Choose the Hard Way

Cameron Jones won the 2025 edition of the 205-mile Unbound Gravel, the most competitive edition ever of the most prestigious gravel race on the planet. Three months earlier, he showed up in America, walked into a used car dealership in the Bay Area, walked off the lot with a used Honda Odyssey and a dream to make this his best season ever.    But these aren't the most interesting parts of his stor...

You've got an hour or less to train, what do you do?  Spencer Martin of the Beyond the Peloton newsletter & podcast + WEDU's Outcomes / The Move takes a break from the Tour de France to join Choose the Hard Way creator Andrew Vontz  to talk about what they do when life and work are at max stress and you have little time to workout.  Is Zone 2 really the right move if you have a few hours a week to...

Welcome back to United States of Sweat presented by Choose the Hard Way where politicians and policymakers join us to share stories about fitness, health and the sports they love playing.  In 2008 Tom Perriello won the election to represent Virginia's 5th Congressional district by fewer than 1,000 votes. He later ran for governor of Virginia and he also served as Special Envoy for Sudan and Specia...

During a divided time in America, our love of sports and fitness cross party lines and can keep us healthy as individuals and bring us together as a nation.  The United States of Sweat is a new series from Choose the Hard Way that features the world's leading political leaders and policy makers sharing stories about what they do to stay healthy, fit and physically active.  When we decided to launc...

Subscribe to the Choose the Hard Way substack at www.alwaysthehardway.substack.com for a look behind the scenes of this episode and human-generated insights about bikes, zen and life.  Walking away from an executive role at a high-growth unicorn to go all-in & start up your own company sounds cool. What happens when a highly promising start up with an awesome product becomes an end up and your fun...

Pro gravel cyclist Chase Wark joins me today to talk about setting the fastest known time on the 300-mile Mega Mid South gravel loop after wildfires devastated the Stillwater, Oklahoma area and cancelled the Mid South gravel race. Find Chase @chasethebiker on Instagram.  I wrote a story with my thoughts and reflections on the interview you'll hear today on my substack. Find that at https://alwayst...

The #1 thing you can do to support this podcast is to subscribe to the Choose the Hard Way substack. Just go to substack and search for 'Choose the Hard Way' or go to  https://alwaysthehardway.substack.com/ and hit subscribe today.  That's where Andrew Vontz writes about bikes, zen and life + shares his reflections on conversations with guests on the Choose the Hard Way podcast and more.  ‪@Harry-...

Christopher Blevins is a mindfulness practitioner who builds community and a more inclusive and healthy world through bikes. He's one of the best professional mountain bikers America has ever produced and one of the best in the world. He has won the Cape Epic and taken gold in the mountain bike world championships in the short track and cross-country mixed relay disciplines. He has also won UCI Wo...

Kristen Faulkner is an American pro cyclist who won the gold medal in the women's cycling road race at the Paris Olympics in truly stunning fashion, surpassing two of the most dominant racers in the sport with a bold attack that left them looking at each other while she drilled it to victory. It's one of my favorite bike races I've ever watched. If you want to know what it took for Kristen to get...

A student struggling with his practice once asked the zen master Shunryu Suzuki to boil down Buddhism into a single phrase. Suzuki thought for a moment, then he responded: everything changes.  This is part two of my conversation with Cory Richards about his memoir, The Color of Everything. Cory is bipolar and at different moments in his life he has been famous, homeless, institutionalized and an a...

Doing hard things with friends is fun and even when you lose, you win. In 2014 I took second at Unbound 100 and superstar creator and now BJJ black belt @blakeoftoday took third. This episode originally dropped in 2019. I skipped the weddings of several close friends and trained 20+ hours many weeks for months to prepare for this event.  When we did the race and when we originally recorded this ep...

Joe Petrowski landed a great job as an aerospace engineer right out of college. Then he got the bike racing bug. People told him to stick with his demonstrably awesome, impressive and very high paying gig. Instead, he quit to go live in at times dismal conditions to be a pro cyclist, first in the UK then in France. And if you're not familiar with domestic pro cycling in France, teams there are kno...

Charisma, fame, good looks, superhuman physical and artistic achievement. Some people seem to have done everything and to be everything you dream of becoming. And as Cory Richards shares in this interview, everything can be nothing and anything can be the opportunity for presence, mindfulness and connection to who and what matters most.    Cory climbed Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen in...

