Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Bikes for Death podcast.

As always, my name is Patrick, and I'm your host.

And today's episode is going to be all things East Texas showdown and slowdown.

I think we're about exactly 30 days away from meeting at the Bullet Grill to get ready to dip our tires in the sand and the gravel

and go take a tour of East Texas on your bikes. It's going to be great. Looking forward to

seeing everybody. And so today's episode is mostly going to focus on, well, not mostly,

it's all going to focus on the East Texas

Showdown.

We have curated questions from racers this year.

You know, what do they want to know?

And we brought in a panel of previous racers to answer those questions.

And I might chime in a little bit here and there as well.

So yes, today's episode is going to be very East Texas showdown heavy.

And if you're not planning on doing this route, I still think that you might be able to

get value out of this because we're going to be talking about bikepacking, bikepack racing,

strategies.

It's all going to be specific to this event, but hopefully there are some

tidbits that you can take away as well. So before we get into it, I first want to thank all of

our sponsors for the East Texas Showdown. So far, Kuat, Quadlock, the Bullet Grill, Rock Geist, Ren and Ruby Coffee have all

stepped up to be sponsors of this year's race and we appreciate and couldn't do it without their

support. Um, we are still open for sponsorship, um, and or raffles, uh, raffle items. So if you are or work at a

company or organization that would like to help support this year's event, um, in any way we are

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