Ep. 131 ~ Red Granite Grinder Recap
Bikes or Death
Patrick Farnsworth
4.8 • 563 Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2022
⏱️ 139 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week we are taking a peak over the preverbial cycling fence to see what's going on in the world of gravel racing. We've seen Ted King, Payson McElveen, Lachlan Morton, and many other gravel racers dip their toes into the bikepacking waters. Now it's our turn to take a peak into their world.
After coming on the podcast to tell us all about Wisconsin Bikepacking & Gravel, Shane Hitz invited me out to experience the Red Granite Grinder for myself. The RGG is a mixed terrain gravel race that starts/finishes in Wausau, WI. One very unique feature about this route is the 20+ special land access options that are available only during this race. Shane has been busy chasing down land owners and managers to make this route a reality and by all accounts his efforts have paid off.
Visit www.BikesorDeath.com for a full writeup and a gallery of images from my trip to the RGG.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Bikes for Death podcast. As always, my name is Patrick, |
| 0:04.8 | and I'm your host. And on today's episode, we're going to be taking a peek into the world of |
| 0:10.2 | gravel racing. For the first time ever, Bikes for Death is going to look onto the other side of the |
| 0:15.5 | fence into the gravel race scene and see what's shaken. We've seen quite a few riders from the gravel |
| 0:23.8 | scene come and check out bike packing. I'm thinking of like Payson McKelvin, Ted King, |
| 0:31.0 | Lachlan Morton, to name a few. And on this episode, we're going to be dipping our toe in the gravel race scene, courtesy of the red granite grinder that took place about a week ago in Wausau, Wisconsin. |
| 0:47.8 | You may remember that Shane Hitz was on the podcast recently. He was on at episode 125 and we were talking all things Wisconsin, bike packing and gravel. |
| 0:59.0 | Well, the Red Granite Grindr is a race that Shane put together and is the race director for. |
| 1:07.0 | And the longest distance is 144 miles. |
| 1:17.3 | And that route takes riders on many different terrains and mixed surfaces. |
| 1:30.1 | Shane manages relationships with 20 different land owners or land managers to get access to areas that can only be accessed during this race, which is really neat and makes it a really unique and fun adventure and challenge. And after that episode, |
| 1:38.0 | Shane wanted to bring me out to check out Wisconsin for myself. So I was there at the Red |
| 1:43.0 | Granite Grindr, doing some media, |
| 1:45.6 | doing some podcasting. But now I am back in Texas and ready to get back to some podcasting. |
| 1:52.4 | We've been silent a little bit over here, mostly just due to travel and haven't been able to |
| 1:57.1 | put out an episode. So my apologies, and we're going to fix that right now so today's |
| 2:04.8 | episode is going to be four different segments from people at the red granite grinder so the first |
| 2:12.5 | segment is going to be with chris shots and he is a local who as you'll be able to tell from his segment has a |
| 2:20.5 | bunch of stories about the area and could probably talk all day so we start off with |
| 2:27.5 | Chris he's going to tell us a little bit about the area and then we're going to speak |
| 2:32.0 | with Maddie Rowe who was the first place male finisher of the 144 |
| 2:37.1 | route. And then we're going to talk to Maria Stats, who was the first place female winner of the |
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