Syd and Macky: MTB Pro Cyclists x YouTubers - a no BS look at Van Life, Creator Life and riding the trail to 17 million views
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Professional racing duo Syd Schulz and Macky Franklin are on a quest to race the best and most challenging mountain bike races in America, filming their adventures along the way to give viewers an unvarnished look at the reality of living on the road as professional cyclists.
Syd and Macky join host Andrew Vontz to share how they went from amateur content creation to financial independence with YouTube, what it means to focus on the 10% things not the 1% things, and why basic rest and recovery are both the most important and least executed part of every training regiment.
After traveling in a tiny orange car, then a series of (old, janky) white vans, they retired from life on the road and now live in Los Alamos, New Mexico where they train and prep for races around the world - like the recent Transandes Challenge, an epic expedition in Patagonia. They have also added cross country, stage racing and endurance events to their lineup.
You can check out all of their video content on YouTube, and follow them on Instagram.
LISTEN NOW: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, Google Podcasts, Stitcher
Choose the Hard Way is a podcast where guests share stories about how hard things build stronger humans. Sign up for the newsletter to get the story behind these stories updates and more. If you’d like to suggest a guest or say hello, DM @hardwaypod on social or send an email to choosethehardway@gmail.com.
Host Andrew Vontz has spent more than 25 years telling and shaping the stories of the world’s top performers, brands and businesses. He has held executive and senior leadership roles at the social network for athletes Strava and the human performance company TRX. His byline has appeared in outlets like Rolling Stone, Outside magazine, The Los Angeles Times and more.
Today he advises and consults with businesses and nonprofits on high-impact storytelling strategies and coaches leaders to become high-performance communicators. Find him on LinkedIn or reach out to choosethehardway@gmail.com
In This Episode:
Syd and Macky Instagram | YouTube
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Andrew Vontz 0:07
All right. So what have you been doing today? Today has been pretty chill. We actually did a race yesterday and drove back from Salida. Last night. So we're a little tired. Yeah. Did our recovery protocol that's a sauna and ice bath. I mean, we sound really spoiled. Monday morning. It's rough. Yeah, we did three minutes or 10 minutes on a three minutes ice bath two times. Normally we do three, but we ran out of time. So here we are.
Macky 25:10
And then, you know, over the years, we sort of like, Oh, hey, this likes, we have a little bit more money, we can spend by spending a little bit more money, we can make our lives a little bit more comfortable and a little bit easier, which will allow us to race a little bit better and focus on a little bit more. And then, like, maybe 2014 15, was when we started making some money from racing bicycles. And at that point, it was really just sponsorship, not enough to live on. Yeah, I mean, it was barely, like, I think there were years where the, like, when we did our taxes, our combined Adjusted Gross was like $12,000. So, you know, we were basically just like, living absolutely as cheaply as possible full dirt bag, bouncing between our parents houses, which were fortunate that both our parents were super supportive. And just kind of, you know, all of our money went towards gas and entry fees. And that was, what we did is we basically just bounced from race to race and lived out of a van. And we were sick a lot. And we were exhausted a lot. And we were like, it was also a lot of fun. It was also a lot of fun. Yeah, but wouldn't do it that way again, probably Yeah.
Syd 50:00
Yeah, I think as a as athletes living in a van, the rest piece was very hard. Like we very rarely had, like our rest days from training, we're usually like dealing with Van logistics, or that would be the day we drive, you know, six hours to go somewhere else and then look for a campsite and then fill up water and like, go grocery shopping. And yeah, so I think that's something definitely to keep in mind if you want to, you know, if high performance is a goal, and you also want to live in a van, it's not easy. Possibly don't live in a van, if you want to live a high performance lifestyle. And then when you make the pivot or the life decision, you and I don't know, did you have a house you were living in when you were not on the road at that point in time. So we basically bounced between since parents house in Ohio and my parents house in Taos, New Mexico. And we would just kind of like store stuff there and crash there for a couple of weeks at a time. So van life kind of came, the wheels came off, not literally but kind of when COVID hit because which is funny, because later in COVID, everyone got into van life because they're like, this is how we can travel. But I think everyone's kind of forgotten that in the early COVID days. We were in Sedona we were staying with friends, we had been there for a festival. And you know, it very quickly became clear that like nobody wanted van lifers in their town, you know, all the places that we usually would go to in the spring like Moab. I think all Grand County like closed its doors to tourists. Campsites were getting shut down.
Hey, it was like a start line right there five.
Andrew Vontz 0:02
Yeah.
Are you sure that that's optimal?
Syd 0:39
That is the question.
