Omata and The Gravel Ride Podcast
Gravel riding is deep in the DNA of Omata.
How’s that?
When I started riding bikes not too long ago — around 2014 — I was riding local dirt on a single-speed mountain bike trying to make my way. It was a humbling experience, and one through which I fell in love with riding bikes. I was mostly riding bikes on the exquisite back trails just off the choked city streets of my neighborhood in Venice Beach, CA.
It was on these trails — generally well-groomed fire roads and the occasional single track — that I found a sanctuary from the character-building exercise of building a product and a company and brand around that product. The Gravel Ride was genuinely a kind of meditation time. It was my church.
That’s why I was super excited to find the Gravel Ride Podcast.
The algorithm directed me to it on evening while I as in a hotel somewhere working with a client. The episode was on Gravel Mob — a wicked hard day on a bike up in Ojai, California that nearly had me tap out. The chit-chat took me right back to that day when angels on e-mountain bikes trundled down the last climb delivering ice cold popsicles from musette bags. I thought I had died and wound up in a kind of purgatory where you had to keep climbing an impossible climb taunted by the promise of a popsicle.
I wrote to Craig Dalton, the guy behind the microphone, and congratulated him on the episode. We stayed in touch and Craig promised to drop a note the next time he was in LA. He did. We went for a ride up in the Santa Monica Mountains, followed up by this fun interview.
