Multiplication

 In celebration of the twentieth year of this blog, I have a few tales to tell. This post is one of them. This series will occur off and on throughout this anniversary year, I hope to illuminate some behind-the-scenes stories and highlights from the blog during this time. Enjoy!

 When I started Guitar Ted Productions in May of 2005 I had no other intentions for doing other blogs, websites, or podcasts. However; I did not take long to get myself into all three of those things. This post will be a sort of brief history of the blogs, websites, and podcasts I've been a part of throughout the years. 

You could say that Guitar Ted Productions was the second blog site I was associated with since Trans Iowa's site predated this blog by almost six months. However; I was not the one making any changes to that blog until 2007 when Trans Iowa co-founder Jeff Kerkove left for Ergon. But technically I was a part of that, so.... 

By 2006 I had an idea for a gravel ride and Jeff Kerkove felt I should "make it official" so he went ahead and set up the Guitar Ted Death Ride Invitational blog site without my knowledge and then handed it to me on a silver platter. Boom! Now I was involved in three blogs. 

A snippet of an article I wrote for "The Biking Hub"

By March of 2006 I was also a regular contributor to "The Biking Hub", an aggregator site for mountain biking articles from the web and a site started only a month and a half earlier which was trying to expand into original content. 

The editor, "Cory", (sorry! I have lost the last name to the fogs of time.), was instrumental in my early development as a writer. He took my submissions and patiently worked with me to hone my craft and become a clearer, more "professional" writer in terms of sentence structure, tone, and grammar. 

I owe a lot to Cory and the chance to become a better writer. This and the chance to start writing reviews. It was Cory's idea to do three-part reviews over time to give readers something different than the typical one-hit and done reviews which were the norm then, and still are today. I'd never seen anything done the way Cory was suggesting and I was excited to be given this template for reviews which I have stuck to ever since 2006. 

I cannot say for certain, but ever since I started doing reviews like this it seems to me other sites picked up on the style and whenever I see things like "mid-term review" or "out of the box", I cannot help but think Cory's ideas were the genesis of that style. 

So, "The Biking Hub" was my first site to write for. That lasted until 2007 when I made a switch.....

The last page posted by Twenty Nine Inches. By this point I had left the site.

 From some scattered submissions starting in late 2005 and running through 2006, my name appeared on articles on the "Twenty Nine Inches" website. Then in 2007 I went all-in on being a regular contributor. From that point on until the end of 2014 I was immersed in the big wheel world. 

My articles there came along at the height of my "influencer/reviewer/writer" status in the MTB world which gave me privileges which included flying to Monterrey to see Keith Bontrager, Gary Fisher, and Travis Brown, ride with them, and eat a home cooked meal at Keith Bontrager's home in Santa Cruz. I got to go to Deer Valley, Utah and ride. I was at Sea Otter three times. Plus several Interbikes as well. Those were crazy days and all due to the blog here. 

In 2008 I took what was a sidebar for gravel events on this blog to another blog, opened up a gravel focused chapter called "Gravel Grinder News", and started my transitioning into more of a gravel related blog here as well. Side bar: A little known fact is that the Trans Iowa history site, which was started at about the same time, was converted to Gravel Grinder News. Then I switched the Trans Iowa History site to its own Word  Press based blog. 

  Gravel Grinder News was an event calendar, then a review site toward the end of its "blog status". In 2013 Gravel Grinder News became an actual dot-com in its own right. That went on for 2013 and through 2014 before I was convinced to roll Gravel Grinder News into......

"Riding Gravel" was a site focused on gravel started by Ben Welnak, then of Colorado, back in around 2013 or so. He convinced me to join forces with him under his banner. So Gravel Grinder News went away and I became partners with Ben in Riding Gravel. 

This partnership lasted until the end of 2023 when I stepped away from doing anything for the site. This marked the first time since 2006 where I had not been contributing to a site, or writing for a site on a regular basis. 

Before I became a part-owner in Riding Gravel, I appeared on a podcast via Ben Welnak's "Mountain Bike Radio" network on a show called the "Guitar Ted Show". I would often call in and gab with Ben about Trans Iowa or early MTB/29"er history stuff. However; I was probably best known online in terms of audio when I did my "Trans Iowa Radio" broadcasts live from Trans Iowa every Spring. 

Those started with me using a few different audio-blogging services which have all - sadly- gone away so there are no archives of those reports. However; you can get a feel for what I used to do from the Emmy award winning documentary on Trans Iowa v7 called "300 miles of Gravel", by Jeff Frings. Jeff used a lot of my audio-blog posts from that 2011 event in his film and it is a great reference for any early gravel riding aficionado. You can Google it and find it online yet, I believe. 

Ben then decided to run a call-in podcast for each Trans Iowa for several years starting in 2013 for Trans Iowa v9. You can check that out HERE. 

This transitioned into the "Riding Gravel Radio Ranch" podcast which started in 2014 and ended in 2023 with a little over 100 episodes. That evolved into the "Guitar Ted Podcast" which is in season 3 now with 68 episodes as of this posting. 

I also have been a guest on several other podcasts going back to the 2010's including "The Path Less Pedaled", "The Shiftless Podcast", and also on "The Spokesmen Podcast". 

Besides the film and podcasts, I also have written feature articles for "Dirt Rag", "Bicycle Times", "Bicycle Retailer and Industry News", and was a contributor to an article in the Japanese publication "Bicycle Club". 

I also have been featured in several newspaper articles and other magazine articles. Most notably, Trans Iowa v3 was featured in a chapter of the book written by Zach Dundas called "The Renegade Sportsman" which came out in 2010. Zach shadowed me throughout the event and he captured my sleep-deprived, Red Bull fueled banter quite well, if I do say so myself. If you get a chance to read that chapter in the book, it is well worth your time to seek out. 

Finally, I also had blogs for my old employer's shop for a few years and the short-lived C.O.G. 100 also, which had its own blog site. There were the two websites I had for a bit. "The Cyclistsite" being the most notable where I and Grannygear wrote reviews on stuff not 29"er related. Then there was "650B.com" which I owned but never posted on. Ironically it is the only site I ever made money on. I sold it to someone in Alaska and I haven't seen anything of it since. Am I leaving anything out? I probably have forgotten something....

All these things because I started a blog in 2005. What was I thinking?

Where do I go from here after accomplishing all of those things? Well, ironically someone was trying to offer me a chance to write for a gravel related site as recently as a couple of weeks ago. The thing is, content writers do not get paid what they are worth, and this looked to be another pie-in-the-sky offer with no real foundational backing behind it which would lead me to believe I would not get remunerated for my talents. So, as for the future?

This blog and my podcast are enough. Time to quit multiplying my efforts all over the place! But I am eternally grateful for what I have experienced and have accomplished over these twenty years and due to this blog, really. Without Jeff Kerkove's encouragement to start writing? 

You probably would never had heard of Guitar Ted. Thanks for reading!