Heather Jackson has won six full Ironman triathlons, 16 Ironman 70.3 races, the Escape from Alcatraz triathlon and she also won the Wildflower triathlon four times. She played D1 hockey at Princeton where she was a two-time captain and was on the US National team for cycling track racing. In 2023, she left triathlon to be a pro gravel racer AND a pro ultra trail runner. In her first season she won...

Michael Marckx is the founder and CEO of the Belgian Waffle Ride, one of the biggest and most influential multi-surface, gravelish series in the world. He's a prime mover behind what has become today's booming gravel scene and wow, this guy has lived what would be 20 lives the average human.  We talk everything that went into the birth of the BWR including Michael's time as CEO of a publicly trade...

Joe Goettl grew up working on a farm, almost made it as a pro snowboarder and went deep into competitive running--until he hit an endless string of injuries that doctors said would end his athletic career. Here we are in 2023 and Joe is a rising YouTuber & pro cyclist knocking on the door of gravel greatness.  During the week, Joe trains, coaches athletes and works a heavy schedule in retail to fu...

One day you wake up and a thing called the Life Time Grand Prix exists and two years later it's all anyone who follows pro cycling in America can talk about. How did we get here? And what's next?  Today, we find out.  Kimo Seymour is  the Senior Vice President of Media and Events at Life Time and the creator of the Life Time Grand Prix. He's also an endurance sports overachieve with 11 IRONMAN fin...

Alexis Skarda is a professional cyclist who rides for the Santa Cruz HtSqd and is the US Marathon National Cross-Country Mountain Bike Champion, a Lifetime Grand Prix racer, an emerging electronic music artist and she's a formidable force on the 1s and 2s as a DJ as well as a podium threat at any gravel race she enters.  I love to produce electronic music, I love to DJ and I love to ride bikes, so...

Dylan Johnson and Drew Dillman join @vontz to talk about pro gravel racing 90210 and the fun they had battling for 17th place at the final race of the Lifetime Grand Prix series, Big Sugar down in Bentonville, Arkansas, home of Walmart and the global epicenter of competitive cycling.    We get into the past, present and future of pro gravel, why community matters, especially if you're going to tra...

Joe De Sena is the founder and CEO of Spartan and creator of the Spartan Race and the infamous Death Race. After he created a hugely successful Wall Street trading firm, Joe left finance behind in 2001 to build a new life and a new business from a farm in rural Vermont. His goal was to change 100 million lives through experiences like those he had competing in Ironmans, 300-mile runs and adventure...

Tristan Cardew, aka @tristantakephoto, sold everything and moved from Sydney, Australia to Girona, Spain to build a life that revolved around cycling and visual storytelling. Five years later, he's racing gravel and road at a high level and has built the creative career he dreamed about making happen. His YouTube channel , TristanTakeVideo, has more than three million views and is built around tra...

Six years ago, I launched Choose the Hard Way to inspire more people to embrace the idea that doing hard things builds stronger humans who have more fun. My guests are among the very best in the world at what they do and I've been lucky that they've graciously shared their stories here. To celebrate 100 episodes, I'm doing something different and sharing more of my story--a story about a friendshi...

Pete Stetina grew up in a famous cycling family and became a highly accomplished pro road racer who raced the Giro D'Italia four times, the Tour de France twice and the Vuelta Espana twice. When he started dabbling in gravel racing, in 2019, he was still doing 80 race days a year in the World Tour while winning iconic events like the original recipe Belgian Waffle Ride. That's when he pulled the r...

Vince Murdock is a professional mixed martial arts fighter who came up from difficult circumstances and worked his entire life to get into the UFC. When he finally got the call, a pre-fight brain scan showed he had Moyamoya disease and a life-threatening arterial blockage. Following brain surgery that involved removing a quarter of his skull, Vince's perspective on life radically shifted. He becam...

Drew Dillman is a pro cyclist who, until now, has focused on cyclocross and criterium racing. In recent months, Drew has aimed for the fences like Babe Ruth and hyped his plans to catapult into the LifeTime Grand Prix series and become a gravel icon. He co-hosts the Matchbox and Bonk Bros podcasts and is co-founder of Ignition Coach Co, a coaching company for endurance athletes. Drew races for the...