on.One morning in June, before dawn, cyclists began gathering at an intersection in Emporia, Kansas, to remember the victim of a recent murder. I live in Texas so my riding is not like it was at Angel Fire and is mostly on gravel roads, hard pack or city streets. So I wanted to get opinions on whether to just let it go and focus on the Ogre, or keep it and maybe change the wheel tire combo down to 29’s with 2.6 tires? I can only attribute this to the big soft 3.0 tires. Even though I have put carbon components on the Stache to lower the weight it just rides heavier than the Ogre. However, like I said, I really like the bike and its design just not the rolling resistance the 3.0 tires create. So, I was thinking about letting the Stache go. In doing so I realized that I am truly more of a gravel/touring rider. In another thread I mentioned taking the Stache to Angel Fire to ride down hill and trails there. I have since fallen in love with the Ogre and even though it is a much heavier bike than the Stache, it just rolls along so much more effortlessly. Over the winter I picked up a Surly Ogre frame and built up a gravel/touring/bikepacking bike. I really love the innovative design of this bike and it has served me well. So I have had my Trek Stache 7 for a few years now.
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