Author: MikeMcGuffin

Oh goodness where to begin the story of Unbound. I’ve been trying to gain entry into Unbound before it was Unbound: back in the Dirty Kanza days.  Well 2023 was my lucky year, and way back in January I was notified that I had indeed been given entry into the event. Be careful what you […]

Currently I’m like the dog who caught the car.  I signed up for Mid South, Unbound, Rift and SBT GRVL, and guess what: I got into ‘em all.  That’s six hundred miles of gravel racing.  The Mid South is already water under the bridge, and suffice it to say I didn’t finish as well as […]

Monday Dec 19th 2022 Palm Desert to Cottonwood Springs Campground Joshua Tree National Park After eating all the breakfast food that we could find at Lori’s house we finalized our packing and were posing for a departure shot at 10:30. This felt a bit late to be starting a bicycling adventure, but we only had […]

On Monday June 7th my buddy Dan and I drove over to Cle Elum to preview the new GRiT L course.  The GRiT is a new three course event (GRiT, GRiT L, and GRiT XL) scheduled for July 10, 2022. Dan and I decided to ride the forty-seven-mile GRiT L.  Forty-seven miles might not sound […]

Route Beta: This is a mountain biker’s gravel course: significant climbing on minimally maintained roads.  I suggest 1.9” or wider tires (basically mountain bike tires) and gearing as low as you can go (mountain bike gearing).  The Yeti is old skool with a triple in the front.  I spent a lot of time in the […]

Over the weekend I joined my “up for anything” friend Mykenna on a 300Km brevet ride with the Seattle International Randonneurs.  A brevet is an organized ride with a set start time and a set route.  For the 300Km distance the rider is allotted twenty hours to complete the course.  An interesting aspect of riding […]

Following a recent ride of the Oregon Outback I got to thinking a bit more about something that I’ve experienced for nearly three decades – what I call Post Adventure Blues (or PAB).  Recently I’ve discovered that this is a common condition known as Post Event Depression.  For me, the feeling has never escalated for […]

In late 2014, when times were much different, I opened up the autumn issue of Bicycle Quarterly and read about a bikepacking race that stretched the length of Oregon, it was called the Oregon Outback.  That year the co-owner of Breadwinner Bicycles and fellow Des Moines, Iowa native, Ira Ryan won the 363-mile event with […]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the Northwest Gravel Riders Facebook group is an awesome source of route and route condition information.  Last week while scanning through the suggested routes page I came across an interesting prospect through the hills north of Darrington – a sixty-seven mile loop with two significant sustained […]

Despite being a born and raised Iowan (I left the state in 1988 at the age of 22) I must confess to being ignorant of most of the state, especially the northwestern quadrant.  When I decided to ride RAGBRAI 2021 I was happy to see that the route would take me through this corner of […]