I think what we've learned this year is that like, optimal is overrated and doing things is important. I think that's a great way to put we actually we liked doing this on ice bath. Yeah. But if we didn't like doing it there other ways to recover? Well, or like you have to go in ice water? Like no,
no. That's something we've actually been talking about. I feel like quite a bit this year is like ice bath and sauna. We're really excited. We have it, we really love it. But like, the truth is, we're talking like a 1% thing. Like that's a sexy 1% thing, basically. And if you actually want to recover, you need to be prioritizing the like 10% things, which is Sleep, sleep, and nutrition and like fueling and, you know, there's all these things that people are like, Oh, well, I'd rather just get a sauna because it's more fun. And you know, you get to sit in the hot box for a while, like, but that's a 1% thing. And if you're not doing the other things, like sure, that's fine, but you're really not, you're not tipping the scales much. And like until you have those significant things dialed. There's really no point in doing the 1% things.
Andrew Vontz 2:01
How do you feel you're doing it all the 10% buckets currently,
Syd 2:06
I think this is like our year of dialing that in, for sure. It's more our year of I think I said doing the obvious shit that we somehow avoided in the past. It's amazing how as human beings, we are capable of avoiding the things that we know would make us better. One of those was like, like getting to the race on time. And getting a warm up has been like a big focus for us this year. It's like, really obvious, but yet was also a thing that we were just not doing like 50 to 60% of the time.
Yeah, it was embarrassing. Really.
Andrew Vontz 2:45
Why was that happening?
Syd 2:46
Um, time management. Yeah, we could make excuses. There's always like some, I think that's the thing is there's always some reason on a particular day. But those could all be avoided if you got up earlier and like allowed some buffer time. I would say,
yeah. planning time management, like, yeah, things
are the obvious things like
Andrew Vontz 3:13
what what did you shift to ensure that you started to get on the right track with that specifically?
Syd 3:20
Well, we're still working on it. I would say, I think so we did a stage race in Moab a couple of weeks ago. And this was one where we were like, okay, like, we're just gonna get up half an hour earlier, like, be organized the night before, get there early, have time to do a warm up. And it was a two day event. It was supposed to be a three day race. It ended up being a two day race. We were 50% successful. But it was because the one day we showed up and like it was 24 degrees Fahrenheit at the start. So everything was messed up. And my dropper post cable was frozen. And so we had to do all these other things. So we didn't get a warm up. But we were like, we had not been early. It would have been catastrophic. Yeah, if we had the race
warm up, we wouldn't have been able to fix the dropper post cable that froze.
So mountain bike racing, that's always something Yeah, going.
But I think that, you know, your question was, what did we do to like, change that? And I think, honestly, we really just said, this is a priority. We need to make this a priority. Like instead of just being like, Wow, way, Excuse Excuse, like, we just need to get up half an hour earlier. Which means we need to make sure we go to bed half an hour earlier. And like, you know, you just you just made that a priority. And yeah, it sounds easy, but obviously, it's always harder than it sounds.
Andrew Vontz 4:45
Yeah, absolutely. And for people who are you listening, I typically I don't get into the hey, here are three things you can do to do things XY and Z. Personally, I've listened to a ton of podcasts. Have for, I don't know, 15 plus years at this point, and what I often find is, by the end of a one to three hour podcast, I've probably heard between five and 50 things that I'm supposed to do to be the world's most optimal human being, and I've forgotten all of them. And then I start to get stressed out about all the things that I'm not doing. I really liked what you shared about there being some basics that can account not for marginal gains for but for some stepchange improvements. And I have to say that getting to the start time online thing, any of my friends that are listening, I'm thinking of my friend at Blake up today out there, Tiktok superstar, who was a longtime training partner and racing companion of mine, and he unfortunately has been subjected to arriving maybe after a race has started a few times be because of me. And in fact, this weekend, I just did rescue T TSA and Vermont, I'm going to do a full episode, I think about my experience there, which again, I don't typically do but it was quite a remarkable experience. I was unable to sleep for the entire night prior to the event. And therefore I had one of my most difficult days on the bike ever, even though I would say I'm at a lifetime high. When I look at my data and my wattage I'm performing at the best I probably ever have. I was unable to sleep the night before the race. And then I was texting my buddies, Jamie and Morgan, the morning of the event and they had told me the night before they're like, Yeah, we're gonna get up to the parking lot, probably around 630 6:45am. I was like, wow, that's, that's nuts, because the race starts at nine. So it's like, granted, there were 1500 people who needed to park in this parking lot. But I was like, that's kind of crazy. So I got up that morning. I texted them. And I was like, Yeah, I think I'm gonna bring it up there, probably around eight, because I was still staying relatively close to the venue, it was 40 degrees outside. So I was like, Whatever, I'll just right up there. They're like, Hey, man, you know, the the race starts at eight. And I had just eaten like a massive pile of pancakes just had my coffee. I was like, oh, that's an 40 minutes, I now need to do all of this stuff that we all know you need to do before a race sometimes a couple of times, and get up to the start. So that was how my day started. After I had an entire night of literally not sleeping, which happens to me incredibly infrequently. I'll save that for another podcast, I guess I've kind of gotten into it. But that is one of the things I saw your Moab video, I saw the frozen cable. And as people who do this for a living and are then making content about it, I just the level of complexity boggles my mind. So I'm really curious, what other kinds of situations have you run into? And what are those additional layers of stress that start to stack up? When you you know, not just have to go perform, but I hope my van works today. And you know, is my GoPro charged? And is my mouth right mount? So what's that like to walk into these scenarios? Not just with the pressure to perform, but your livelihood kind of rides on, but you have to get the content?
