All posts by: McDowell Mountain Cycles

About McDowell Mountain Cycles

One of our goals in starting McDowell Mountain Cycles has been to help people rediscover what great exercise and good fun riding bikes is. Part of the allure of it is being outside and not stuck indoors like we are for much of each day, but being outside brings certain challenges when the weather turns on us.

Bikepacking is like backpacking, except that you have the majority of your gear on your bike. At the shop, we’d been talking about exploring this for a while and decided to do a maiden voyage overnight trip to Seven Springs.

I had not been riding much and “training” even less. I needed a goal, but none of the races I had done in the past were getting me on the bike in earnest. I needed something new, something crazy, something stupid and that’s when it hit me!

When we started McDowell Mountain Cycles, we decided to do a lot of things differently than a lot of bike shops. We recycle over three times as much as we throw away and we decided to allocate space to create a hangout for riders.

In Part 1, I talked about how becoming a stronger rider requires us to stress our various energy systems. Then in Part 2 I discussed the other important side of the equation, recovery. In this installment, let’s get into how we fuel our bodies for our rides.