I landed on my head and got a really horrible concussion. They were wearing a helmet, thank God. They had my neck stabilized, and I got carried out in a blanket and rushed to the hospital. Feel to burn, baby. Oh yeah, it's a slam dunk. Absolutely breathtaking. Welcome to the Bike to Bites podcast. I'm your host, Garrett Bes. This is a companion podcast to the Bike to Bites television series. And for more information on that, you can check out the links in our show notes. Now, before I get to a very special guest here in the studio, a very dear friend of mine, I want to take a moment to thank our sponsor plus for their support of the Bike Debees podcast. When your tomorrows are built on technology, you need to partner with superior Insight, with expertise in cutting edge innovation across ai, cloud security, and workplace transformation Plus is on the frontline of today's modern enterprise e plus where technology means more. Now I'm excited to introduce to all of you a very dear friend of mine, master mechanic, Mike Rogers. Mike, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. So Mike, tell everyone a little bit about who you are, what you do, your passion for cycling, all that good stuff. I grew up as a little kid in grammar school in Bayo, working at a bike shop up the block. Bayo, New Jersey, by. The way. Bayo, New Jersey. Yeah, there's only one. There's a France too, but it's not as good as the New Jersey one. But I grew up working in grammar school in this bike shop and grew up working in there through high school, and then summers growing up, I just kind of fell in love with bicycles just from being around them. I wasn't into it when I started there, but then somebody put me on a road bike and then I got really into triathlons. Did in Ironman. Were you one of those kids type of kids that basically liked to take bikes apart and see how they worked? Kind of, yeah, definitely I would. As a little little kid, I would take the chain off and then I'd have it broken and my dad would have to bring it up to the bike shop and have them put it back together. Because you couldn't fix it back. Then. No. No way. Yeah. So you took an early interest in bicycles in terms of working on them, fixing them, riding them, and then you started to get really into riding. Right. And you ride mountain bikes or road bikes? I ride mountain bikes a lot. Right now I just live right by a trail and it's great riding, but I grew up riding a road bike, so I grew up running and then got into the swimming and doing Ironman triathlons, but pretty much lived on a road bike for five or six years where it was 10,000 mile years. So you're pretty much every day spending hours on the bike. Wow. Do you remember what your first bike was as a kid? My first bike as a kid was a gold and black. It might've been from smoking a bunch of cigarettes somebody wanted or something like that, but it was a little BMX bike and I loved that I took it apart and would jump off little ramps with that. And then my first road bike was first a borrowed one that I did a triathlon on and finished, but really didn't respectably finish the race. And then once I did that race and was just totally humbled, I really became addicted to getting better and then starting to race and compete and try to win self when you're doing it. So was cool. And so you were doing lots of competitive circuit stuff or No. At that point, yeah. I'd say from 2011 to 2016, I was really, really heavily racing. Do you know what my first bike was? My first kid bike. Let's see if you can guess. Awin, stingray? No, no, you're close though. Think really? I wanted to be the cool kid. This was a single speed kind of two wheel bike with a long cushion seat and it looked rough. Oh, a banana? Not really a banana. It was a huffy a year of a huffy bike. Oh, sure. Yeah. It was a huffy and it had these big tires and it was black and orange, and I thought I was the coolest kid riding that thing, and I love that bike. But then my first road bike was a Raleigh, which was a really cool, it was a blue Raleigh bike. I think it might've been my brothers that passed out onto. Me. But I never got the bug back. Then you got right. I rode because I had to ride, and then when I was 15, I ended up getting a moped and then you didn't have to ride a bike anymore. That became the transportation to get everywhere. At 15 years old, I could go anywhere. I could ride my bike from this town that I grew up in on the shore in Jersey to all the way down the shore for miles and miles and miles and then turn around. It was gas powered. And now the big craze today is electric bikes and people can do the same thing. But I got into bicycles kind of after I graduated college and was living down here back on the Jersey shore. I remember buying my first real bike. I called it a real bike from a bike shop, and that was a Bianchi and it was a Bianchi hybrid bike, and I love that bike. And then I stopped riding it and it sat in the garage and I did the dumbest thing and I sold it, which I probably should have never sold that bike. Was it mint green? It green. Yeah. That's a mistake. Yeah, it was dumb for me to sell that bike. It might've been a forest green, actually. Not a mint green, but it was green. It was definitely green. Anyhow, so back to you. You're doing the cycling circuit and was that the moment that you said this is, I want to be around bikes as a career or no? Yeah. Another really big influential thing was it was my senior year of high school and a buddy of mine who I worked at the bike shop with became a police officer and there was this big bicycle tour from New York to DC every year and last minute they needed a mechanic. So was Were you calling yourself a mechanic at this No, I mean, I thought I was, but I totally wasn't. And I had really long hair, was in a band playing in New York City all the time, but totally didn't fit the bill for a police bicycle tour at all. But I went in there and just made stuff happen. If someone broke a bike, I fix it and got 'em rolling again and that. It was like a crash. It was like a crash course on. It was triage. On being a bike mechanic. And I did that. And since then I have not missed a year of doing that. So. You still do that ride? I still do that ride, yeah. I ride in the back and help people show 'em how to shift as they're having trouble and try to ride as much as I can. But when we get into the cities where there's lots of debris in the road, people start getting flats and you're just going nuts. And you're helping all of them. Yeah. You're in a moving trailer that's following the ride. So we just, what do they. Call that? A support? Support. Well, we call it sag. Yeah, yeah. So. Does that stand for. I don't know. I couldn't tell you. I got to forget a name. I'm going to find out before my producers can look up. What does SAG translate to as an acronym in the psyching world? See, I just respect the acronym so much that I'm like, oh. Yeah, they'll tell me they'll come into my year end and I know what it is and I forgot. But anyhow, so you were doing this, you were supporting this ride that happened every year and was that when you got the bite? Is that when. That's when I got the bite that I was like, wow, it's so much different doing that than working in a bike store where people are, it's just a retail store. It's cool that I get to fix bikes, but it's still working, selling a product where this was, people wanted to be out there on their bikes and when they break down, they really, really want just want to get rolling again. They don't want you to sell 'em something, they don't