The Rust Buster Gravel Ride

I did my first organized event of the season at the beginning of April while I was in Memphis for the eclipse with my boys. The event was put on by my friend Clark at Victory Bicycle Studio in midtown Memphis. 

The ride is called the Rust Buster, and you’ll see why in a photo on our site, and offered two different rides, a road ride of roughly 50 mi. as well as a gravel ride of roughly 50 mi. I chose to do the gravel ride. 

Prior to flying out, I texted Clark and asked him what tire I should mount and he said something fairly slick, but 40-42mm wide, so I mounted up the American Classic Kimber Lite, which I reviewed last year. 

Victory did a great job of promoting the event and even garnering support from the brands. SRAM and Pinarello had a presence among others. I met riders who came from Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina and Mississippi. 

The ride was held on land that is the far western edge of Tennessee, north of Memphis, near Meeman-Shelby Forest State Park. This is land I know from years ago when I still lived and trained in Memphis. It’s west of the westernmost highway in Tennessee, which is to say all the roads are small. 

And while Western Tennessee is mostly flat to slightly rolling, the river bluff land in and around Meeman-Shelby Forest State Park is very hilly. None of the hills are particularly big, but they often turn quite steep, so it is possible to encounter a 100-meter-long hill that tilts at 13 percent. 

What was funny to me was that the opening 20-ish miles had next to no gravel to speak of and I wondered why I wasn’t just running the 30mm Panaracers I’d been riding days before. Oh ye of little faith. After commenting to a rider next to me, roughly a mile later the road went to gravel and mostly stayed gravel for the next 25 mi. 

This area, sometimes in sight of the Mississippi River is an area I’d never visited at all before. It’s mostly flat farmland. While this isn’t Mississippi, this is William Faulkner’s South, a place of tilled fields, spring floods and oppressive summers. 

The gravel road usually had some loose pea gravel on it, but there was almost always two good lines, but even the soft stuff was rideable; it was just a little slower. 

I met a number of really nice riders, who, like me, worried that the end of the ride would take us back over all the hills in Shelby Forest, a fate we were saved from, though the 45-mile route ended up being more like 52 mi. 

At the finish there were lamb tacos, chicken wings, a local IPA and small servings of key lime pie. 

There are two big observations I want to make on the Rust Bucket and Clark Butcher, the organizer. I like Clark because he’s actively building community in Memphis. Friends of mine who aren’t even cyclists have dusted off their beach cruisers and signed up for his training groups and now I have people asking me what sort of road bike to buy. To use a popular Southernism, Clark is doing the Lord’s work. 

The other observation I have is that the 50-ish mile length of the Rust Buster is a really terrific distance for a gravel event. I got out, I saw stuff, had a great ride, met cool people—including some readers/listeners—pulverized my legs sufficiently, AND! I got home at a reasonable hour, which means that doing an organized event while on vacation with my family didn’t become a day-long ordeal of me being gone with the only car. Burning a whole day is something family members tend not to be too wild about, so being able to leave before anyone missed me and be home just after 2:00 gave me time to do something with my family, so they didn’t feel cheated. 

I think too often rides get caught up with being the most extreme event out there. I mean, Unbound had to up the ante from 200 miles and add Unbound XL at almost twice the distance. Nothing against them, but I think the growth market for cycling is in the sub-80-mi. event, not the 80+-mi. event. Honestly, if the only distance for the Rust Buster had been more than 100 miles, I wouldn’t have done it. Thanks to the Rust Bucket’s reasonable distance, I was able to have a great ride without neglecting my family.

#winning