 So after 12 years of road cycling, this was my perception of gravel riding. And to be fair, those images you just saw, that did form part of our ride, but that only felt like 10, maybe 15% of the ride. 40% of the ride felt like this. I'm not riding that. So you could say, I got a massive wakeup call. I underestimated things massively and as a result of that, I made a ton of mistakes. And in this video, whether you're looking to get into gravel riding and you want to learn from my mistakes or maybe you're into gravel riding and you're just up for a good laugh. Ha ha ha ha ha, what an idiot. I think this video has got a lot to offer. But first of all, if you are a channel supporter, you might be wondering, how did I go on a gravel ride when I don't even have a gravel bike? As many of you will know, I am a true road cycling wanker with aero carbon bikes and juicy expensive carbon rims everywhere. That's all I own. So for this cycling adventure, and I'll explain why I was doing this gravel bike riding adventure for you shortly, I needed a gravel bike. So I reached out to my good friends at Advanced Traders who are the Aussie distributor for BMC, Norco and Merida here in Queensland, Australia to see if they might happen to have a couple of demo gravel bikes. One gravel bike for me and one for Ryan who's also in this video and doesn't have a gravel bike. Either he's got a mountain bike and I thought we could do a bit of cross-promotional activity I could promote these gravel bikes in the video in return for lending them to me for the day. Oh, here we go. Hello. You're good, Mark. It's Cam Nichols, you know, the cycling YouTuber. Oh, good, Cam, how are you, man? Mate, I've got a little gravel adventure coming up and I was wondering if you had any demo bikes I could loan for a day or two. Hey, Wano. Yeah, mate, I've got this YouTuber on the phone again, Cam Nichols. Get in, he's after not only one, but two gravel bikes. Two? Ah, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, what a dickhead! Tell him he's dreaming. Yeah, sorry, Cam, we can't help you out, mate. Gravel bikes are pretty hard to get at the moment, but good luck. All right, mate. No worries, thanks anyway. So after that, Bailia, so I've come to the Cycle Sportif in Noosa where you can hire bikes. This is a Focus Parallel, it's an endurance road bike, and we've fitted some Maxxis Cyclocross tyres, they're a 33mm tyre, so it should be good for the gravel road. The gear set up is a SRAM Apex-1, so it has one chain ring on the front, it's a 44 twos, and 10 to 34 on the back. So depending on your weight, but something around the 40 psi for the off-road sections. So gravel bike for me anyway, tick and for ride, as you'll see shortly, he did the whole ride on a mountain bike. So why after 12 years of road cycling, would I all of a sudden, to randomly just go decide to do a proper gravel ride? Let's hear from the head coach of the Road Cycling Academy, Ryan Thomas, as to why we were doing this in the first place. We're testing out one of the gravel courses actually, so we're the main partner for the coaching at the Noosa Injuro, which is in the end of July. So we thought we'd come out here, see what it's all about. So the Road Cycling Academy, where I'm also a road cycling coach, is the coaching partner for the Noosa Mountain Bike Injuro, which is also hosting on the same weekend, late in July, the Australian Gravel National Titles. So I thought I'd better get involved. Now please know for this particular event, obviously when it comes to gravel, I have no idea. So as the coaching partner for this event, I'm taking a backward step and Ryan Thomas will be managing all our eight week programs leading into both the Injuro and gravel events. And all these eight week programs start next week. So if you happen to be doing this event and you want coaching support, I'll provide some links below, but you'll need to be quick because as I said, we're starting next week. So to set the scene for this one, let me paint five pitches for you before we get into it. Pitcher number one, clearly I have no idea. Yes, I've ridden on gravel a few times on a road bike, probably for a few hundred meters at a time, but I've never done a gravel ride nor even a proper mountain bike ride. Number two, this is a difficult course. And while these gravel courses don't have overall ratings, I did ask Ryan Thomas because he's got a lot of experience in this space. How would you rate this course out of 10? He rates it an eight out of 10. So this was my first gravel experience on an eight out of 10. Number three, we have had a lot of rain here in the Sunshine Coast over the past two to three months. I have never seen anything like it. Queensland's flooding crisis is developing into the night. Brisbane is a city under water. So as a result of all that, everything is wet. The ground is extremely wet. Thus the difficulty of this course was exacerbated by extremely wet and muddy conditions. Number four, to this picture that I'm painting, I was riding with two elite bike handlers. I mean, Daymo Jones has run a bike shop for the past 20 years and he loves his off-road and head coach of the RCA, Ryan Thomas, is currently racing at a UCI continental level with Mayo Pro and is a very proficient mountain biker coming forth in the Nusa Enduro mountain bike event last year. And then there's me. And this is kind of like the cherry on top of the five points that I wanted to share with you. Is that I am currently overweight and out of form. So the foundations were set for a very good day on the bike. Now, literally it would have been three to five minutes into this ride where we hit our first off-road section. And can I just say, I was not expecting trails at all. In fact, I didn't really know gravel riding included trails. Pretty silly. Considering the Enduro website even says 10% trails although it felt to me more like 40% trails at least. So within a few minutes of my gravel riding experience, I was literally on dirt, rocks, mud, tree roots, debris, more rocks, you name it. I was literally