want a different bike. They just, as long as I could get back out on that road, you're helping me. And I don't know, there's just something very fulfilling about getting everybody to the end. They just told me SAG is support and gear, so there you go. Support and gear. Yeah, that's what SAG is. So now you, and then behind that we have a broom wagon, which is where if your legs are broken. They just sweep you up. You just get in that you sweep up in the broom wagon. Okay, well there you go. I'm learning all these terms. Thank God I haven't had to experience a broom wagon. I know you have, and we're going to talk about that in a second, but let's talk how we met because we met a few years back now, I think it was during the pandemic. I remember I told you I had not cycled forever, had long gone. The Bianchi was long gone. A few years before the pandemic, I decided, oh, I think I'm going to buy a bike. And I bought this Trek FX three, an aluminum frame bike with the straight handlebars and I was like, oh, I'm going to ride. And I didn't ride really. I rode a few times and then it sat in the garage and then during the pandemic I took that bike out and I was like, you know what? I got to clear my head. I was going through some interesting kind of soul searching at the time, and I needed an outlet and I was like, well, maybe this bike can serve me well, I'm going to just start riding, getting exercise. And I started riding the bike and first three miles and I thought three miles was like, oh man. I went really far. I went three miles, then five miles and then 8, 10, 12 miles, and I was doing 12 miles every couple of days. I was doing miles and it got up to 12 miles and I was starting to get, it started to hurt me a little bit in places that you don't want it to hurt you. And I was like, your ass starts to hurt. Maybe you're not fitted on the bike correctly. But it's also, the ride was pretty firm. It was a pretty firm stiff is the way I would describe it, ride. Anyhow, I come into the bike shop that you're working at and I'm telling you, is there a reason I'm riding this bike and it's starting to hurt me? Should I be hurting you? How many miles are you doing on the bike? And I said, oh, I'm doing 12, 12 15 miles now on this bike. I started riding a few weeks back and progressively getting more miles in. And you're like, yeah, well for longer distances you want to have something that's going to be a little bit more supple, a little bit more comfortable. You might want to try a carbon fiber bike. And this is right at the height of the pandemic. You guys are operating at the shop, bikes are flying off the shelves. You guys can't keep up with the demand. Everyone wants to get outside and do something physical. And you said to me, you might want to try a carbon fiber bike. I've got one actually, I think that might be in your size. It's a gravel bike and it was a trek checkpoint. And you go, have you had to ride a bike with clipping in? And I'm like, what clip are you talking about? And you're telling me, well, you need shoes to kind of clip in. I clip in, locked in, I can't get out skis. And you're like, yeah, but it's okay. It's easy to get in and out of it. And you had me get on the bike, you put me in some shoes with some clips I clipped in and you had me ride around the parking lot of the shop and you were kind of watching. I'm sure I was holding my breath the whole time. Whenever I know first time, it's never just the relax thing. I'm. Like, Ugh. Yeah, because I remember the first time I ever went scuba diving, it's like you only have that four hour session in the resort course in the pool, and then you're in an open water dive and you're like, okay. And I'm sure some of those instructors probably, well, hopefully they don't hold their breath, but you know what I mean. They're wondering, I hope this guy got everything that we went over and he's not going to panic. But I got on the bike and I was like, oh, this is cool. Anyway, the first impression that I had of that bike was how light that bike was in comparison to the aluminum bike. And so you were talking about how you kind of rode your first bike was A BMX, and then you were doing some mountain biking and road biking. And we're going to talk, I would love for you to share with people who are listening, watching, what are the different types of bikes that people ride? So I in the show ride on a road bike, and then I also have a gravel bike, and then of course there's the mountain bike. Can you explain the differences between these bikes for the average listener? Average viewer? Well, yeah, so ride really, you ride different styles of road bikes on the show. So all of your bikes have those curved handlebars. They're still in the road bike family Where then you get into hybrids which serve some kind of a purpose one way or the other. So it might be more off-road mountain bike leaning and have a suspension fork on it, or it might be leaning more towards a road bike and be carbon, but it's got a flat bar and it's a skinny tire like a road bike would have. So that's kind of the middle. I really think of bikes as a left to right spectrum where it's like a mountain bike is on one end and road bikes the other where mountain bike, you don't really care. You could buy a $10,000 mountain bike that's 40 pounds and it would have all the best stuff on it, but its job isn't to be light, it's to just be there under you when you get to the bottom of the mountain. Then, so I started in what you would call this checkpoint was what you would call a gravel bike. That's a gravel bike. And so gravel is like a version of a road bike, but it can go and go off road on gravel surfaces. Correct. But it can ride on the roads, right? Yes. But when you're riding a gravel bike on a mountain bike trail, for instance, you're holding your breath the whole time. It's all about your line choice. It's not on a mountain bike, on a mountain bike trail. You let the bike do its job and it kind of does the work for you. So you could play and take any line down a hill that you want and go over that rock and then hit another rock. And there's no consequence where on a gravel bike, it's almost like you're walking on a tightrope when you're going through the trail. Yeah, I don't think I would take my gravel bike on a mountain bike trail ever. I would take my gravel bike on a gravel trail like a rail trail or something like that, which I think is kind of cool. It's in the name. It's. In the name, yeah, I'll use it on that. And I am perfectly comfortable riding the gravel bike on the road. But then you get on the road bike and we're going to talk about, there's different materials. You have a bamboo frame bike, and we're going to talk about that in a second. But there are different materials that are made that bikes are made out of. So the first one that I told you that I tried before I got to you to come and convert over to carbon fiber was an aluminum frame bike, but there's aluminum, there's steel, there's carbon fiber, there's titanium, there's bamboo. What are the differences between these frame types in terms of bikes that I just described? Well, it used to only be steel. So even in the tour of France, that's what guys would ride on. That's just what they made frames out of. Then I don't know whether it was the ladies eighties, but certainly in the nineties, Cannondale is one brand that strikes a name with me thinking of it, they made these big fat light aluminum frames and aluminum became the hot material. You could make it lighter than steel and they didn't know how well it sort of wore, but they