The Rundown: Lance is back from two weeks in Tucson, Matt is back in the studio after a season buried in high school cross country, and the guys finally sit down together to unpack one of the biggest mass-start rides in the country. This one runs from a 4:09 ride at El Tour de Tucson and a week of riding alongside retired pros, to a sharp listener question about whether young people are leaving cycling behind. Still here, still riding, still making a podcast.
Backpedal: a season of coaching, and a trip that mattered
Matt has been neck deep in coaching, swimming in the mornings and cross country right up to the national championships, where he has a senior runner going sub-14:30 in the 5K. The pay works out to less than minimum wage once you count the hours, so it is the gratification that keeps him in it, watching a young talent develop and getting to feel like a small part of it. Ian has been a bit of a gym rat, riding with purpose feeling hard to find this time of year, though the Sauvie Island Shootout reminded him how much harder real competitive riding is than a normal ride, and how good that kind of suffering feels afterward.
Lance spent two solid weeks in Tucson and called it a riot, but he also came home to a quiet house after the loss of his dog, and he took a minute to thank everyone who reached out at group rides and events. The trip was a good distraction, and the welcome he got back home meant a lot. It is the kind of honest aside the podcast does well, and it sat right next to the racing talk instead of being tucked away.
El Tour de Tucson: 11,000 riders and a race that split at mile seven
The main event. El Tour de Tucson is technically a fondo, but with 11,000 cyclists across four distances and an elite corral up front, it rides like a race. Lance got into the elite corral on the second row, lining up with 500-plus riders who could all genuinely ride. He went there for the El Tour prologue camp, a week of riding and eating alongside George Hincapie, Bob Roll, Christian Vande Velde, Chloe Dygert, Bobby Julich, Bradley Wiggins, Leanda Cave, and Jens Voigt. Twenty riders, those pros mixed in, and the kind of unguarded conversations you do not get anywhere else, including Hincapie asking Lance about his Factor and his new pro team that runs Factor bikes too.
The race itself came down to one moment. The first seven or eight miles ran 30 miles an hour on a closed three-lane highway, then funneled to a single lane, and right where it pinched there was a crash. Lance had given himself room and was sitting around 150th wheel instead of in the first 30, so he skirted it, but the front group was gone in seconds and the gap blew out to a minute almost immediately. He flicked an elbow to organize a chase, nobody came through, and that was the front of the race for the day. He rode the rest in the second group, finished 4:09, and averaged 24 and a half miles an hour for 102 miles at a normalized 234 watts. Hincapie, at 52, beat him by ten minutes by staying attached to that front split.
The honest reckoning underneath it is good listening. The split happened in the first 24 minutes of a four-hour day, and the guys dig into whether Lance could have bridged if he had committed in that first minute, or audited a faster group on the long straightaways. The takeaway is the same one that ran through their 2025 highlights: in a huge mixed field you cannot read every wheel, you give yourself room, and you race the group you are in. The winner was a local Tucson rider whose father was in hospice and passed away during the race; he and a teammate soloed off at mile 40 and stayed away for 60 miles. Third overall was a 19-year-old national champion racing with half a forearm. Real stories, the kind that stick longer than the result.
Leadout: cyclocross is back, and Pogačar goes shopping for monuments
Champ takes the news. Cyclocross season is underway, with Thibau Nys, Sven Nys' son, coming on strong and winning early. The big question every year is whether Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert will show, and the schedules finally dropped: van der Poel has about a dozen races including World Championships, van Aert eight or nine but no Worlds, with roughly five races where they overlap. Tom Pidcock has said he is skipping cross entirely this season. You can catch races on FloSports, YouTube on a delay, and some on HBO Max.
On the road, Tadej Pogačar has said he is targeting Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix, the two monuments missing from his collection, with the Vuelta a possibility too. The guys talk through why those two are hard for him: both are flat enough that they favor sprinters and big horsepower over the long climbs where he makes the difference. He washed out on a corner at Roubaix last year and still finished fourth. Then there is the Oman story, where the plan is to literally build a mountain to bring the World Championships there and set up a climber's finish. There is a lot of money in the sport that has nothing to do with the sport making money, and the guys are honest about that too.
Hot seat: is cycling becoming an older person's sport?
A listener from Sun Valley asked the question the guys chewed on hardest: are cycling groups trending older and older, and are fewer young people getting into it? The answers split in a useful way. Matt pointed at cost and at the simple fact that fewer kids seem to find cycling as the exciting thing it once was. Jake went to freedom, the Gen X childhood of riding everywhere until the streetlights came on, and how each generation that does not grow up riding is less likely to put their own kids on bikes. Roads feel less safe, kids are on phones, and unsupervised youth activity of every kind has shrunk.
Ian offered the most interesting counter, and it reframed the whole thing: maybe it is not that fewer young people ride, but that cycling lets older people stay in it. It is one of the few sports you can do hard into your later years, so the masters scene is huge and the average age looks older even if the youth numbers hold. The guys looked at real fields to test it: road races skew old unless it is a junior-specific event, while off-road, cyclocross and mountain, draws more juniors, helped by promoters who let kids race free or cheap. NICA gets a specific shout as the program doing it right and growing fast.
On what they can actually do about it: pay it forward and donate good used gear instead of selling it, support youth and team programs where the teaching and camaraderie live, find the cycling-curious parents first because parents who ride tend to raise kids who ride, and push local municipalities for real, safe infrastructure rather than the lane dividers that read more like a hazard than a help.
One last thing
Matt is still posting watch videos and is way behind on a backlog, including the Garmin fenix lineup he wants on the Dialed site before the video goes up. Ian's was a humbling one: his new dual-sided power meter revealed that his right leg is putting out about 30 watts less than his left, a 59 to 41 split he traces to an old climbing injury. A dual-sensing power meter tells the true story a single-side unit hides by just doubling your good leg, and now he has something concrete to work on. The guys also gave a shout to teammate Chris Mann, who was in Bahrain racing the go-kart world championships.
Jake closed with two. First, a real offer: if you know a kid who wants to ride and is held back by gear, email info@dialedcycling.com. The lab has a few bikes on hand in different sizes and would help cover helmets, shoes, and cleats to get a young rider started, because the gear is the real barrier to entry, not the riding. Second, the team ugly Christmas sweater ride is coming, pushed back a week for family plans, so watch the Dialed Cycling club on Strava and the socials and come out if you are local.
That is 377. A 4:09 at El Tour, a week with the pros, and an honest look at who is riding and who is not. If you have a kid who wants in, you know where to find the guys. They will be back soon.
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