Bike Sports and Beyond

^{Photo Credit: Tyler Chase & Front Range Media} 

Under the Bike Sports umbrella, Whit and Zack organize the FoCo Fondo, which attracts thousands of cyclists to their hometown of Fort Collins, Colorado each year. They spend summers organizing community training rides that attract hundreds of riders weekly. The Gravel Graceland section of their website helps people find the perfect gravel routes in Northern Colorado, and their YouTube video series aims to empower folks to have a positive bicycle experience.  

How is life on the road with your notorious Waste Veggie Oil Mobile? 

Zack: The Waste Veggie mobile is dead. It is no more. It blew a whole piston, head cracked, blew the cylinder. A motor swap was the only option.

Whit: We were on the way home from BWR North Carolina [where Whit placed 5th] when it happened. It’s super tragic [laughs].

Zack: The Waste Veggie oil stuff is super cool, and the last eight years of our lives were all about that. But we drove a 2022 rental truck to get home from where the truck blew up, and it was crazy nice.

Whit: We realized, ‘It doesn’t have to be this hard to drive across the country…”

What were the logistics of driving the Waste Veggie truck across the country for races and events? Would you stop at restaurants along the way or what?

Zack: I would carry everything I could. Pretty much the only way I could filter the oil clean enough to put it in the truck was to filter it at the house and then carry as much as I could. At the house, we have the capacity for about 200 gallons, but it’s not usually that full. For a trip to Unbound and then to North Carolina and back, I had 140 gallons in the truck. But the truck could also run on diesel, so I could flip flop in a pinch.

I guess a new truck would be a little more streamlined than that.

Zack: The old one got us over 100,000 miles on vegetable oil, so I felt like we earned a new truck. We saw a vehicle through its entire life to death, so I feel good about the truck we’re in right now. We got a Dodge RAM 1500…like a middle of the dodge truck range with eTorque. Partial hybrid 4WD, a modern 2021 truck. It’s pretty cool.

How long have you been in Fort Collins?

Zack: I moved to Fort Collins to go to CSU [Colorado State University] in 2008. Whitney moved here after she went to UT [University of Texas] Austin, in 2010.

What is it about Fort Collins that keeps you living, training, and creating events there?  

Whitney: It’s the best of all the places I’ve lived. I grew up in California and finished high school in Houston before going to college in Austin. Fort Collins has the culture. The access to the outdoors. It is a great bike town and not just for racing and recreational cyclists, but also for bike commuting and infrastructure. There’s a deep-rooted bike culture. Even with all the professional racing over the last decade, I’ve never found another place I’d want to live. It’s the best of everything in my opinion.

Is that your favorite place to ride in the whole world, or do you have other preferred spots?

Whit: Riding in winter can be rather harsh, so I would say that during winter there are many other places I’d rather ride [laughs]. But there’s a good variety of riding in Fort Collins whether you want to do something flat or hilly or go up into the mountains. I do like having access to all that sort of stuff.

Zack: I think the riding in Fort Collins especially for gravel and mountain biking is way better than anyone really knows yet. I really enjoyed a riding camp we did in Agoura Hills, California, but I think that going somewhere else makes riding back home feel fresh. Winters suck, but I think I’d get sick of riding in Fort Collins if the winter didn’t exist.

We travel a lot for racing, so we get to see what different locations can muster for a racecourse, but that may or may not be the best actual riding in an area.

Right, a bicycle race is not necessarily the best reflection of the prime bicycle riding in a place.

Zack: We did BWR North Carolina and rode a couple loops through DuPont State Park and some extra road loops that were super dope. The racecourse is great and diverse, but there is some stuff the race can’t get permits for. It’s fun to travel for racing, but if we have a couple extra days, we try to ride the most lit up areas on Strava heat maps.

What are your favorite non-athletic pastimes when you’re not riding bicycles?

Whit: I do a lot of cooking and bread baking. I would say that’s my thing. My specialty is that I never cook the same thing twice, it’s all fleeting moments. I guess the only consistent thing in our household is sourdough and some form of granola. We have a CSA, community supported agriculture, so we have a farm share. It’s basically all about seasonality, and only consuming what’s in season. It’s about enjoying things while they’re here.

Otherwise, I like seeing all our friends. We have a huge network of people in our town that we never get to spend enough time with so definitely hanging and doing outdoor things with them.

Zack: General tinkering with the vegetable oil truck and things like that. When I’m not racing, I’m maintaining the house and yard and all the stuff in the garage. I’m never not busy. There’s always a list of things that need to be fixed.

Many of the things I work on are out of necessity. I think we swap tires on bikes a lot more than normal people do, but we’re always testing tires and doing new configurations or putting on new parts. I spend the most time working on bikes.

You don’t seem to let your racing totally dictate your lives, and have other interests is that a fair assessment?

Whit: I totally agree, I think everything that is offered under the Bike Sports umbrella is reflective of our values, of our interests, and comes from a place of deep caring. It’s a little bit more DIY, so empowering people themselves, and doing that through the bike.

I think the bike is a cool tool where if you can take on a new sense of adventure and push your limits. Those skills and lessons can pass over to other aspects of your life and be really refreshing and empowering.

Zack: To add, I think this is a gravel, new-wave pro cycling sort of existence. When you say that cycling takes over people’s existence, we both did that for 10 years. We were both pros on the road. I was on Elevate, Whitney was on Colavita, Super Mint. When we were out of college and racing professionally and making ends meet, it was just bread and water and riding and training. You’re in the van for the whole season.