thought that it lasted really long and didn't fatigue, but it kind of does. And then after aluminum got phased out, then carbon became the thing, and it's amazing now, but carbon bikes were pretty terrible when they first came out. So it's definitely as the new thing comes out, there's always that point of regression and then they figure it. Out. So the two bikes that I ride in season two of Bike to Bikes is they're parley and we can talk about, I know you're very familiar with them. So I ride the Parley Road bike and I ride a Parley gravel bike, slightly different in terms of their construct, a little bit of a thicker fork on the gravel bike than on the road bike. I've got Chris King wheels and hubs on both those bikes and we're going to talk about all this good stuff. And then of course it's Shimano drivetrain with their latest and greatest electric shifting on both those bikes, and that's the Shimano dur dur and pretty spectacular. And we'll talk about all of this good stuff. I can't wait to dive deep into that for our listeners, but those, Bob Parley was considered one of the forefathers of the carbon fiber implementation of carbon fiber into site bicycling manufacturing. He is won numerous awards and he was one of the pioneers and these bikes, I had never, I mean, I rode the checkpoint, but when I got on these in comparison to that where everything was custom built to my body type and the way I ride, incredible, absolutely incredible. And we are going to talk about custom fits and all that good stuff. But then in season one I rode a titanium frame bike, which I loved as it was a great ride. How do you determine if somebody's coming to you and they're like, ah, Mike, I'm thinking about buying a bike. Is it titanium? Is it aluminum? Is it steel? Is it carbon fiber? How do you know what's right for you? If you're somebody listening or watching this podcast, how do you know to pick what's right for you? How do you determine. That? I mean, you have to be real with yourself and say if you're getting a bike to keep up on an aide that's 20 miles an hour, you need a carbon bike that's just going to give you the advantage. It's going to fatigue you less. You have that smoother ride. But if you ride with the club where you guys stop for coffee halfway through and everybody puts, I. Stopped for food halfway through, more than halfway. Through, and you're looking at this bike and it's a talking piece and maybe it's half collecting and half riding too, then those other unique frames are really cool. Or you could just afford a racing bike and a titanium bike. They also last forever, like a tie bike. You buy one and you never need another frame. But that's seems to never happen because those guys who buy those bikes wind up buying a carbon bike also and they just have two bikes now. Well, that's what happened. I had the titanium frame, but I had, and I really wanted, when I started this adventure, I really wanted a parley. A friend of mine in town rides a parley, and I had seen it and I was like, man, that would be a sweet bike. And that's what I tried. And for all of the reasons that we talked about the pandemic, whatever, I couldn't get a Parley bike at the time that I was doing the first season of Bike Bites, but had the opportunity in season two to go back and have Bob and Isabelle Parley come on board as partners and sponsors of the show, and they just fell in love with the concept and they're like, we're making your bikes. That's awesome. And so I went through the process of, now I should add that prior to riding my bike, I was 30 pounds heavier than I am today. So during this time, not only did I get mentally fit for me, it was all about that. It wasn't about me getting out and saying, oh, I'm going to ride my bike as a form of exercise to lose weight. That was an added benefit, a sub benefit of why I really wanted to go out. I was feeling really stuck creatively. I was feeling, I'm an executive producer of food and lifestyle programming and corporate video work, and I had reached a brick, like a brick wall. The pandemic was going on and it was like I just was feeling really soul sucked and I figured that I needed a distraction. I needed something that I could go out where I'm not listening to anybody, I'm not talking to anybody. I don't have music in my ears, I just want to hear the outside. And I started riding this bike and this is right before I came to see you. And that bike for me when I started riding became therapy. It became my zen place. It became a place where I actually could just find peace. And I listened to the way the tires crunch on the asphalt or on the gravel, and I listen to the wind blowing in my face as I'm riding and the gear is shifting and all of that, those sounds became almost like soothing to me. That's the best way to describe it. And that's when I knew, that's when I knew. I think I've been bit, I think this is my happy place and I was doing it now three, four times a week. And like I said, the losing of the weight was the added benefit of starting to ride cycles bicycles more seriously. And look, am I out there riding as much as you? Absolutely not. But do I aspire to want to start riding more? Absolutely, I do. I think this year I was really excited. I was like, wow, I've ridden over a thousand miles this year. And for me that was a big deal. But I see people online and whatever they're riding 10, 12,000 miles a year or 50, that's a lot of miles. It's a lot. Of miles. That's a lot of miles. And to me, I aspire to, I want to ride like that one. It's a question of time, but I'm also learned that you've learned, you got to make time, you got to make it part of your routine because it's something that you enjoy. What I've just described, is that part of any of why you love it or what is it about cycling that you love so much that you ride a lot, you ride a lot. I think growing up where I grew up in Bayone and in New Jersey, it's sort of isolated where it's a peninsula. So you could only go north through Jersey City and the route that you would ride takes you into New York state if you go far enough and just sort of not going to a ton of different places growing up to be able to wake up in the morning and ride my bike, looking at the New York skyline, going into New York State, grabbing a cup of coffee and coming home was a huge power that I had, and I was still 20 years old when it started. That was just something that to have control over doing that was really powerful to me. And I think that's what really got me sort of addicted to it. I'm like, wow, I'm leaving the state. I'm driving farther on my bike than people commute to work in their car. Pretty amazing. And then going and working at the bike shop for the day. So I think that was it. That's pretty cool. And the more I ride, the more I want to keep riding. And it's, it's been quite the journey for me. And now I have these beautiful bikes. What I am doing right now is a dream. It's not a job. This is like a gift. Life has given me a gift that I so desperately want There's so many great people in this country doing unbelievable things. And for me, this idea, after I started riding the bike and I was having this soul sucking moment where I was feeling like, what am I doing? I'm not challenging myself creatively, I feel like I'm stuck. It was feeling stuck. And it was at that moment that my wife and I had already bought my checkpoint from you, And my wife was like, and I had some things happen at work that kind of were a little disappointing, a little discouraging at this point. I wasn't doing a lot of food and travel television