Today on the emergence of our podcast episode number 38. It's Thanksgiving here in the United States, and we Americans, we like to travel. It's time to go have turkey and stuffing with grandma and grandpa or maybe go to your parents' house long, or far away in another state.
600, 700 miles away, and maybe you have to go all the way across the country. But chances are you're going to a place you've haven't been to in a long time. Well, I see this is a perfect opportunity to maybe go see some new trails and see some places you haven't been before, to explore something
that you didn't even know was right behind your in laws house the entire time. Now, you could just go there, fill your face, sit and run the TV, fall asleep, a bachelorette football, or you could turn Thanksgiving into an opportunity, an opportunity to maybe do something you haven't done before, like bring your bike maybe even your running shoes, and go explore
a park or a trail system you didn't know existed. Now if you combine this with thinking about where you can plan events and where you can do events, the more trails you see and the more types of environments you experience, gives you the opportunity to maybe come up with some ideas that you didn't have planned before. And who knows? It could be an idea that's even close to family, or you could just stuff your face and fall asleep. What's it gonna be?
Welcome to the Merchants of DIRTT podcast. Recruential engineering for a better outdoor life. And now your host, Kyle Bondo. Thank you for joining me for the Mercers of their podcast. I am Kyle Bondo, your racial engineer. And of course, here on merchants of dirt, we wanna help coach you into learning how to build an outdoor business that features racing as a primary means for generating income. And my goal is to teach you the art and science behind all of this so that your production
can actually have a start and maybe even a finish. And hopefully, as you piece it all together, become a business you can actually earn money from, maybe even a living from. And if you're new to the merchiserv podcast, welcome aboard alongside me is my cohost, Mister Murphy, who is asleep because he ate way too much turkey and he's sitting on a couch with his pants zipped open watching football. But because Mister Murphy's asleep, it's time for us to go to do something that actually generate
some interests or maybe even a possible business venture. You never know. Because you never know that The trail system that's hiding behind your in loss house or maybe the trail systems behind your parents' house or some place you grew up or maybe even grandma and grandpa's place is ripe for a possible location for an event.
If anything, you're gonna go have a good time. You're gonna burn off some of that turkey. You're gonna go enjoy something in this place and maybe you haven't enjoyed in a long time. But you never know what kind of potential opportunities exist when you go do this. So I'm gonna learn 7 ways to kind of approach a trail system that maybe is not something you're familiar with. Something that's like in your backyard, in your not in your backyard, but in your family's backyard, 600 miles away.
In my in my case, We went from Virginia to Alabama. So in Alabama, I gotta go to the Talladega National Forest and go find a trail system. I've never ever even knew existed. So this is my 7 steps to understanding how to evaluate a trail. Trail far away or even a trail close by. Let's get into it. Step number 1 is pretty simple.
You're gonna go someplace that maybe you're either not familiar with or you haven't been to in a long time, like a really long time. Like, you went away for college, or you went in the military, or you just decided to go someplace across the country. You haven't been back at all, maybe 20 years, maybe 10. So that's about doing some research. There are trails that have come in to existence.
While you were gone, you didn't even know were were going to be put in. You didn't know about the local bike mountain bike club. That the crew was created out of full cloth long after you left, which would have been cool if you're there or the the ultra running club. Or the running club or the orienteering club or any of the these off road event or these off road event producers who just showed up and decided, I'd be really cool. If we could do certain things at certain parks.
So because of that, you're gonna go and do some research. You're gonna go online. You're gonna go to single tracks or IMBA or pick your pick the flavor of of National Park or a local park or regional park website that you wanna go to and find out what's changed or what you didn't know existed.
Find the single tracks is really good for this singletracks.com, where you can go find people have made comments and posted photos and created a trail map idea or GPS trail maps of trails that you didn't know were there. This is the same with true with IMDb, which is the international mountain biking. Association has something called the MTB project, which I think is I'll put this in the show notes. My belief is mtproject.org.
Which is trails that they have GPS mapped and people have checked into and have posted up on their website. Allows you to see a trail system you did not exist it or see a trail system that's expanded, grown
to become something worth riding or worth running. So doing research is important. You gotta find where those trails are near you. And now, When it comes to balancing family with actually getting out there and doing some trail work, pick 1. Pick the 1 you wanna go to the most. There might be 2 or 3. Pick 1 because chances are when it comes to visiting family, this family is important. You wanna visit with family. I'm gonna do the catching up. You want to
you know, share the stories and and have the the the emotional connections you have with family. So you only really gonna have time to maybe do 1. It's probably gonna be after the holiday. So you can even plan that into your trip. You know? You have Thanksgiving. Usually, he's always on a Thursday.
