Hello and welcome to the Bikes or Death podcast. My name is Patrick and I'm your host. This is the show that

talks about bikepacking, adventuring, and the cool people who participate. On this episode, I sat down

with Thomas Adams, who is mainly a gravel cyclist. I'm kind of releasing this as a special Dirty Canza episode. So Dirty Canza was just

just this past weekend. And Thomas has a very special relationship with that race. I don't want

to give too much away. I want him to be able to tell his story.

But I will tell you that three very significant life events happen for him at Dirty Canza.

Going into the interview, I was only aware of two of them, but I found out about number three on the podcast and so will you.

So this was an interesting interview for me.

I happened to be up in the Northwest Arkansas area on a family trip.

And of course I was trying to pack in some podcasts as well. And I did interview Hal Russell while I was there and I'm really looking forward to releasing that one.

But I also, in the back of my mind, really wanted to interview Thomas just because of his

relationship with their dirty Kansa and, you know, the fact that it just was this weekend,

like all the stars kind of aligned,

and it really made sense that he and I talked.

But I didn't really tell him about that.

I'd kind of tease the idea to him about recording a podcast,

but we never really set anything up official.

So I went over to his house and we were just kind of hanging out.

And I kind of brought up the podcast and he was willing to chat. So it was very, very impromptued.

I probably didn't, well, I didn't prepare at all. I mean, I had like an idea

of what I was going to talk about in my head, but didn't go in with any show notes or anything

like that. And we were a couple of glasses of whiskey into the night already. So that's kind of where

...