as a producer. I was doing a lot of corporate video work specifically in the tech sector. And some of that work was incredibly rewarding. But during the pandemic it became really challenging. And so there was this one thing that had happened that set me in a bad way. And my wife, Dawn basically says to me, you need to go clear your head, take your bike and go somewhere. And she bought me five days at this retreat up in the Berkshires at this place called Miraval and No phones, and I'm in a room by myself. She didn't come with me, it was by myself. I have my bike, clean eating meditation, sound therapy, massage. It was things that I hadn't done a lot of before in my life, all were condensed in this five days at this place. And I was journaling. I was writing every day, go down to the restaurant on the property and sit down, have a cup of coffee and just write notes to myself about what was in my head and what I was thinking at the moment. And I would get on the bike in the afternoon, there was I could make your own schedule. And I got on the bike and I had rode through the Berkshires on my bike, this beautiful Massachusetts picturesque landscape. Fantastic. Again, head clearing came back, it was journaling some more. And I journaled this idea for Bike to Bites, and I come back and I remember being so excited about sharing the idea with my wife, and she's like, so she'll do it. She's like, the idea was how do I take all the things that I love now cycling, which I was deeply and madly infatuated and in love with in a good way, cycling, food and travel and producing, and how do I take all of that and put it together into a concept? And it was this concept bike, the bites that allowed me, afforded me the opportunity to do that. So I come back, I tell my team back at the office, we're doing a pilot and a pilot is a proof of concept, if you will, of a show idea that you hope to show some network executive somewhere and hopefully they take enough interest in it that they're going to buy it. And I'm like, I'm going to host it just as a proof of concept, but for the format. But the idea is we design a 15 to 30 mile bike route around the places I want to go eat. And we sit down with the restaurateurs and them and we sample some of their dishes, their signature dishes, and then we get back on the bike and we ride some more along the route. We stop at these places along the way. And I remember my one colleague looking at me and going, who are you going to sell it to? I go, it doesn't matter. What does it matter? Let's just do something fun. Let's just do something that gets us back in the game of producing television, food and travel television and now layered in a little bit of cycling and let's see what happens. So we did, and I sent it off to two different network executives that I had worked with, and both of them had the same reaction. They were shocked. They're like, holy shit, dude, I had no idea that you were hosting this thing. And I was like, no, no, no, no. It's just proof of concept. And they're like, no, no, no, no. And the one gentleman, gentleman over at the network that we currently broadcast our show on, a dear friend of mine, Dan, who gave me my first break in television, his name was Dan Russell, and he was the first guy that I ever was able to get introduced to a network television company before to sell my first series. And he was the guy that got me in the door, and now here it is 20 years later, full circle. And he's the guy that's looking at this show, this bike to bite show and says, he goes, I like this show so much, I want to buy it. And I was like, what? He goes, yeah, I want to put this on our air. Want to put this on our network. And I go, really? I go, well, that's so great. I go, I've got some really good ideas for talent, somebody that could host it. And he goes, you're not listening to me. He goes, I want you to host it. And that was how that came about. And we negotiated a deal and we put the program together and we were off to the races literally and to produce our first season of bike divides. And where do you film the pilot? So the pilot we filmed was in Jersey because it was my backyard and I went literally to all of the places that I normally would go to, restaurants that I liked. And we shot the pilot there and it was what we call a non arable pilot, which means we weren't shooting it with super high production value, we were using smaller cameras, not high resolution, not as high a resolution as some of the more broadcast types of cameras. And we shot this thing just to prove out the concept. And that's so funny. The funny thing is when we got the show approved and we were going to, the first season was going to be eight episodes, I did not end up shooting one of those episodes in New Jersey at that point because we sold the network on eight cities outside of New Jersey. So I felt really terrible that here all my friends that helped me in terms of featuring them in a non arable pilot, they weren't going to get to go onto TV because the network wanted these eight other cities or we did these eight other cities and Jersey was just not on the list. So season two, I had to right the wrong and. Yeah, especially with Jersey, people won't forget that. Have. To. Yeah, they won't forget. Jersey doesn't forget. And so came back and we kicked off season two filming on the Jersey shore and with a mutual friend of ours who was featured in the Jersey Shore episode, and we'll talk about the episode and all that good stuff. In a second, I want to get back to you because you are somebody that I absolutely just kind of admire. I admire because the fact that you are this master mechanic and that you're so knowledgeable, everything related to bicycles and not just the mechanics of the bike. You ride and you ride and you've ridden competitively and you've ridden dangerously, which I don't think I would ride mountain bikes like you ride mountain bikes and I want to talk about your story on a mountain bike in a second, but I've learned everything I learned about which bike to get and what I should be riding that was right for me, kind of came from you educating me. You were the first guy that I ever met to bring me into my next chapter of a bike. And then from there you just became like my bike conser. Yeah, I mean there's always a right and wrong suggestion. I think with, if you are honest about what you're doing with the bike, there's a right tool for the job. It's just a tool. So some of them are much nicer and lighter than others, but if you get something that's going to do what you need it to, there's always a specific bike that's going to do that. Right. And I remember telling you that the first bike that we were going to ride in season one was a seven cycles up in Boston, titanium frame bike with Shimano Drive train, and I remember bringing the bike here and you just, what was your first reaction When I. Showed it was a stunning bike was very, you went from an FX to a checkpoint to a seven pretty quickly. And then, so we did that first season. And now in that first season you really were kind of teaching me, you were teaching me about how to shift. You were teaching me how to ride a bike properly because no one ever taught me how to ride a bike properly. And you and I would go out on rides together and you would teach me how to change flats, which first of all, I'll acknowledge and admit I was never really good with my hands ever. When it came to physically fixing something, my brother, different story, my middle brother could fix anything without an instruction manual with me. I would