Syd 8:14
Now that's a great question. Yeah. I think sometimes Yeah, the content can sometimes be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back. Because when the GoPro doesn't work, man like that, that's happened a couple times. And that's like the one thing that apparently mentally I cannot handle in a race like, it's just really funny, because, like, when they go pro is working and things are going wrong. Like I think there's a part of my brain that's like, this is part of the story. Like I'll just talk about it, it's fine. But we had a race in DC last year first. It was a six day stage race the first day the GoPro the SD cards were just airing out. So like both of our Yeah, it worked at the start, and then aired out immediately. And oh, man, I just lost my mind. I was so mad, you know, you're hitting every button and like trying to pull the battery out and put it back in. Because like, I didn't know what the problem was like sometimes that will fix it. You know, while you're racing. And yeah, it was not good. Not good. So I think that's a Yeah, that's an evolution of how to make that switch when the cameras aren't working back to like pure race mode. Be like okay, you can still get still perform well in the race. You guys just let it go that there's not going to be a video.
I think that's I mean, I think that's true of racing in general though is sometimes things go wrong. And if you could just accept that they've gone wrong and move on with your life or the race in this case. Like that is the recipe for success because Some things going wrong. Like it happens, it happens to all of us, you get flat tires, you crash, you bonk you like it happens. And dwelling on it literally has no positive effect, there is nothing positive that comes from throwing a wobbler, like losing your mind dwelling on it, the zero benefit to any of those things, the only thing that is beneficial is fixing it as much as you can, and moving on and continuing. And so you know, whether it's a camera not working, or a mechanical or anything, like, the goal is to have a memory like a goldfish. And like 10 seconds later, you've forgotten that this terrible thing happened. And you're just raising your bicycle again. But it just does add yourself, oh, easier said than done. But also it adds like, trying to record these races and get content around these races, adds one more level of things that can go wrong. And I think that's where it gets difficult, like we you know, we've gotten pretty good at talking to the camera remembering to hit the record button, you know, those kinds of things. We've gotten fairly good at remembering the night before to plug everything in, make sure everything's charged, put in new SD cards, you know, all that. But any additional system you have is another possibility for failure. And that's where I think it gets kind of stressful, you're just like, cool, I have to make sure my body is ready, and my bicycle is ready. And all the cameras are ready. So,
but I think it's kind of funny, this hasn't happened recently. But we used to somewhat frequently get comments on our YouTube channel of people being like, it'd be a lot faster if you didn't work camera, which is kind of funny, when it's like on the video that they're watching, you're like, you wouldn't be watching this if we were a camera, but like, Thanks for the hot tip. We haven't gotten that as much recently, but I don't know it, we've thought about it and talked about it. And I think like, I don't think we would be faster. Without the cameras, I don't think that little bit of weight takes away from
I mean, come on, it's probably like 300 grams. That's significant.
I don't think that takes away from like what we get from making videos and having a community and like a reason to be racing beyond just for ourselves. Because I think racing at a professional level can feel like I don't want to say selfish, exactly, but like a very self centered pursuit. And I think the cameras kind of help us keep that in perspective, a lot of the time because, you know, if we, if things go badly for us like that is people are gonna learn from that, from our experience, it's gonna make a good story. It's also like, the results, like the race results don't matter to us as much as they used to. Because I mean, a we have an income stream from YouTube. But also, I think, again, they kind of in the perspective that most people don't even have the opportunity to like, think about winning a bike race are being in the top 10%. And that's like, pretty cool that we're there. And like, what's the difference between Fifth and Sixth? At the end of the day, like, that's not something you're gonna remember, like five years, 10 years down the line. So but you might remember, you know, the experience of doing the race.
