The best writing in run, ride and hike — recapped by the RODEO team from newsletters we actually subscribe to. New reads most weeks. Worth the bookmark.
Recapped by the RODEO team from writers we actually read — every piece credits and links its author. Quoted lines are the author's own words; everything else is our summary, not a copy of the original newsletter.
Laura Fountain took a solo cycling trip to Angkor Wat on a borrowed bike with a chain that kept slipping. Every fix cost her time, so somewhere on the temple road she stopped fighting it and let the bike set the pace instead.
It turned out to be the better ride. Slower laps meant more temples explored properly, fewer crowds, and no rush to beat a schedule that was never really hers to keep. As she puts it: “The bike had been right to make me slow down and take in the sights.”
The lesson trained runners will recognize immediately: the session you can actually do, at the pace your day allows, beats the one you're too wiped to finish. “I cycled slowly, I stopped where I wanted and I took the sun going down as my cue to go home” — not a bad way to run a taper week either.
Terrell Johnson — the writer behind The Half Marathoner, read by 39,000+ runners — admits his mileage has quietly cratered since a new job added a five-day commute. The only run he can reliably get in now is a solo Saturday loop.
His first instinct was the familiar one: if it doesn't look like it used to, it doesn't count. “I've started to tell myself I'm not a ‘real’ runner anymore,” he writes. “(And I write this newsletter!)”
A conversation with a friend about lifting weights — a little, often, no production required — talks him down. He lands somewhere calmer: “What I can do right now may not look like it did a year ago... I still have to figure out how to be patient, and let what needs to happen, what needs to be right now, be.”
Mike Kirby, a long-distance cyclist who writes The Cycle Scribe, lays out exactly which foods quietly sabotage endurance performance — and when. Fried food, heavy dairy and anything high-fibre in the hours before a session is a recipe for a mid-ride stomach mutiny; he's blunt about it: “Frequency of consumption is key if some foods are not to kill endurance performance.”
Timing does more work than most riders give it credit for. Fuel too little and you bonk; fuel with the wrong things and you spend the ride managing your gut instead of your legs. His fix is unglamorous but reliable — “little and often” during the ride, real carbs and protein after it.
The line worth remembering: “Look after your digestion as well as your nutrition.” Half the fuelling mistakes riders make aren't about what to eat — they're about when.
Noa Deutsch has been fitting bikes professionally for two decades — no part sales, no affiliate income, just the fit — and marked the anniversary by writing up twenty of the biggest shifts she's watched happen in that time.
The throughline is how much riders' willingness to change has grown. “I always explain the reasoning behind any part swap — the logic, the alternatives, the options available at various price points,” she writes, recalling a time when swapping a saddle was a hard sell and shortening cranks was nearly unthinkable outside elite triathlon.
Some of it is just how far the gear has come — her saddle database alone now runs 350 models deep, “across various shapes, widths, and materials.” Twenty years of paying attention, condensed into one very specific, very earned list.
No trailhead required: the Thruhikers crew traced a 37-mile line straight through Los Angeles — from the San Gabriel foothills down through the Rose Bowl, the LA River, Chinatown, downtown, Koreatown and Beverly Hills — and walked the whole thing in a day.
“We pulled out a map and traced a route that would take us through as much of the city as possible,” is about as much planning as it took. What follows in the original is a full route writeup, maps included, built for anyone who wants a long day on foot without driving three hours to a trailhead first.
Proof RODEO's "hike" pillar doesn't need mountains to count. “We walked across Los Angeles. It was 37 miles and took an entire day” — a city, covered the slow way.
Callie Leisure writes about training for an Appalachian Trail thru-hike and hitting burnout — not in her legs, but in her head. “Hiking is more mental than physical,” she writes. “Sure, going for a hike is an aerobic exercise... but the hardest part has been the mental side.”
What pulls her back isn't a training plan, it's returning to why she started: the Appalachian forests she grew up in, and a version of hiking that isn't about proving anything to anyone. She's honest about outgrowing an old relationship with exercise built on validation rather than enjoyment.
“We do it for the journey back to who we are,” she writes — the kind of line that has nothing to do with pace and everything to do with why RODEO exists in the first place.