take the instruction manual and I would throw things because it was always so complicated and I couldn't figure it out. My brain didn't work that way, but you were really patient with me trying to teach me how to do things. I remember there was one time where I got a flat and you came out and you met me and you helped me kind of change the flat. And then as we were talking, you talked about how I was fitting on the bike. And this is something that not only are you a master mechanic, you do bike fittings. And so explain that to the listener and to the viewer about what a fitting is. A bike fitting is just optimizing the adjustments of your bike. So first before you're fitting, you should get the right size bike, which a lot of people don't have, but if you get the right size bike, then there's little adjustments that you could make within that bike's setup. It changes the ride mean, and it's not like you're moving stuff that much. If I move your seat two centimeters closer to the handlebar, it totally changes the way that you feel on that. And my spiel, if you want to call it that, is being on that unity tour, I've watched hundreds, probably thousands of different people on road bikes ride their bikes, and some do really well, some don't, but it's very easy to sort of look at somebody's positioning when they're just riding. They don't think someone's watching 'em, they're not on a trainer inside of a store, they're just riding their bike outside their body language kind of tells you everything you need to know. And most of the time it's just a matter of moving a couple of things, very small amount of space, but it makes a huge difference. Huge. What people don't realize, Mike, is that every rider and every bike combination to truly optimize that experience is different. It's different. You're a different body type than I am. We're going to ride the bike differently. You might be riding a different bike than I'm riding. That bike's going to ride differently. It's the crossroads of where does the person riding the bike meet up with the bike that they're riding and how are they properly situated on that bike? Are there examples that you can give of what are the most obvious things that you see that are wrong when you're sizing up someone on a bike? What are the most obvious? I mean, the first thing is most of the time if somebody's a newer rider, their seat's just way too low or they talk to someone and then they were like, oh, you got to put your seat up. And their seat's way too high. But usually their saddle height, that's the first thing that you correct, because then you know that you have this constant that's not going to change and you adjust from that. But usually flared out knees while someone's pedaling or they're just kind of bouncing up and down on the seat. Those are two, we have a problem here, sort of body language. Thing. So it's the seat and it's also the seat in relationship to the bars, right? Yeah. So sometimes it's adjusting the seat in combination with adjusting the height of the bars, correct? Yeah. Well, the thing with road bikes is you can't raise your bars. So a lot of people have this misunderstanding that, oh, well, I'll just put, they call it a gooseneck. It's this fairytale thing that doesn't exist, but they think that they could just put a higher handlebar and bring their back position up, but you just shouldn't be riding a road bike if that's a problem. Is the height of the bars for a road bike pretty standard. So that's where all these different types of road bikes have come in. So now they haven't really catered just towards what you see in the tour to France. Used to be that was it. If you wanted a road bike, it was what they rode in the tour. Now they make these things called endurance road bikes. So similar to your checkpoint, but more road specific where it's very relaxed. So a guy in the Tour de France would never give away that efficiency of being able to get lower with their head. Of the aerodynamics being lower. Speed efficiency. And for them, I mean they're moving at 30 miles an hour. So that's a huge, that could be three, four mile an hour difference just to drop your bars further. Now it's funny you talk about the bars both on my road and gravel, so we're going to come back fast forward season two, I got the Parley Road and gravel bike. Both of them have the drop bars, right? It's funny, I don't like being in the drop position. Am I abnormal? No. Are there people that don't? There are people who want to be in the drop bars. They think that they're doing better. They're a tour of friends, but really, yeah, you're, they think the tour never using that unless you need your arms to pedal the bike. There's a whole bunch of wind tunnel study things done that prove that if you're on your hoods of your brake, you're actually more arrow than if you are in your drops. It's got something to do with your forearm. That's how. I ride. I ride with my hands on the hoods. That's the way I fit people too. I mean, because doing everything, you're operating the bike from that hand position. And if I'm on. A climb, I'll come off the hoods occasionally and I'll go. Pop up, open your chest. Open my chest a little bit and try to stretch out a little bit. But it's so funny, Mike, sometimes in season, so I got the parley bikes for season two. They're unbelievable. You saw them? Oh yeah. How did you feel about those in comparison to the seven? I mean, they were carbon and had, the paint job is just phenomenal on those. You just somehow, I don't know how you upgrade from this, but you seem to only be going up. They're phenomenal. And they were incredibly, and they were different in terms of how they rode. And I rode them in different places. But I remember in going up a hill in season two and I was on the road bike and I moved my hands off the hoods into the top of the bar because you do that to kind of help yourself just push up the hill. And I remember switching into a lower gear and I ran out of gears. So what happens? It's not. A good feeling. What happens when you run out of gears, Mike and you're going up a hill, just hope that you have enough gear in your legs. To get through the. Top in your loins or in your legs to just continue to try to push through. And I did, but I look at, I know you've been dying to take me on this one ride, which is up on nine W, which is up near the George Washington Bridge, and we haven't done it yet, but we're going to do it this spring. I'm going to do it because I've gained confidence and I've gained confidence in my ability to ride more of an uphill, although you took me not that long ago up here, and we are in Highlands Atlantic, Highlands New this is, I think we say it in the show, it's the highest point on the Atlantic coast. And so you've taken me up, not even to the most extreme part of it, but I remember doing that with you a couple months back and I was struggling. It was. Pretty hard. Hill. Was it hard? Oh yeah. Or was I just, was I just. Weak? No, that's never easy. I never get to the top of that and don't say, oh my God, that sucks. You were very gracious. You allowed me to just kind of, I said, I got to stop. And you're like, okay. But you know what happens when you stop on a hill? Do you know how hard it is to get back going again? I had to almost go across and come down a little bit to go back up so I could get some. It's called the paper boy. To get some momentum, right? Is that what it's called? Yeah, that's the name of it. Paper boy going like this. Yeah, it was from one side of the street to the other. I love that at, so we switched