shitting myself. What have I got myself into here? I mean, my arms were vibrating so much I felt like my head was about to snap off. This isn't fun. I'm not having a good time here. In addition to all these new bits and pieces that were on the ground that I was having to deal with, there were also some steep little inclines to deal with in that first section. And I was yet to appreciate how to deal with these small and slippery but steep inclines. So I learned the hard way. But thankfully I had a great support crew there to care and nurture me as I went through this process. It's behind the scenes. Is this why it's called road cycling in the academy and not gravel? So that first section of what felt like pretty much all trails was roughly 10 kilometers in length and probably the hardest section of them all. And that is literally how I started my first gravel experience. Then we hit some proper roads. And it was an amazing experience. I was just hopeful it would last at least another 80 kilometers, but unfortunately five minutes later we're back in a section that was just as bad as the last. And then I hit this thing. I'm not riding that. Yeah, if you've got good bike handling skills. So what am I supposed to just walk in the water? What the f*** can choose? Oh my God. So a big tip for those thinking about going on their first gravel adventure. This is why you don't use road shoes. You're exactly right. Look at that. Beautiful. No, I'm 100. I can't click. Why are you even getting those in? I don't know. I don't think I am. That's the worst. That's what you said about half an hour ago. We descend down to bitumen and then gravel road. Yeah, no more sections like they say. No more sections like that. Next. We finally hit some nice gravel and I gotta say the gravel riding was great. No cars, open roads, fresh air and good times with good friends. But I had this constant thought in the back of my head when's the next slippery hilly trail coming? It was stressing me out. And I had a right to be stressed because literally moments later we hit this section. Was this section even considered gravel or trail or I don't bloody know what it was. But what I can say it was in this section I started to develop more confidence. Just really relaxing the upper body, putting a lot of weight on the saddle and just letting the bike slide around. Let the bike do its thing. Don't try and get in the way and you will progress better than if you are stiff and worried about what's potentially going to happen next. So I was finally starting to feel like I was getting the hang of gravel and mud but a false sense of security perhaps. After that section, we hit a small town called Koran. We had a coffee, refilled our water. What are we doing Ryan? You wanna drink out of that? Yeah. You wanna drink out of that? And I'm thinking to myself we're only a third of the way through this ride and I am cooked. Never before have I been so mentally fatigued from a ride the concentration required was adding a fatiguing element to the constant verse of VO2 max and anaerobic power I was having to push as I tried to get up some of these short hills. And we still hadn't hit the beast. That is Mother Mountain. But once again, we cruised on some very nice dirt gravel roads on the way to Mother Mountain. And again, I'm loving the vibe, no cars, open roads, fresh air and good times with good friends but worried about what's to come. I also realized I left my GoPro back at Koran. I think that was the fatigue kicking in. So we got to the bottom of Mother, Mother, Mother, something like that, mountains. The climb is 10 kilometers. It'll be really washed out because of the rain we've had. They've shut it off to full drives. It'll be a hell of a lot of fun. This section of the ride was almighty challenging. We have a combination here of poor bike skills, fatigue, incredibly tough to rain and really poor gear selections. We are less than 500 meters into this climb and I'm already cooked. This is kind of like what we're dealing with right down here. Rocks, gravel, all sorts. Out of air, big time. And this is what I'm looking at. That left me pushing the bike a lot in that first two kilometer section which has an average gradient of over 10%. Sad scenes, but that's actually what happened. After descending that climb, we popped out on some very nice roads. Scenery was great, but more random. What are we riding on at the moment, grass? And it was by this point in the ride where I literally felt like purposely crashing in a bush and having a dose. I was that cooked. But we pushed on and then we reached an intersection where we had the opportunity to go back to Koran and pick up my GoPro. So that's what we did, which meant we didn't quite finish off the true 100 kilometer gravel event. We sort of skipped 30 kilometers, but I was very thankful to be able to go pick up my GoPro and also to be able to ride on the road and sit on both Daimo and Ryan Thomas' wheel for a solid 25 kilometers. So to summarize this experience, and to be honest, I'm still a bit bamboozled by the whole thing, if I had to break it down into three key takeaways. Number one would be make sure you've got the right gear. I had the wrong shoes, the wrong gear ratio, and the wrong tires, and that was all my fault. Number two, riding gravel is physically and mentally fatiguing. So carve up, which I didn't do, and be prepared mentally. Number three, gravel riding is not just gravel riding. In fact, I think we should change the name of it. We should call it everything riding. So be expected for the unexpected. To wrap this one up, little plug for the Road Cycling Academy, the reason being we open up a 12 week program called the Up Level Road Cycling Course. Now three times a year and the next opening is not too far away, July 18th. So if you're keen to take your road cycling performance to another level or gravel, you could work with Ryan if you wanted to improve your gravel or mountain biking. There'll be a link below where you can apply for our next major intake. We'll catch you in the next video.