GRAVEL CYCLIST LLC
ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA

In Gainesville, Florida, we are fortunate. While the hot and humid summers don’t appeal to everybody, the fall and winter months, if you can call them that, are absolute paradise. While many parts of the country are buried in snow, we train year round outdoors, even during those odd times when the mercury drops below 32 degrees Fahrenheit / Zero degrees Celcius. Several of my fellow cyclists in Gainesville, gainfully employed during the daylight hours, disliked the idea of training indoors. For the fall / winter months of 2004 and 2005, we banded together, donned lights, and spent almost every Tuesday and Thursday night riding laps and “wintervals”, of a paved business park in nearby Alachua, Florida. The group would range in size from six to 16 riders, all merrily sprinting, time trialing, telling jokes and riding for fun. During March of 2010, I tested the waters of gravel racing, making the ten hour drive from Gainesville, Florida, to St. Francisville, Louisiana to race Rouge Roubaix. Rouge Roubaix is more a road bike race with some nasty gravel roads thrown in for good measure. Accompanying me on the trip were two of my closest friends, here on referred to as K-Dogg and Dr. Pain (read more about the “Cast” Banner Elk, North Carolina is a beautiful region of the United States. It is known for picturesque scenery including Beech Mountain, in addition to Lees-McRae College, which has a strong cycling program. Along with its mountainous paved roads is a plethora of dirt and gravel thoroughfares. For 2011, Mr. Andrew Stackhouse of the now defunct Pirate Race Productions created Three Peaks USA, a homage to the original Three Peaks cyclocross race in Great Britain. The scenery was amazing, the suffering was full on, and the camaraderie between the racers was like nothing we had experienced. Find yourself stooped over your bike fixing a flat tire? Any fellow racer who came upon you would ask if you needed help. What?! Harlan Meyers (1924 – 2013) and his company, Hi-E Engineering, represented the pinnacle of outside the box thinking, and genuine innovation, from the early 1970’s into the 1980’s. Based in Nashville, Tennessee, Harlan, a former aircraft engineer, applied principles learned through his work on aircraft, to bicycles. Hi-E came to existence because of Harlan’s son, […]