into, and what's so funny, you talk about speed. Speed is an interesting thing. I'm not a speed demon. You probably are more of one than me, or maybe not, but I don't know. I was in Asheville in season one and I did the Blue Ridge Mountain. I started halfway up this ascent. A guy that I was in the show with me, who was our host at the Inn that we were staying at, he was a cyclist. He goes, I'll meet you halfway up. And so we drove halfway up being full disclosure, and then I met him at the halfway point, and then we rode up on the bicycles together and ridiculous. It was a climb, man. It was like a couple thousand feet we were climbing. And then we did the descent. And the descent was a bunch of, and I'm on this bike, and I remember Mike at one point looking down at my GPS, my speedometer, and I see that I'm doing 37 miles an hour, and I allow myself for a second to say to myself, just one pebble. Then I was like, Nope. Get that out of my. Head. Yeah, you. Can't think that way. Can't think about the one pebble, but stop. You can't ride your brakes. You have to feather them. And you taught me the proper way to lean into it as you're making the turns, which way, where your knee should be when you're doing a turn. But I remember that and I was like, that to me was scary. Speed can be scary. It's scary when you can't see what's coming. I would never push it on something that I'm not familiar with. But on nine W, there's a hill at the state line that's an easy 50 mile an hour hill if you. Want it to be go down. Yeah. Yeah, I don't want to do that. Although you don't have to. You could do 30 if you want. No, we went down when we did the ride a couple months ago in Highlands and we went down that hill. I remember you looking at me going, I'm impressed. You're pretty. Comfortable. You did. You went down. Fast. Very comfortably. Yeah. Yeah. But if I think about it too much, it kind of scares me of things that scare. Speaking of things that scare me, you were out on a mountain bike trail and you had a life-changing moment for you as a cyclist for a period of time. And I don't want to jinx myself. I have not had any run-ins with close call, right? Sure. And I'm knocking on the table, but you we're out in an area over here that's known regionally as an incredible mountain bike trail. And what happened? Well, I mean, I only know from secondhand accounts. I don't remember the day, but I was out on my usual ride and rode down a part of the trail that had been changed, and somebody kind of put a jump in there that never existed before. So you didn't see it coming. I mean, I guess I attacked it. Everyone that I was with said I just rode into it at full speed and I landed on my head and got a really horrible concussion. You were wearing a helmet, thank. God, wearing a helmet, landed feet away from a trauma surgeon and his ER nurse wife. So they had my neck stabilized and I got carried out in a blanket and rushed to the hospital. And it's a year and a half or almost two years later, but I'm just starting to feel like I could make a list of things to do and kind of carry it all out. So you stopped riding for a while, it took a long time. You stopped riding? Stopped riding just more because I had a six month old at home at the time and just promised my wife, I can't do that. And then I was able to kind of talk my way out of it and I'm riding again. So you're back in the saddle as. They say. Yeah, but not being reckless or doing things that are even a little bit of a doubt in my mind, I'm certainly changed completely. Now are you doing. More mountain biking now? Again, just mountain biking. So you're not doing, because after the accident you were just only going to, I'm selling my mountain bikes. I'm only going to do. Well, I sold that mountain bike, so that had the bad karma and I have a new one. So you got a new mountain bike, but you were riding road bikes again after the accident? That's when we started. We rode a couple of times after the accident and you're like, I'm going to stick to this for a little while. No, I'm just doing my fittings. So I'll still probably in the summer ride 60 miles on my road bike, but it's all doing bike fits. So you love the mountain biking. Love the mountain biking. Now I did buy a mountain bike and I had it. I went out one time and I am smart enough to realize where my comfort zone is and where it's not. And I'll remember I went out there thinking, oh, I'm going to a mountain bike and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, I'm going up this. I ended up, because they rate the trails like they do in skiing, right? Yes. I was on what's black or blue? Black diamond or blue. Yeah. I should have been on green. I somehow ended up on blue, which is an intermediate to an intermediate advance, This the same place that you were injured. And I'm like, I'm thinking I'm going to attack the hill and go up this hill. And I couldn't even get up the hill. I could not ride up the hill. There wasn't enough gears to get me able, so I had to hike and bike it up the hill to get past this one section. And then I get lost. I completely get lost and I'm gone for almost three hours trying to find my way back out of this place. And then I was like, I'm done. I come home. It was cold that day and I was all bundled in the right clothing, but it was really cold. It was like late fall, early winter. And I tell my wife, I go, my chest hurts. Not like heart pain, but breathing, because I was breathing in all that cold air and I was exerting myself, and I sat on the couch and I tried getting up off the couch and I was like, oh, oh, I could hardly move. And I turned to her the mountain bike, sat in the garage, sat in the garage. She goes, are you going to go out and mountain bike again, honey, you bought this mountain bike? And I was like, yeah, you can sell it. I'm not going to be a mountain biker. I'm just not, but road and gravel and doing the rail trails and hopefully this summer I'm going to try to do some bike packing. And you and I agree that we were going to try to do something together On that front, but you help me really get prepared for season two. And I want to talk about that because Park Tool, they're an incredible company based in Minneapolis. They're a sponsor of our show and they really, really wanted me to be prepared both on the bikes that I was getting and how to properly take care of them moving forward and using the right tools for the right job. And then also on the road, what do you take with you on the road if something happens to the bike? And I came to you and said, look, park Tools sponsoring us. They're sending me some tools. I want to set up a shop here at the bike to bike studios, a bike shop. And I said, can you help me set up this bike shop? And all these tools arrived and everything was foreign to me. But then you started teaching me, well, you came and you set up the bike shop. So talk to me about when you came here and we opened all those boxes and about what they sent me. And then I asked you, well, Mike, all of these, what is it that somebody should have if they're doing a five, seven week road trip where they're just going around cycling all the time, what should be in this? And they gave me this great park tool toolbox to take on the road with us and you loved it. And I said to you, what do I even put in this mic? And can you please teach me how to use what's going in this box? And you did. And I must say that I took my bike apart. You taught me how to take my bike apart to clean out the gears and all that stuff. What should someone have in their shop, someone who's a little