The Rundown: The guys are back after a month away, with Ian heading to the UK and the south of France the next day. Between the catch-ups there is a genuinely useful run of listener questions: how to recover after a huge race year, the best wide gravel tire for chunky roads, what it would take to beat Tadej Pogacar, and why the race scene keeps shrinking even as more people than ever are out riding. Still here, still riding, still making a podcast.
Backpedal: a cyclocross season that keeps getting better
Lance has pinned on 14 numbers in the four weeks since the last episode, and the cyclocross campaign he went into with no goals has quietly become one of his best. He is second in the Portland Trophy Cup 50-plus after winning a race outright, his first win since 2019, third in the Harvest series on pure consistency, and he made his first ever Cross Crusade podium. He even bunny-hopped the barriers every lap in Madras, one of only a couple riders doing it in any field, and brought the official barriers home to practice in his backyard. His proudest moment was a gravel race at Grava de Madras, where he got dropped on the climb and then soloed for 45 straight minutes to claw back a group a minute and a half up the road, holding 320 watts for half an hour on his ENVE MOG. Confidence, it turns out, is most of the game.
Ian skipped the gravel race, his head not in racing mode since June, and went to the Sauvie Island shootout instead, hanging on by the skin of his teeth through a 28 mph second lap. He is deep into gym work and knee rehab and enjoying the retiree life. Matt is living in watch reviews and cross country coaching, running with his team in the mornings and swimming open water to test devices. Jake's month was the heaviest: he built an entire new website and point-of-sale system from scratch, set on going live within days, while juggling the lab expansion into the connected space next door, a third surgery in nine months, and a follow-up where his hip specialist opted for another injection rather than surgery. On top of all of it, someone smashed the lab's door at 1 a.m. and was out with a $7,000 bike in about twelve seconds, the same night he was recovering from surgery.
Leadout: a Vuelta finish in chaos and Remco against the clock
Champ takes the news. Jonas Vingegaard won the Vuelta on the final stage after a Madrid finish thrown into chaos, with Joao Almeida second and Tom Pidcock third. With the podium ceremony scrapped, Pidcock's mother pushed Visma to improvise, and the team threw together a parking-lot podium behind the hotel: a banner, three coolers, and Sharpie numbers, with all the jersey winners showing up for it. The guys agreed it was the best part of the whole race.
At the World Championships, Remco Evenepoel crushed the time trial, catching and passing Pogacar on the road to add another title to a collection that already includes the Olympic, European, and national time trials. The road race was a different story: Pogacar won, while Evenepoel fought saddle trouble, swapped to a backup bike he hated, swapped back, and still rode to second through visible frustration. Ian's point landed well, that time trials are predictable because everything is in your control, while a mass-start road race has too many variables for even that kind of engine to dominate every time. Pogacar then kept winning into the Italian week ahead of Il Lombardia.
Gravel tires for chunky roads
A listener with rough, unmaintained gravel asked for a wide tire with good traction that still rolls fast on pavement. Lance's answer was direct: the Maxxis Reaver in a 45, the new HYPR-X compound, which has a fast file tread down the center and just enough side knob to hold a corner. It is the tire he has run on nearly everything this season, and at around $72 it undercuts a lot of the $90-plus competition. His other picks, all of which the lab stocks and sometimes struggles to keep in stock, were the Specialized Pathfinder Pro and the Schwalbe G-One, fast-rolling road-leaning gravel tires that fall off in mud or chunk. Jake added the Challenge handmade gravel tires, the high-TPI ones the lab ships all over the country, as another strong fast-gravel option.
The bigger lesson under the tire talk: width and pressure matter more than the exact model. Wider tires carry more air and flat less, which is why the narrow-tire riders kept puncturing, 20 of them at the Madras gravel race alone. Save the narrower casings for muddy days when you do not want to pick up clay, and match the tire to your frame's clearance.
What would it take to beat Pogacar?
Matt raised it after Evenepoel said Pogacar barely needs a team to win, then watched him ride away solo with 75 kilometers to go at the European Championships. The guys worked through the options. Going solo early was arguably Evenepoel's only real recourse, breaking the field rather than setting up a showdown on the climbs where Pogacar is strongest. Worlds and Euros are strange because they are national teams, not trade teams, so riders who tear each other apart all year are suddenly teammates, sometimes with trade loyalties quietly cutting across the national lines. The honest read: better tactics and a stronger team can make it closer, but on form, beating him is mostly about hoping the day, or the bike, goes against him.
The tech-news segment had two cases worth watching. Strava is taking Garmin to court over heat maps and segments, with Suunto joining in, while Garmin dwarfs Strava in size and could, in theory, cut off uploads in a way that would hurt Strava badly right as it eyes an IPO. The guys' bet is it quietly settles. The other is the SRAM and UCI dispute over the 10-tooth cog, which sits in essentially every modern SRAM cassette and could reshape the product line depending on how it lands.
The shrinking race scene
Jake's big topic, and the one with no clean answer. Race entries are down across every local discipline, the once-massive Cross Crusade that drew nearly 9,500 entries across a season in its 2011 peak is now hoping for a fraction of that, and even the lab's weekly group rides have thinned. Yet the lab just had a record year and there are more people out riding than ever. The guys circled several causes at once: economic nervousness making the luxury of racing easier to skip, fewer new riders coming up because the roads feel unsafe with distracted drivers, older riders aging out or getting hurt, and a general sense that everyone is just busier than they used to be.
There were structural angles too. So few manufacturers still build dedicated cyclocross bikes that a proper one can run $7,000 to $10,000, pushing nearly everyone onto gravel bikes, which raised a real question: should cyclocross sand off some of its sharpest, most barrier-heavy features to stay competitive on the gravel bikes people actually own. OBRA already ran a kermis-style short-track gravel event this year, no dismounts, eight laps of a two-mile loop, and it was a hit. The other recurring theme was leadership: a huge share of riders never pin on a number, and the guys talked about how much one inspiring, encouraging voice in a club or race org can pull people off Strava and out to events. Promoters mostly do it for love of the discipline, but love alone is not sustainable when the long build days do not come close to breaking even.
One last thing
Matt has a wave of videos live and coming: the Apple Watch Ultra 3, Series 11, and the surprisingly capable $250 SE 3, plus a Garmin fenix 8 Pro review and a satellite-connectivity comparison, and his first sponsored video on a pair of Tozo headphones. Ian is off to the UK and then Nice for four nights, promising to actually document this one with the GoPro. Lance was racing again that same night and threatening to bunny-hop barriers in competition.
Jake closed with a story worth the wait. A customer he had seen in the lab a few times finally worked up the nerve to ask if Jake had been in a car-versus-bike crash seven or eight years back. He had been one of the paramedics who pulled Jake, with zero memory of the event, out of a 30-foot ravine and a blackberry thicket 115 feet from the impact. Jake has no recollection of any of it, so hearing a first-hand account, including the detail that he had calmly told the medic his shoulder was subluxated, meant a lot. A quiet reminder of why the lab treats the people who walk through the door like family.
That is 375. A season peaking, a tire question answered, a hard look at where racing is headed, and a reunion nobody saw coming. The guys are aiming to get back on track, maybe even next week.
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