Go for that ride on a Saturday. It's just perfect because everyone's burned out. People, you know, they've heard everyone's stories by then. People come come ebb and flow and spot time and start heading back since Saturday's a perfect time. Do the research and pick 1. Now, you need to also do some planning beforehand because you need to this is number 2.
Bring the right gear. If you don't bring the right gear, if you wanna go for a ride, and you don't bring your bike, or you wanna go for a run, and bring your running shoes, it's gonna be kinda tough. Vis that trail. Now you could probably go there with whatever you brought, go do some hiking, go visit trail. This is not bad either, and this is highly recommended
that you at least if you didn't bring the right gear or you weren't planning on doing this in the first place, but happened to see an opportunity. Go there and just, you know, go spend an hour walking around and experiencing something a little different. Go with the go outside and enjoy smart doors. Now, you probably visit some places that have, you know, we're talking about giving is November.
So in the United States, a lot of northern states have snow already. Northern the mountain states have snow already too. So dress warm. You're gonna do that. But you never know what you're gonna find. The nice thing about when the leaves fall You get to see trails, you and part of the trails, and vistas, you didn't have you didn't see before
if you've ever been there before. You've never been there before. You're probably gonna find probably gonna find some that some people have already gone as well and this was snow blazer trail and go see how things connect and go through SQL c. Ideally, what I'm trying to my point of here about, you know, bringing the right gear and doing some research to go find these local trails is that you're going to go see how a trail system is built
far away from the stuff you're using now. And The concept kind of is is you're gonna see either poorly poorly managed trails or trails that are managed way better than your trails are now. And hopefully you're gonna take something away from that of what neglecting a trail will look like versus what a well managed trail is. That's number 2.
Now number 3 is a very important 1, and this is kinda taking you out of your comfort zone. And that is you need to talk to the locals when you get there. Now this means that you're gonna co show up to a trill that may or may not have people at it. Chances are there gonna be a few people there. If you bump into them, Talk to them. Ask them what they think of this trail. Ask them what they think the best part of this trail is. In my case, I bumped into a local named Adam.
Who from he from this guy who lived very near to the trail system went to here in Alabama. And he gave me the insight to the trails, which are usually they're they're loops. There's like a main backbone to this trail sitting there. It's called the sawword sawword trail. So it goes around this place called Lake Howard in the Talladega National Forest.
And he gave me insights into how to approach each trail which was not too clockwise, but too counterclockwise loose because the dissents were better, more enjoyable, a place that he'd ridden a hundred times. He said, if you want to really enjoy this trail, you do the loops clock counterclockwise. He is right. He was a 15 mile trail experience where the counterclockwise was intense. Now the climb out of the counterclockwise was yeah. It was kinda rough too.
But that's the enjoyable part. You go to the downhill. You experience the you climb the uphill. If you go to the next downhill, go to the next uphill. But if I hadn't talked to this guy, if I hadn't said, hey, do you write here often? I wouldn't have known that. And maybe I would have had I mean, I don't know what I would experience. Maybe I would have had you know, maybe the right would have been no different.
But I feel that he gave me that slight little insider's knowledge that helped make the ride better. Plus, we talked about other things too, other trails in the area. We talked about bikes and just getting to know outdoor people and the kind of things that he was working on. It's fantastic to understand what the psychology is of that area and how many they do races there and what kind of races do they do. And
what kind of local riding happens there as well. These are all good information, especially if you're planning on doing an event in a location like this. You need to know your customer base. So, talking to local is important.
Okay. Number 4. Plan for disaster. A lot of times when you go to a trail, That's far, far away from your home. You're not gonna have anybody to ride with. Now, I just happen to bump into Adam and coming off the trail. So that couldn't really say, hey, can I can I pile around? Now, that is an option. You know, see some people going on the trail, ask, you can join them. Now, mountain bikers are a weird bunch.
Sometimes you go to ask to join a mountain biking group and they leave you in the dust. Or vice versa, they're too slow for you. Same with running where people stop all the time. They wanna hike and more than they wanna run. So you need to plan for disaster because the chances are you're gonna do this solo. I mean, you don't wanna go alone, but sometimes you can't avoid it. So if you're gonna go alone, plan for this answer in the sense of, carry a compass.