And to build on that nobody else is really paying as much to hike as much attention as we all think they are. Like, I know who won national championships last year, I think. And I raced bikes professionally, like, you know, your, your average mountain bike rider, even racer, really, they're paying attention to their own results. And like maybe those of their like, couple close friends. And that's like, we're all in our own little bubbles in our own little world. And that's totally fine and make sense. And so worrying too much about results. That like nobody's really paying attention to, like, you know, and it's it's kind of nice to have that perspective. Because I think through our YouTube channel, we do get to interact with your like with people who are what I consider like your more like the bigger population of mountain bikers. Yeah, it's easy when you're racing to feel like oh, everyone who rides a mountain bike races at a really serious level and is trying to like, race professionally.
But that was who these like 10 people are. Yeah,
because you're, you know, you're seeing the same people at races and you're hanging out with them and like so to you. It's really important whether or not You were like sits at fifth or sixth. But 99.9999% of the mountain like population has no idea and doesn't care. And so it helps, like, put that in perspective of, you know, we're doing this mostly because we want to be doing it because it's not like this is, you know, mountain bike racing is not a changing the world, the result you get is not going to change your life. Yeah. And every
now and then we get comments on YouTube, you know, written or raced with someone that, you know, maybe they've done a couple Olympics or like, done some World Cups, and people are like, Who's that? Yeah.
That's a good reminder. Yeah.
Andrew Vontz 15:44
And at this point, I know, one of your recent series of videos was about going down to the Andes to do a stage race. And when I think about, again, going back to my experience last weekend, I hadn't traveled to do a race in quite a while. And I got to drive to this one, which anyone who's listening, if you've done a bike race, it's always much simpler to be able to I ideally, you just get to ride your bike to it and start, that's incredibly rare. If you get to drive there. That's better. If you drive and have to stay overnight, that's a higher degree of complexity. If you have to fly somewhere, then drive somewhere, then stay overnight and race more complex. And then international travel. Wow, just like above my paygrade. So how far did you travel to get to that race? How many hours? And how did the level of complexity for that event, compared to what you've done in general?
Syd 16:40
Yeah, so we have actually raised internationally quite a bit. We have done I think Matthew has done something like 24 Enduro World Series events. I've done less than that. But still quite that we sort of stepped away from Enduro World Series racing in like 2019. But before that, we were doing at least two international trips a year to race and to raise some pretty stressful high pressure events. So this was not out of the norm for us, though. We had not done it since like, pre pandemic times. So there were some like, Oh, right. We forgot our raincoats. Yeah.
We were a little out of practice, or a little
out of practice. Yeah, there's definitely it definitely adds something we were lucky with this trip, we went down two weeks before, so it was pretty low pressure on the way out, and our friend upgraded us to business class on the way out which we had never done that before. That was the that's the way to do it, if you can. But yeah, I mean, it. Yeah, I don't know.
So travel wise, we live in Los Alamos. It's about we flew out of Albuquerque. So that's about two hour drive. So I think we had an afternoon flight because it was alright. Yeah, it was an overnight flight. So left in the afternoon, finished packing that morning, got everything in the car, drove for two hours. You know, you drop all the luggage off with one person, you parked the car, you take the shuttle back to the airport, like each of those little steps, like just adds a little something in terms of stress. Then we had a layover in Houston. Yeah. And then we had our long flight to Santiago. And so you know, that likes it said we, we had a friend other flight, yeah. And then another flight from there to to Morocco, and picked up a rental car and then drove for a couple hours. So like each of those steps, not only is there the logistics of like making sure you get to the flight on time and actually get on the flight, which we have missed a flight before. Because we were standing in front of the wrong gate. So like, you know, there's each of those steps and then every time your bikes have to go from one flight to another, there's the worry of like, Is my bike gonna make it? Or are we going to get there and not have any bikes and then like, have to try to track our bikes down. And and then, you know, we both speak Spanish. So fortunately, communication in South America was fairly straightforward. But it had been a while since we were down there. So you're kind of like trying to remember how to speak Spanish and how to understand Spanish and you know, and then you're driving in a foreign country where technically, the rules are essentially the same. But like in practice, things are a little bit more fluid down there, which you're just in a slightly higher level of stress because you're in a different country and you're driving and you really don't want to get pulled over because how are you going to communicate as easily with the police You know, there's all these little stressors that add up on international travel, that, that make it harder. And you know if you can simplify that for yourself by coordinating things ahead of time or like having a plan like, for us, we got down there and didn't take cash out. Because there wasn't an ATM at the airport really was we didn't look that's true, we didn't find an ATM. And of course, we like get out of the airport, we start driving, the first thing we do is hit a pay the toll booth. And the toll booth doesn't take credit cards. So, you know, we're like, Well, you know, what, what do we do here? And they're like, Okay, well, we can take a credit card, but you have to go like Park, and then walk into the building and then pay that they and we're going to take your your license your driver's license as collateral. So there's just all these things that we're like, We're such a
big cluster that resulted in us like backing down them, the median of a not a beat the shoulder of very busy highway going the wrong way. Yeah, anyway.