I think it’s interesting how the gravel side is a whole reset on why we’re racing. I would not be racing any more if it gravel required the same time commitment and focus as road stage racing in the early 2010s. Gravel allows us to have more interests, even in sponsorship. Interesting people are more sought after. Being able to put on an event, and race professionally and have other interests, that doesn’t exist with road racing quite as much.

There are various ways to make a living as a gravel racer beyond the traditional “pro model.” Is that helpful for the sport?

Zack: I think it’s helpful for sure and attracts more interesting people, the people that have personality, make the sport more consumable and more fun. I think the people that are consuming gravel as spectators are having a good time following the personalities and stories. It’s fun to be a spectator right now.

Whit: I would add, it’s a lot better for women because they can enter the space in a lower stakes environment, than say trying to race the Joe Martin Pro Stage race. For that you have to beg and plead to get on a composite team, to get your first chance of doing a stage race and then you’re not on the best teams. You’re not able to get a result and get seen by the full professional teams.

Whereas in gravel, you have the scalability. You can do it for completion. You can do it for a time goal. You can move up and do it for competition and race the top riders head-to-head in this space. I think that is something that is cool and does change the situation of what is a pro.

You mentioned earlier that Bike Sports has an umbrella of all the things you like to do and care about. How would you describe your program and everything in it?

Whit: We have the FoCo Fondo race and with that, we also have a series of free community training ride that go from January to June. All those routes come from our route website, which is called Gravel Graceland and features Northern Colorado rides.

Zack has a bike fit studio, and we just ran our final tourism-style Gravel Curious camp in May. Additionally, we now have two video series including one called Bike Sports TV Cribs that is like MTV Cribs style tours of people’s campers and vans and different ways that they make gravel racing happen for themselves. I host the other series called Bike Sports TV Garage where I teach basic bike mechanic skills. I’m trying to empower women, and really any riders, to be able to maintain their stuff or to ask the right questions to get the support they need to keep riding.

Bike Sports includes all of that...and of course our professional racing program.

What do you find to be the most rewarding part of the whole program?

Whit: It’s hard because it’s all been very rewarding. We’re going into FoCo Fondo right now, so a lot of energy is building. Our training rides have seen 150 to 200 riders at some. It’s pretty wild. It’s changing people’s outcome entirely and teaching them to explore. At FoCo Fondo, we get to share a special day with 2,000 other people. It’s this party that you’re throwing for them and adventure that you’ve curated–it‘s bananas to experience that.

Zack: I like that Bike Sports helps convince people that they are capable of a little bit more than they’re currently trying to do. The route website is passive, but there are people who see our content pieces on those routes, and they get up enough confidence to go do a ride that they’ve never done.

To hear that people get into gravel cycling because of Bike Sports resources and how it showed them they’re able to do something or that people can push themselves as hard as they need to, is great. FoCo Fondo is in that vein too, it’s all the same goal of creating a great experience for people.

Do you find what you do with Bike Sports more fulfilling that when you were solely racing professionally on the road, or is it different?

Whit: I do really miss having teammates like I did on the road. I was lucky to have some close teams and I find that gravel can be a little isolating. Ultimately, there are not that many women racing professionally and that can feel weird.

Zack: Doing all the things we’re doing in gravel through Bike Sports is way more fulfilling as far as how many people we get to positively affect. If you’re on a pro road or crit team, the biggest moments where you impact people the most come after something like a big crit, like Boise Twilight, where there are families and kids watching. They’ll hopefully be inspired to get a bike and start riding. But that still feels like small potatoes compared to the traffic to our route website or the FoCo Fondo on any given day. I guess I feel like gravel is way more fulfilling with how we can make a positive difference for people.

At the end of the day, what kind of impact do you hope Bike Sports has on people?

Whit: I think that bikes are truly transformative. Not just in the gravel space. I hope that through Bike Sports people can change the stories that they have for themselves, and to have that affect them not just on the bike but also outside of the bike. A lot of the work that we do is to make sure that anyone can feel welcome and remove some of those barriers that have not really allowed other people to be in the space in the past. I think that’s exactly what we are doing.

Zack: I think getting more people on bikes, riding farther than they ever thought they could before. Showing people that resilience and being able to pivot and not be too scared to start something, giving people the confidence to do something they haven’t been able to do before, with a general bike theme.

How have bicycles been transformative to you two?

Whit: As a kid I was told I would be an entrepreneur, and I didn’t really realize that till much later. I didn’t have the language or knowledge for what that could mean, and it took me a long time to figure out. I don’t think I would have figured that out without the bike. It’s allowed me to live a dream in a much more complicated way than I ever could have imagined for myself.

Zack: Bikes are like a distilled form of freedom. As a kid, growing up in DC, I had a bike and could go anywhere and pretty much do anything that I wanted. That’s bled into every other aspect of my life. The bike has taught me that I can do whatever it is I care to do. I think that’s what Bike Sport hopes to show other people too. You can go do big things, you don’t have to ask anyone about it. It’s an extreme form of freedom.

Whit: I’d add that bikes are tools not just for exercise or sport but also for commuting and enjoyment and transportation. The same bike can do all those things for you and that’s special.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Learn More about Bike Sports and FoCo Fondo.