Salsa Cycles Presents: Along For The Ride

200-mile rides are tough. Parenting is tough. What happens when you combine the two for a 24-hour period?

In Along for the Ride, we join RJ Sauer and his son, Ollie, on the Rexy gravel course from Fruita, Colorado to Moab, Utah. There’s just one hitch: RJ pedals his Cutthroat while Ollie rolls behind in his Burley trailer, offering up encouragement, snack suggestions, route advice, and plenty of opportunities for pee breaks.

Watch the film here:

“The main motivation to do a race like the Rexy was I wanted to do something we could look back on as a memory together that reflected on this chapter of our lives,” said RJ.

The pair pedal through the Rexy’s high and low points, through daylight and darkness, their father-son bond growing with every mile.

“Parenting and bikepacking have a lot of similarities. It’s about patience, endurance, adaptation. You make plans but those plans change and you need to just deal with that. I think the one thing I’m really accustomed to is sleep deprivation. I’m not sure which, parenting or bikepacking, has taught me more about sleep deprivation.”

Thinking about introducing your kids to pedaling or just riding along? RJ says to go for it:

“Anyone wanting to do bikepacking, whether it’s one hour, two hours, one day, three days, whatever, just get out and try. I’ve had all kinds of awesome conversations with parents who are either doing the exact same thing who are inspiring me to do things or traveling around the world with their kids’ doing adventures, and there are people who are just messaging me saying, ‘hey, awesome, I didn’t really think that we could go out and do this kind of adventure.’”