Last Sunday, while western Heroes bathed in champagne and stuffed newspapers up ladies’ shirts, the Tenspeed Hero / J.P. Graziano team rode a 100k gravel ride in Dekalb, IL. While the premise alone begs for epic sagas of grandious fire-eating lion-heartedness, you will not hear about record breaking masses that started but did not finish this ride, nor the record breaking heat in which this ride occurred, nor futile attempts to hold the wheel of UCI badboys like Ben Berden. What you will see is a day (perhaps under the influence of mild heat stroke) a few Heroes grew just a little. We were reminded that some rides just aren’t worth racing, and that it is the company we keep and prospect of orange slices and pretty girlfriends at feed zones that take a little bit of gravel out of rides like the gravel metric. We were also reminded that while not racing these rides, good pictures are few and far between and red is a very bad color for leg warmers.