Carry a backpack with a couple, you know, charged cell phone. Maybe you have iOS carry Compass, a a space blanket. And my cell phone fully charged. I carry usually like a pullover coat for rain, something really light to shell. They just need stuff in there. Yeah. I carry some water. Now, I've moved off of carrying a camelback all the time. A lot of times, I just carry a bottle on my bike.
But planning for disaster helps give you that edge. So that something bad does happen, you have the ability to at least to help yourself first, which means I also carried a tube and some CO2 to pump that tube up and some some bike levers to get that tire off. But finally, I also care to whistle. Now, if you're gonna be out in the woods by yourself
and especially if you're gonna be alone, A whistle is a fantastic thing to make sure you always pack. They're light. They're tiny. They're cheap. You can put them just about any kind of pocket to think of. But it's planning for disaster because a whistle can do a lot of things. First, you can you can alert people to where you are, maybe fell off the trail. A whistle can scare the to Jesus out of out of someone trying to come at you. Whistle also,
bears aren't really, you know, fond of whistles, loud noises, things like that. They most likely will leave you alone. So whistle has got all sorts of different different uses. So that's the plan for disaster. Number 5, okay, you're going someplace maybe you've never been before.
You could go all out and really, you know, really try to beat the record or become king of the mountain or, you know, have your straff or garner on trying to see if you're gonna be you can be the fastest person on some trail segment. Yeah, you could. But there's a reason you go outside. And that means that you need to take a moment and enjoy the scenery. Is there something about this trail that is enjoyable? If it's just like in the woods, maybe that's not the the right pole.
That would get you, you know, get someone to come out and race it. Or maybe the trail is just, you know, it's it's too rough or it's there's something about it that just doesn't have an appeal. But I've never really found a trail that didn't have some kind of Vista, some kind of appeal, even if it's just a looking at a creek or some sort of a high point where you could see out maybe, you know, a little further than normal,
or maybe it's just a, you know, place where you open up to a field full of flowers, there's always something to see. What is it? What is the thing that you wanna enjoy? And then you need to take the moment and actually enjoy it. I mean, the whole reason you went out there was to, you know, have some, like, you know, some quiet time for your brain to think. Well, take a moment to actually enjoy that. Enjoy that scenery. You definitely wanna take a moment and and have
the opportunity to see something that's just for you that you can enjoy. The whole reason we go outside, that's why I go outside. And I think that's the reason why maybe you go outside too. If you want that moment to enjoy the scenery, well, you need to take it. You need to find that moment and stop. Put the bike down. Take the back up put the backpack off and just sit or or look or just, you know, just have a have a moment to have a moment of silence.
This is an I think this is an important thing. Anytime you're outside, you need to take a moment. Sure. You can beat the trail in so many minutes. But If you don't take a moment to enjoy it, maybe you're out there for doing the wrong reasons. K? That's just me. That's number 5. Number 6. Expect to get turned around. Now this trail system had a donation box, which is always nice. If you go out there to some strange trail, put couple bucks in the donation box.
You know, they use that to to was they when I heard the the Adam, you know, my my local guy, said that they use the donation box. Not a lot of many people put money into it, but if they do, they use it for chainsaw gas, they cut trees that fall, That's kind of nice. I've been a couple bucks in that box. I know when that guy opens it up and see a couple bucks, sit in the station box. He's gonna be like, oh my god. Someone donated, it'd be fantastic. So that's the thing. Just give forward.
And that's the the what I'm talking about is the and number 6 is expect to get turned around because the head maps and it had a clearly fine trail system, but when you're in the trail, the map and the trail don't always jive. And there's 2 way traffic in a lot of places. And you're in a strange place, everything looks the same. You you don't remember that term or this term or the trees all kind of look the same or your pine field you drove through is kind of the same.
You're gonna get especially coming back the other direction, things are gonna look right. There's connectors. They have they have connectors. There's all these little loops. They had these little they spurs that connected to each other. If I'm paying attention, you aren't watching the signs, you get turned out really easy. In fact, that's just what happened. After the 3rd loop, I wasn't quite sure where I was even though I had the map. Took me a little second to get to get oriented.
