Gravel Culture: Quarantine Q and A with Colin Strickland

When you're a pro gravel racer with no races to go to, what do you do? American Colin Strickland (winner of the 2019 Dirty Kanza 200) has been talking about how he's handling the downtime and who he is away from the bike.

Cycling has always been a significant and meaningful part of my daily life. Between the ages of 18 and 25 I rarely went a day without riding somewhere on my bike, but this was out of necessity, and it was almost always to get to another location, not for the purpose of training. I worked as an Environmental Scientist for a small consulting firm in Texas. I showed up at work every day at 7.30am (or at least tried to), and got off work at 5.30pm. In between those hours, I walked transects in the steep hills of northwest Austin, hand-excavated potential cave features, crawled into tiny cave openings, and wrote reports for the US Fish and Wildlife Dept about those activities.

I also prepared pre-construction documents for projects relating to environmental compliance. It was a lot of sitting at a desk, a lot of sitting in a truck driving all over Texas, and occasionally hiking through brushy thickets for days on end. Every day I wore old pair of jeans, hiking boots, and a company-monogramed Patagonia fishing shirt for field work. Oh, and a company cap (some things never change).

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent response has effectively cancelled, or at the very least significantly delayed every race on the 2020 USA calendar (with the exception of Mid-South), until late summer at the earliest. After spending 4 months building race form and sharpening “the axe”, we're looking at waiting another four months before the next competition. This presents the question - try to hold the form, or back off the gas and start three months ahead of the next event? I am still a bit undecided, but I think I will be going with the second option. Thus far I have been heading out on three big rides week and one or two shorter rides, but it is honestly hard to find motivation when the goal is so far away. I think a short break will be good to reset and focus on something else for a week or two. I'm excited to kick off the next build with a four to five day bike tour.

Aside from the social disruption, the isolation of social distancing is not to foreign from my normal way of life. Being one of the only professional cyclists in Austin (Texas), I spend most of the hours of the day alone on quiet, desolate roads. That much has remained constant. I am taking the opportunity to explore several extracurricular pursuits, specifically building bicycles for friends and playing guitar. I love introducing people to their first quality, personalised, and well-equipped bike based on their desired utility.

I am also finishing various home improvement projects that have been sitting on a back burner since the cycling has taken priority, and I am putting more energy into full renovation of a 35 foot (10m) 1954 Spartan travel trailer. I’m also tearing into a few motorcycle modification projects that I’ve been delaying as well. I am a tinkering projector, and I have been kept so busy by existing hobbies that I don’t have bandwidth to discover new passions.

The morning of the race, Katie and I sat in the car as we received the ‘rain delay’ announcement and prepared mostly our minds for what we were about to do. I awaited Mid South with a mix of excitement and dread. Dread, because I knew that the first three hours would be only just above 0 degrees C and it would be pissing with rain. Excitement, because I knew that these sloppy conditions would add a significant amount of muddy drag, turning it into a strategic 6+hour tractor pull, and that the opportunity for McGyveresque field remedies to fix jammed components. I figured that if I could deal with the cold, the conditions would suit me.

As it turned out, I never really was able to get over the cold. I red-lined around hour 2, chasing my way across a 30 sec gap up to Stetina and Summerhill on the decisive early climb, and I felt like I was barely hanging on for the next 4.5 hours till I rolled into Stillwater. It was bizarre. my body never seemed to get up to operating temp. Add to that the immense caloric demands and the challenge of accessing and ingesting food in those conditions, at that intensity, and the result was what felt like a 3-hour bonk. It was the kind of day that at 25kms to the finish, I didn’t even realise I was within sight of Payson McElveen because I was too busy looking backward, desperately trying to defend a place on the podium. I was just a hard f****g day at the office.

Yes, this. Well, things were different in early March 2020. I hindsight, it was a highly questionable decision. But at the time, there had not been any widespread adoption of social distancing. The measures were literally being adopted in major US cities over the weekend that Mid South occurred. So, while it seemed a little eerie and ominous, it did not feel like an irresponsible decision at the time. Katie and I are bike racers, and there was a bike race going on. We had travelled for a full day to arrive at the bike race - it seemed only natural to race our bikes.

On another note, I am a pragmatist, above all else. I understand the utility and necessity of social distancing guidelines and follow them. But a bike race is not a contact sport, and the odds of catching infected fluids from another rider, who is asymptomatic enough to compete in a 105 mile bike race, are very low. If I ran ‘the zoo’, I would have tried to limit the social contact of the pre/post-race events. So, in summary, no - not a lot was known at the time of the race, and the act of racing, especially in this case, was a very isolated endeavour.

For this type of compressed race calendar, it will be crucial to time the form to be firing for the brief race window. The typical racing year is far more forgiving, and allows you some leeway with when, exactly the good form arrives. Not so much this year. Training and timing will be key.

This 2020 forecast sounds identical to 2019 Kanza, so I would venture to guess that this date will suit me just as well as May. In such a long race, there are many different physical challenges that face the riders, and hopefully heat will be one of them. While I think that high temps and direct sunshine favour me, I do recall winning a few races in less than sweltering temps as recent as 2019….