bit more than an enthusiast, someone like me who's riding pretty regularly, what should they have in their shop? But more importantly, what should they take when they're on that kind of road trip and talk to the viewers and the listeners about what we kind of put in that toolbox that you thought was important for us to take on the road with us. What should everybody have? What are the go-tos? I mean, you were, I guess, fortunate enough to be able to bring a lot of, it's not like you were bringing it on your bike with you. No. So I think we pretty much packed the bike shop. I mean, you could have done anything that you needed to. We didn't pack tools that weren't specific to the components that you have. So let's say you had Campolo parts instead of Shimano that would require some different tools to remove the cassette or the bottom bracket. So we wouldn't pack that sort of stuff. But I think everything that you could to take it apart, because the one tool you don't pack is the one that you're going to need. So I think for that sort of context, you pack everything. You just sort of lay out what you'd need to do and overhaul to your bike. Maybe you don't bring two of the same Allen key, but if you're bike packing, that's totally different. I think that's where you bring as little as you can, but try to cover all your bases and that becomes a pretty dangerous game to play. But if you're carrying a 50 pound bag around, that's also a dangerous game to play too. Oh yeah. I watched this guy who rode the divide from Banff down to Mexico on the border of Mexico, and he had a problem on his bike where he had the Shimano Dures electric shifting and something happened with the rear derailer and was stuck in a single gear and he was in the middle of nowhere. It was interesting, I saw him improvise using a spoke to kind of help move the chain to get, manually move it so that he could get it in the different gear to go deal with some of the climbs that it was a crazy, crazy. So having the right tools makes a difference. And clearly we did have the luxury of having a support. We had our own sag, there you go. Support and Gear, which happened to be in the back of my car. And we had a great rack on the back and we had some great bike stands that we could take the bikes and put them up. And you packed this talk about this toolbox. I mean, this thing was. It's really everything that you need is able to just get stored into these pockets that kind of hide everything away and compress it down to this small little briefcase sort of thing. It was great. You look like an Inspector Gadget pulling up and opening it up. Why is. Park Tool so good at what they do, Seth? You use them in the. Shop, right? Yeah. I mean, they are the industry standard. If you walk into a bike shop and they don't have Park Tool, I probably walk out. So no, they've been a real big supporter and fan of what we've been doing, and they've been very, very gracious. And we set up the shop here and I remember you walking in and you couldn't believe what we were setting up here. And what are some of the benefits of having, let's go back for a second. You helped me set up this shop. What did you want to do to have the shop be optimal to support us in terms of all of the things that we're doing on the show? Well, the luxury of what you have is you could set it specifically for your bikes. So it's like a tailored space that's optimized for what you're doing. And you aren't having people come in with flat tires and stuff and cluttering it up. So it's like a hospital style, sterile environment in there. It's so clean and where everything is, and you could really get stuff done quickly. I know for me at the shop, I waste more time looking for tools and looking for things. If I could just sit down and fix every bike with what I need in front of me, it would be so much more efficient. But you have to help people and you have to walk away from things. So this is more like an operating room rather than a doctor's office. And for people who want to check out what we've got in the shop and what we've taken on the road, there's links in our show notes and they can check it all out from Park Tool. They are absolutely incredible and they've been super, super supportive of everything that we've been doing. And I love the shop here. I don't have the skills to start bleeding breaks and doing all those other things that you do in a real bike shop like yours. But certainly doing triage and maintenance and cleaning and tuning this room is perfect. And it certainly affords us the opportunity to not have to every time, we need to have something done, get the bikes on the trailer and go over to the bike shop so it's convenient. And you, Mr. Master mechanic, set that whole thing up and slowly and surely you're teaching me slowly but surely you're teaching me how to use the tools that are all there. I must say for a guy that never worked with his hands before to fix anything, I was really proud of myself when I was able to take that bike apart. You took it apart with me. But. Then I mean, you put it back together. Really well too. I put yeah, which was really cool. But I think the things that if I want to elevate the game, how do you put braking cables in and snake them through the frame and doing all that stuff? You don't want to do that. Just call you. That's terrible. I'll just call you. I'm not doing it. But yeah, having those tools was invaluable on the road. I want to go back to real quick. I know we're running, we're running short on time, but you ride a, is it your road bike? That is the bamboo frame. That's my, I would call that my flat bar gravel bike. Okay. But it was more bamboo, not. Yeah, but that's really cool. Who's doing that? So this company, I want to say it was direct from China, emailed our shop and had discount codes for us and wanted us to buy 300 of them. So I just emailed them from my private email and I was like, Hey, I'd really be interested in checking it out and seeing what it's like. Do you have a discount code? So I think I got the frame for maybe 200 bucks or something, and it sat for a year with no parts on it, just a frame, and finally one day. You decided to build it. I. Had a Rainman moment and was like, if I take this part with that part and take this bike apart and put it together and now, yeah, it's not. Going anywhere. It's like the bamboo transformer that bike. It's got all these different, it's very cool. You know what, I'm going to take a picture of that and I'm going to put that picture in our show notes as well because that bike's pretty cool to take a look at. Mike, I think that if you were to give your top five pieces of advice for someone who's just starting out in cycling but wants to get more serious about it, what are the top five things that they should be thinking about when considering purchasing a new bike? What are the top five things that they should be asking. Themselves? Well, I think it's easier to just say it for road bike, let's say, just because that's a little bit simpler, how often are you going to use it? So if you're using it every day, spend that extra money on the parts that are going to last you. So don't skimp out and get the cheapest spike that a company makes. Get something with, for Shimano, for instance, 1 0 5 parts or even 10 speed RA stuff, that RA stuff, which is really inexpensive now is the same quality of stuff that would've been on a Tour de France level bike 10 years ago. So all that stuff trickles down, but you want to get that performance level of part that's really important. I think the next thing