Gravel right now reminds me of where triathlons were about 15 years ago
The big surge of new people and races has already taken place. But more races continue to start up looking to take advantage of the current popularity. Like tri there is a race almost every weekend less than a 5 hour drive away
On the gear side it has gone from ‘run what you’ve bring’ to people becoming overly obsessed with aerodynamics, rolling resistance, and buying new gear.
Former pros offered specific gravel coaching services or training camps
And the Lifetime series is the equivalent to Ironman as the big name race series (minus the tattoos). Unbound (EDIT: accidentally typed Leadville initially) of course being the Kona of the gravel world. Everyone wants to go there even though there are much ‘better’ courses that cost a lot less money and are less of a pain travel/logistics wise.
I’m outside Vancouver Washington and within a 3-5 hr drive my list has around 12-15 gravel races and maybe 6-8 XC mtb races. Gravel offerings for their long courses are 60-80 miles with around 50-100’ elevation gain/mile average. It seems the events draw around 75-350 people per race.
This year I’ve completed 2 of the largest gravel races and what seems to be the largest XCM race in the region. Each had about 300-350 people. Smaller events are around $120ish with the highest I’ve found being $275 for the High Cascade 100.
Moving here from Texas, these events are insanely well run. Great communication, planning, course marking, support, etc. I did some similar/smaller sized races in Texas but they weren’t at this level of support/communication, but were also typically much cheaper.
I did unbound last year and loved it. Amazing experience in every aspect. I lucked out with a no mud year, as that just doesn’t seem as enjoyable to me. I would absolutely do a lifetime event or similar annually, but none are within a reasonable driving distance. I’m not that interested in flying to races. My family (wife and 5 y/o & 1 y/o) enjoy coming to my races and we make a family camping trip out of them. I couldn’t justify flying somewhere for the whole family for a bike ride, nor likely using my vacation time, not with them.
Next year I hope to do more events. After my 50 mile XCM race in September, that’ll be 4 races this year. A lot of the races in 1-2 hrs are in the spring and don’t start until 9:30 a.m., so it’d be an easy morning ride if we wanted as well.
In my rather densely populated part of Europe I feel like gravel events and races are still increasing. Mainly because competitive road Gran Fondos and even just open road rides are going away due to NIMBY’s.
Having cyclists on the road seems to be the end of the world for people these days so events that ran for decades can no longer get a permit. For competitive events a closed of route is mandatory in Belgium so that makes everything into three loops of 50km (or a crit), and even then those three villages don’t want to give a permit to close a few roads for a morning.
So given road isn’t possible, but Belgium being the cycling hotspot, gravel events take their place. The quasi non-existence of road events lead me to buy a gravelbike because I wanted to do longer competitive events.
In the PNW (WA) we had the first gravel even that I know of get canceled due to low turnout this year. It seemed like a combination of factors 1) it’s located out on the Oly peninsula which is a PITA to get to, and 2) another promoter started a competing event on the same date that is super convenient to Seattle. At this point most of the biggest competitive bike events here are gravel. The Cascadia Super Gravel (excellent event) sold out at about 500 riders. That’s the biggest in WA that I know of. Gorge Gravel in OR has been as high as 1000ish. The bargain here is the Vicious Cycle events with great courses and volunteers, just enough support on course, and a series long GC competition. Meanwhile XC and marathon mtb here is close to dead, cross has pretty small fields, and road racing has big masters men fields but no juniors and few women.
I like the 50 at that one, for a couple reasons. It has plenty of climbing to make up for being relatively short in miles. The other reason is that weather is still iffy on the west side at that time of year (some would say always in Cap forest), and to me I can suffer through a 50 in crap weather without being too bothered, but 100 in bad weather with that kind of vert is a full on sufferfest.
No idea if aero bars are allowed there or not, but IMO there are very few places they’d be helpful. It is a mountain bikers gravel race, I think most would pick a dropper post over aero bars, or perhaps even drop bars.
