I get asked this question a lot, often by road cyclists who are curious but not yet convinced. Why gravel? Why leave a structured professional road circuit for a sport where the roads aren’t closed, the start lists are open, and the events range from 60km Sunday rides to 800km desert crossings?
I’ve been thinking about how to answer it properly. Here’s my best attempt.
What Road Racing Gave Me — and What It Didn’t
I raced at UCI Continental level for several years. I competed at World Tour events. I was part of a team structure, racing on closed roads, with team cars and earpieces and a very specific role to play within a collective tactical effort. That world taught me how to race — how to read a peloton, how to suffer on demand, how to perform under pressure with a lot riding on the result.
What it couldn’t do was play to my specific strengths.
Road racing, at the elite level, rewards a particular kind of athlete. The sprinters. The general classification riders who can go uphill for twenty minutes at a power output that seems physically unjust. The time triallists. The domestiques who can be everywhere for everyone across a week of racing. I could do these things. I wasn’t going to be defined by them.
My body is built for duration. For the kind of sustained, grinding effort that gets harder as the hours accumulate and rewards the person who started conservatively, fuelled intelligently, and kept something in reserve for the moment that decides the race. That profile exists in road cycling, but it’s never quite the decisive factor it is when the distance stretches past 150km of technical, unpredictable terrain.
In gravel, duration is the point.
What Gravel Does Differently
The first thing I noticed, on my first proper gravel ride, was how present it made me. On a closed road circuit or a familiar training route, your mind can wander. The surface is predictable. The corners are known. A significant portion of your riding becomes automatic.
On gravel, you are always paying attention. The surface changes constantly — hard-packed to loose, dry to muddy, smooth track to rutted field — and the consequences of not reading it correctly are immediate. That constant engagement is cognitively tiring in a way that I initially found surprising and then found I actively craved.
The self-sufficiency changes things too. Road racing has a support infrastructure — team vehicles, neutral service, feed zones staffed by soigneurs — that gravel largely removes. In an event like Badlands, which I’m doing in August, you carry everything you need for an 800km crossing of southern Spain. No race official will bring you a wheel. If something breaks, you fix it or you stop. That accountability is clarifying. It’s also — and I recognise this sounds slightly unhinged — enjoyable.
The Physiology of It
Jacob Tipper, my coach, has talked about this in terms of where my power curve sits. I have a high ceiling for sustained aerobic effort over many hours. I don’t have an exceptional short-duration sprint. Road racing asks for both, at different moments, and tends to be decided by the latter. Gravel racing, particularly at ultra-distances, almost exclusively rewards the former.
There’s also the question of technical skill. My background in football — years of reading a situation quickly and making decisions under pressure — translates surprisingly directly to technical gravel descending. You’re processing information fast, committing to a line, adjusting mid-action. It’s not dissimilar to reading a ball moving through a defensive shape. The specific skills are entirely different but the cognitive pattern is familiar.
The Community
Road cycling has a culture I love and admire, but it is, at its professional level, quite hierarchical. There are clear distinctions between the elite circuit and everything below it, and those distinctions are policed carefully.
Gravel is not like that yet, and I hope it stays that way. At Turnhout in March, 2,534 riders from 27 countries started the same course. Elite women. Age-group amateurs. First-timers doing a gravel race because a friend convinced them to try. All on the same roads, in the same conditions, with the same rules.
There’s something genuinely good about a sport where the people who watch the elite race and the people who do the elite race are doing versions of the same thing on the same day. That accessibility is not a weakness. It’s the feature that makes gravel feel alive right now.
Where This Is Going
The UCI Gravel World Series and the Gravel Earth Series are building something with real structure. The World Championships are becoming more significant each year. The prize money is growing. The media coverage is growing. The start lists at the biggest events are extraordinary now — riders who could be competing at the top of road racing, choosing gravel instead.
I made that choice. It made sense immediately and it keeps making more sense as the season develops. The sport fits my body, my mind, and the way I want to compete. There aren’t many things in life where all three of those things align.
When they do, you know.
Supported by Merlin Cycles, Ventum Racing, OGT, Gravaa, and Questa Financial Planning. Coached by Jacob Tipper at JT Performance Coaching.