How To Avoid These 8 Gravel Riding Mistakes

Gravel riding is becoming ever more popular, and all of the GCN presenters have now taken part in at least one gravel event – except Dan Lloyd! We’ve made all the mistakes, and learnt a thing or two in how to avoid them, so here is a list of all the basic mistakes you could be making, and how you can make sure they don’t happen to you!

Chapters:
0:00 – Intro
0:34 – Loose bolts and lost bottles
1:39 – Picking the wrong trail
2:32 – Sliding Out In Corners
3:45 – Pumping up tyres too hard
4:36 – Wearing the wrong shoes
5:34 – Don’t sweat the bags!
6:10 – Enjoy gravel culture
7:03 – Don’t go off too hard

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Ravel riding is fun and it can take you on new exciting Adventures if you haven’t been on before wow we here at gcn have been riding gravel for some time now from epic 500 kilometer growl bike packing Adventures to your casual gravel ride but let me tell you we have made pretty

Much every mistake when it comes to gravel riding so in this video I’m going to share some of those mistakes with you so you don’t make them yourself thank you one mistake I made on my very first gravel race was not making sure all my bolts were tight this resulted in me

Having the most Reckless bottle cage my poor bottle was hanging on for dear life gravel is rough and bumpy stuff and things will work loose over time and this can possibly happen imagine this in your ride how annoying would that be so that’s why you need to go around and

Check everything is tight to save you riding around with one of these you also want to make sure that your bottle fits your bottle cage because if your bottle cage is too big your bottle is just gonna fly out on any bumpy surface you can be left without any water for the

Whole ride and that’s not very pleasant when you’re working hard when you get quite parched you also want to make sure that your seat post and your handlebars are done up tightly because if they work loose on the ride it’s not going to be very nice on the other hand you do not

Want to over tighten any of bolts because that’s going to be a very annoying costly mistake but it will usually say on all the bolts how tight you need to tighten them so just stick to that you’d be absolutely fine Now this next one is going to vary depending on where in the world you live it’s probably not relevant to those of you who live in America that have the nicest smoothest gravel roads in the world I’m very jealous here in the UK are gravel roads look a little bit

Different it’s usually through fields or on single track things like this and I think we can get our hands on really and a lot of the tracks that I’ve been on are very debatable whether me and my gravel bike should even be there some of them actually feel like downhill tracks

And yes the bike might be capable of going down it but it’s not very good for it it hasn’t got any suspension and you don’t want to crack your pore frame but just do some research before you head out on your gravel bike make sure you know you’re not heading on any waterfall

Things or anything like this really oh God another mistake we see a lot of beginner gravel Riders make is going around Gravelly corners and crashing you cannot be riding around gravel Corners like their tarmac because you will deck it you need to be extra careful when cornering on gravel you can’t really go

Into these gravel Corners the same as you would on the road because there is lots of tiny little loose stones and we all know they can be pretty sketchy if you go over them a little bit too fast only a bike can be wiped from underneath

You you need to reduce your speed coming into a gravel corner or if you do come into it a little bit fast make sure to put your foot down and that’s going to help you make a little correction if your tires do sniff a little bit but you

Definitely don’t want to face full of gravel no one needs that in their life just like on the road if you tense up and grab a handful of breaks things might go sideways pretty quickly but when you only gravel bike you want to get used to that feeling that the ground

Might move underneath you a little bit you might do a little skid or slide here and there but embrace your inner child if you do slide just see it as an opportunity to practice your skills it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to crash if you do but it’s going to help

You relax a little bit more and get more confident on the bike This next one I have been guilty of you do not know but you do not need to put the same amount of pressure in your gravel bike tires as you do in your road bike times however careful you are in choosing a route you are going to come across some

Really bumpy gnarly gravel and when you go over really bumpy stuff with hard tires you will be shaking like this and your teeth will uh like that is not nice sometimes you even go over things that mountain bikes usually go over and mountain bikes have suspension and a lot

Bigger tires the only suspension you have on this bike is your tires so running a lower pressure say around 30 PSI is going to be very beneficial going to give you a lot more comfort and Traction in your tires now this next mistake is actually one of Hank’s most recent gravel riding

Mistakes he recently did a ride where he rode 500 plus kilometers on gravel and he chose to ride in his Road shoes don’t ask me why but it turned out to be quite a big mistake for him most gravel riders that will choose to wear a set of SPD shoes like these ones

Gravel Pacific they’ve got a flat Sole and a lot of tread because sometimes you will tend to get off your bike run through pedals or walk or a tactical bits and you need that equipment issue whereas Road shoes do not have that the gravel shoes tend to be a little bit

More more flexible so your feet don’t tend to get as sore as the really stiff Road shoes and the pedals have dual sided so you can clip in and out really easily which you need on gravel where you have to do some running Hank did not

Have any of that so you can see he probably struggled with it so don’t whack your road shoes on your graphic bike Now this next one is a super duper important one do not forget your bar bag your frame bag your fort bag your saddle bag your bum bag your fanny pack all your bags to go around gravel riding you definitely need them I’m joking you do not need any sort of

Special trendy bag to go and ride gravel all the cool kids will have them and they’ll wear cool t-shirts out on the bike I’m definitely not that cool to be able to do that and you don’t need to dress a certain way or have certain bags

To go on a gravel ride just get a new bike and enjoy gravel riding Now if you haven’t entered a race or an event before I would 100 enter a gravel race as your first it is such an amazing community and culture it’s like one big family really the gravel races I’ve entered have been some of the most enjoyable races I’ve done and there’s so

Many different abilities from professional races to people you know like I was doing the very first gravel event it is so enjoyable and 100 recommend it now don’t go thinking that your first gravel event has to be 200 kilometers long it doesn’t have to be it could be

40 kilometers there’s actually races you can do that have time sections so you could ride casually stop then you have a time section so you’re flat out on that time section and you stop have another little ride and then hit another time section and go really fast so there are

So many different kind of events that you can do something to see everybody Rival races tend to be some of the longest events out there anywhere from 50 to 300 plus kilometers I think it’s a really long way and most of us well we don’t get to ride that far in training so when we do the event we aren’t really

Putting our bodies in the unknown we don’t know what kind of pace we can hold for that distance no pretty much every single GCM presenter has done a gravel race apart from Dan Lloyd actually maybe we should sort that out but pretty much all of us have all gone out way too

Fast in our event you cannot hold that pace that you hold for the first hour in the last hour so it is very easy to get carried away there’s hundreds of riders around you and you’re all excited but let me tell you let those Riders bomb

Past you in the first hour because let me tell you come out with five six seven eight you’ll be buying path then just be patient ride your own race so those are some mistakes that we have pretty much all done here at gcn when we’ve been riding gravel but hopefully you can take

Something from this video and learn from some of them if you have found this video helpful then please make sure you let us know down in that comment section and give us a like but whilst you’re down there let us know what grammar mistakes you’ve done because we all love hearing these stories