And on top of that, I bumped in some other mountain biker who had the same problem, they got to an intersection, didn't know how to get to the park. Now we're talking 3 PM,
the sun starting to to dip. If you're out there, you know, it's still another 6 miles back to the parking lot. If you're taking a group of of some young kids and they're not moving very fast, can take you a long time to get that parking lot. Sun starts to go down. Things get dark in the woods. It gets hard to get out of there, which goes back to my plan to disaster before. I forgot to include, headlamp. You never know. Right?
Okay. So we expect to be turned around. And if you expect to be turned around, don't panic. Just kind of just realize that you may have to backtrack. You may have to do some exploration. You may have to go and and see where you're at by pulling out your app on your phone. If you have any service to see where GPS is, but this goes back to number 1 as well to your research. If you if there's no map there,
You can always print 1 off before you go. Have an idea on what the place looks like. No where north is. No where the you know what your landmarks are. So if you do get lost, You're not trapped out there all night long. And it also goes back to playing for disasters. Tell someone where you're going. That's an important thing. Alright? And number 7. And number 7 is a key piece that in a strange trail system, you should always keep in mind. Is get back before sunset.
If you're out in a strange location, you don't know the trail, you don't know where you're going, Don't leave your don't leave where you're at at 3 in the afternoon because we're in the winter now. But, you know, some goes down early. And expect to go explore a trail and get back in time. Go early. Go real early. Sunrise. That gives you a lot of time to get lost, to backtrack, to find your way, get back to the car.
So that's 7. Alright? Do your research? Bring the right gear. Number 2. Number 3. Talk to the locals. Number 4. Plan for disaster. Number 5. Take a moment to enjoy the scenery. Number 6, expect to get turned around. And number 7, get back before sunset.
Because you don't wanna go to alone, but if you can't avoid it, These are the kind of things you need to think about. So if you have a plan and you're exploring exploring that new trail solo, it can be very rewarding to enjoy something that you've never really seen before. Something is in your backyard. There's your in laws or your grandparents' backyard. Your backyard the whole time.
And now you get to add this to your war chest of places you've been where you get an understanding of the topography of the area, understand what it looks like in this season. And maybe if you plan on expanding your your event management to other places, You now have an idea on whether or not, you know, is Alabama the right place to do this kind of racing? Because the trail system was really nice. But is there an audience? Is there a customer base? There might be. I don't know.
So if I ever wanted to do events in Alabama. Well, I know a trail system I could do 1 at or help someone do 1 at. Now I need to do all my customer marketing research that's on top of that. So that's it. That's the the 7 things you need to think about when you're visiting a new trial. So that's gonna be my new my new Thanksgiving tradition. Is I'm gonna go and join the time of the family. I'm gonna go and hear the stories and catch up and have that connection with my family.
But when 2 days of concept for Thanksgiving and everyone's already, you know, they're full of food and it's it's football time. And I'm not a huge football fan unless you talk about the CLC Hawks. That's different. But college football, and Saturdays, I'll use college football. So I'm not really a big fan of that. But think about possibly expanding your exploration of an area that you're visiting to include a ride or a run on a trail system you've never been before. And now you know.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Burgster podcast. This is my special Thanksgiving episode. I did this on the road while in Alabama, and I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed my my 7 steps to understanding
how to approach a trail system in this range land that you haven't been to before. And I hope that you can apply those to your own life and that when you approach a trail system, you can use those kind of those those steps to make your experience worthwhile and safe because you don't wanna go to his real system. He lost, stuck in the dark, or get hurt. Definitely wanna be planning for disaster at all times because you never know Mister Murphy's gonna wake up from that turkey coma and come wreck your ride or your run.
So thank you very much for joining me. I'd love to hear from you. Please reach out to me at [email protected].
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or the the end of the chain Thanksgiving holiday because by the time you hear this Thanksgiving, we'll be we'll be over. I hope you had a a great holiday and we're about to go into the final month of the Virgil's repodcast. That's where I'm gonna start changing up the music because I have Luvs Love me some Christmas. So this is gonna be a fantastic the last 4 episode before the end of the year. It might be great. Give me some cool content I'm gonna put in out. And I got some some
some surprises coming out. And we'll talk about that as well. Until then, I'll see you on the next episode at the merch store podcast. And I hope you go out and enjoy a new trail that maybe you haven't seen before. Take care. I had an idea for merchandising or podcast t shirts that said hashtag getting kinda dirty, and they only come in triple x.