is maybe not looking at the bike, but just once you get the bike, the consistency you have to make a deal with yourself. Maybe not strict guidelines of every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, but three days a week I'm going to ride. And you hold yourself accountable to that because that's when you start to see those results. So if you start to genuinely do that and stick to that, then it's like, okay, I understand how the work becomes skill in cycling. That's the beauty of cycling too, is that you can't really overtrain where running. You could hurt your knees, hurt your ankles if you run too much Cycling, unless you're doing hill repeats every day, you could go out and ride for three hours every day and you're just going to keep getting better at riding, get a good fit and be smart about nutrition. I don't know how many things that was, but that's kind of it. You're. There, you said get a good fit and I want to just explain, you can get a non custom bike, but still be custom fit on the bike that you get. I think that's what people need to understand. Some People think, oh, custom fit. I don't want to spend the money on a custom bike. Well, no, those are two different things. You can get fit for a custom built bike that is to the millimeter. It is like at our. Bikes and that company's going to do that for you. That. Company's going to do that. For you. That's the difference. Right? But you can get a bike off the rack and you still need to want to get custom fit. On. That bike off the rack, go to an expert like yourself to have them fit you properly for your body on that bike because those seat adjustments and those little nuances, even the way the hoods, the angle in which you hold the hoods, your bar width. I remember when I first started riding, you were like, why are you riding with these bars? These are not the right size for you. I think I was too wide. You're like, you're way too, you need to be in here. You were out here and for different bikes, there's different bar widths that you'd want to use on a gravel bike. You might go wider, right? Why is that? Why would you go wider on a gravel bike but more narrow on the road? Well, so the gravel bike, the same way that a mountain bike has really, really wide handlebars that allows you to control the bike better. That little nuance move actually affects where the bike's going. It also, these gravel bikes now have these flared out drops. So the brake lever from the drop position feels satisfying to grab. It doesn't bottom out against the curve of the bar where if you have first generation gravel bikes with these hydraulic brakes on 'em, they feel like they're bottoming out. When you grab the brake from the drop. Do you think we're talking about the width of the bars, we're talking about the height of the seats. We're talking the type of the bike. If you're just starting out, how do you know, we talked earlier, roads over here, mountains over here, but there's so much in between. How do you figure what's going to be right? Well, I mean, are you riding the trail in the park around the lake that you feed the ducks at? Then you want a hybrid. But if you're the type of person who, for you, you were riding 12 miles and you would've been doing more, but you just weren't comfortable, so you know that that person is going to grow and continue to ride, just bite the bullet and get a road bike. Or if you live by trails, get a mountain bike. There's so many people who I see one summer spring, they come in, they just don't like the price of the road bike, but they really need it and they buy hybrid. They ride. Maybe they ride group rides and they're like, why can't I keep up? Well, you're on a $600 hybrid where your position makes you a sail in the wind and you're riding with guys whose shoes cost 500 bucks. So you need the right tool. You can't keep up, you can't hammer a house together as fast as a guy with machine tools can put it together. It's same thing. Clips or no clips. Always clips. Always clips. Why. By clips, I don't mean toe clips. I mean clipping in with your shoe. Correct. But why you're really not riding. If you are enc clipped in the biggest telltale sign of someone who maybe they're strong and they could ride a hundred miles, but somebody who's just pushing a gear over and you could see them struggling at a low cadence. They're not a good cyclist. They might be strong and they might be a good athlete, but a cyclist keeps a high cadence and that spin and their fluid dance that they're doing, it's not like it's left and right. It's just this cyclical thing that you really can't start or stop at any point. So it's that rhythm that you get with the clips. It's clip in, clipped. In. You're getting a rhythm that you will not get without. It. Get this hip driven rhythm. You could maybe get it for a few seconds, but you're just chasing the dragon forever without clipping it. Drive, train recommendations or No, they're all good throwing, I'm. Not going to go. Not going to, no, I think there's good in all of them. Good stuff. Yeah, there are good and bad things like little qualities that everything has, but if you're getting that top level of any of the three big names, it's going to be incredible. I mean, there's really nothing you could complain about. It's all, it's all very. Good. I think you might've mentioned the four things. I might mention the fifth thing. If you start to get into cycling and you're riding and you keep riding long distances and you happen to be riding on the new electric shifting drive trains, which both the top manufacturers make, my advice is bring a battery charger. Yeah, that's a good, because you don't want to be stuck on a long ride in a gear that you don't want to be riding in and then find out that you got to get back home and you don't got the juice. So yeah, amazing time with you. This is not going to be our last time together. I want to do this more. There's so many things to cover. In fact, as people start to kind of write in and comment on our podcast and on the show, please send us your questions because I want Mike to be able to answer them for you because if it's anything mechanical related to any bike that you have, this guy knows what he's talking about. Mike Rogers, lot of pressure. Mike Rogers master mechanic. I can't thank you enough for being a guest today. Thank you for more information on this episode as well as other episodes in this series. Head over to our website at bike to bytes podcast.com. You can also find us on YouTube at Bike Tobys. Be sure to give us a like and subscribe while you're there and if you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, we would appreciate a five star rating and a glowing review. It really does help spread the word. Check out our Instagram at bike debits tv and be sure to follow my personal Instagram at Garrett Abe where I post shots of my daily rides and interesting places I visit. If you're interested in watching the Bike de Bites TV show, please visit bike de bytes.com. We also have some really cool stuff of Bike to Bites, apparel and some other things that you can check out while you're there. We wouldn't be able to do a podcast like this without great sponsors. And for that, I'd like to thank e plus an organization that harnesses the power of technology for truly transformative results from AI and security to cloud and workplace transformation. Plus brings you the right solutions at the right time in the most efficient way. E plus on the front lines of today's modern enterprise, check them out@eplus.com. Until next time, pedal, eat and repeat.