Payson McElveen in the house

The above picture is Payson McEleveen and me in the final throes of SBTGRVL, Steamboat Gravel 2019. It was a long season for me and after a whole lot of almosts, taking the win there in Colorado was some tasty icing on a 2019-cake.

There’s an image below in the link to the podcast that I am about to reference. That captures the first time that Payson and I hung out. It was at LandRun in March 2019, Drew Dillman was party of the fun, and it featured a bit of furniture in the middle of the Oklahoman prairie. I’m not trying to rub in my win in the above paragraph; Payson got the best of me in this first go around at LandRun beating me in a hard fought and fugly sprint.

Let’s backtrack. I first caught wind of Payson at the year prior at the 2018 Dirty Kanza. I believe he suffered a mechanical of some sort and that ended his day, but more than anything I was thinking to myself, “What the what?! There’s a Red Bull helmet in this peloton. Who does that belong to?”

It didn’t require much digging to find Payson at that point held the US national title in marathon mountain biking. He went on to win the crown again the next year as well. To the uninformed reader, and according to my brief internet research, marathon mountain biking is technical, cross country racing of at least 40km… and my understanding is that these races are usually way way longer than that. So suffice it to say that marathon mountain biking is “super long mountain bike racing”. And therefore Payson is at that point a 1x — and soon to be 2x — national champion at “riding bikes on technical terrain over super long distances”. Umm… yup, sounds to me like he’s got the perfect pedigree for the pointy part of gravel racing.

Payson and I have gone on to become buds and we continued this budding friendly ship with a podcast. He has a terrific pod’ that you should all check out called The Adventure Stache and I of course host King of the Ride. We formatted a really cool poddy that we both think you’ll dig, just by hitting the link on this Chaise Lounge photo, below.

Without further ado, please enjoy the show!