According to its website, the cheapest Rodeo Labs bike available is the Flaanimal 4.1, which is $1,350 for the steel frameset. Add a Shimano GRX-600 groupset and carbon wheels, and you’ll spend just under $3,850 for the bike, which would be more than suitable for, say, the two-hundred-mile gravel sufferfest of Life Time Unbound Gravel 2oo.
But Rodeo Labs founder Stephen Fitzgerald, along with his two friends Nick Gilroy and David Hornick, had another idea: tackle Unbound on $200 beach cruisers from Walmart.
After arriving in Emporia, Kansas, for the event, Fitzgerald, Gilroy, and Hornick went straight to Walmart and picked up four Kent Seachange Beach Cruisers, one for each of them and a fourth as a parts bike.
After repainting the frames with what Fitzgerald described to a reporter from Velo as “sick fades,” swapping the saddles, replacing the stock plastic flats with metal pedals (the cranks wouldn’t fit clipless spindles), and redubbing them “Rodeo Kens,” the Denver-based trio was off to tackle what has become known as one of the most brutal races in America. Beyond the addition of bottle cages, everything on the beach cruisers remained in stock.
Of course, a beach cruiser isn’t much of a beach cruiser without a front basket, which was added to one of the bikes.
The day before the race, the trio make their ambitions clear. “We aim to complete the Unbound 200 on these bikes, and moreover, we aim to have fun along the way,” they announced. “We do not know if either objective is actually attainable. Failure is possible and, depending on who you ask, probable. And therein lies the allure of it all: the absolute unknown of what tomorrow holds.”
To avoid the chaos of the first few miles of Unbound (and because the cruisers were equipped with coaster brakes), Fitzgerald, Hornick, and Gilroy started at the back of the thousand-rider pack.
According to Fitzgerald, that was exactly the right place for them to kick off the day. “The vibe in the morning for the first thirty miles was unreal,” he told Velo. “The party is at the back one hundred percent.”
However, after the day’s opening seventy miles, things started to get tough for the single-gear beach cruisers. The Flint Hills started to get punchy, and the gravel grew chunkier and nastier. The bikes held up well, however, as no one suffered a flat or a mechanical over the entire course. “The tread pattern was baller,” Fitzgerald said. “Fast rolling, and the casings are way thick.”
The bikes' durability led Fitzgerald to think a lot about the place of his company in a world of ever-more intricate, proprietary, and expensive bike builds. “It actually made me think, “Why does all of this have to be so complicated?’” he said.
As for their performance, Fitzgerald and Gilroy finished Unbound in 16:50:49, making them the seven-hundred-and-twenty-first and seven-hundred-and-twenty-second riders to cross the line. Hornick finished ninety minutes later.
And though this may seem like a clever marketing trick from an independent bike builder (and one that worked. After all, you’re reading about them), according to Fitzgerald, tackling Unbound on beach cruisers is just another chapter in the Rodeo Labs story.
“We started with silly bike rides and having fun before there was ever an idea to make a bike,” he said. “In 2014, for instance, we rode Denver bike share bikes up a 14,000-foot mountain. We are a bike company now, and I’m proud of our bikes, but we’re not a product-first company. Products come from the inspiration that comes from going out and actually riding. We will keep making bikes, and I’m proud of what our team creates, but we will always go wider than that. We will always celebrate the joy of riding first.”