And it's, I think what we've learned over time, and have gotten better at is, the more things you can do and plan ahead of time, the better your life will be. Like, you know, if you can think, hey, we just got here, we're probably going to need cash, I'm going to go to the ATM, I'm going to get the cash out, you know, you have your rental car booked so that there's no like, Oh, are they going to have a pickup truck available? Like everything you can do ahead of time, when you're at the comfort of your own home with good internet is just going to make things better. And so that's
from experience of not doing that for years, for years years, because you can save money if you wing it completely, like it does usually end up being cheaper. But we did get ourselves into lots of lots of sleeping in airports. And
and I think that's been our, our one of our big focuses this year is like, how can we do things ahead of time to make the experience of doing a race less stressful?
Yeah, that's probably another 10% thing, like we were talking about earlier. Yeah,
definitely.
Andrew Vontz 22:10
I don't know if it'll make you feel any better about what you just described experiencing on the highway there. I live in hope Maine. And every time I need to go down to Boston or go somewhere, I feel like I have that same experience at every toll booth in Massachusetts. And then I ended up well, it's a little bit different, because then I just end up getting a ticket in the mail at some point, but I never seem to have the right amount of cash or the cash has been removed from my car or, or whatever, you know, what a wild world that we live in. So to go way back to the start of all this. Why did you start doing this this specific project? When did you have the idea and when did it come into being?
Syd 22:50
Which which project like YouTube in general? Yeah. Okay.
Okay. Um, so, so yeah, that's kind of an interesting story. We, we both had been racing for several years now.
I think we should go. I should go a little bit. So I got my pro card in 2006. I was 2018, something around there. In mountain biking. Having a pro card simply means you're racing at the highest level like in the highest category. It does not mean you are making any money doing it. In fact, you are probably spending a lot of money doing it and making no money doing it. So I got my pro card 2006 That was the same year I started college. We both went to Middlebury College in Vermont. So I would you know do school during the year I raced collegiate, which was always a blast. I wouldn't really train seriously summer would come around. I started racing again, I'd race myself into shape over the course of the year. But like, you know, I was balancing racing bicycles and doing school. We met at Middlebury College, we're both on the bike team. Just like you know, club team for fun thing.
Collegiate racing is super fun. Yeah, if you're
in college, you're on your way to college. Go raise collegiate is a blast. So then once I graduated, said had another year of school. So I at that point, kind of said, you know, I want to try racing bicycles. I was doing freelance web design on the side because that was a way to make money that I could do from anywhere. And then when Syd graduated in late 2013, at that point, we basically lived nomadically for the next seven years. Yeah, like we first we started in a small orange car, and with bikes on the top and we'd set up a tent every night, which was brutal, but we did it. And then we got a van which was ancient and like, literally the floor was resting through.
We like cost $1,400 So You get what you pay for it turns out,
and then we got a, you know, slightly nicer van, meaning it was a 2006 instead of a 1998.
Andrew Vontz 26:35
Did that just become a lifestyle by default or by design?
Syd 26:42
I think a little bit of both, I think I mean, mostly default, I think we're both pretty practical people. And that were like, well, we could get a job to pay rent, or we could not have jobs and not pay rent. And how can we do that we could get the cheapest possible vehicle that we can live out of. And then we can take the money that we can make from it was pretty much sponsorship at that point. And then we can put that all back into racing. So we were obviously at this, the reason this was able to work is that we did have sponsorship, we pretty much did not have to pay for bike equipment at all. So it really was like, we just had to make enough money to feed ourselves and pay entry fees and pay gas. And we could kind of make it work.
So it was you know, it wasn't like we were like this is, you know, our goal in life is to live in a cheap rusted out van and, you know, be bums. But it was a means to an end. You know, our goal was we want to be able to race bicycles and travel to cool places and do what we love. How can we afford to do that? Well, we can keep our expenses as low as possible in every other way. And we did that for a long time. And so you know that I guess the reason I shared all of that was to give you an idea of where we were in 2017. When we were like, Hey, YouTube is a thing. Surprise.
You're kind of at the point where we were like, well, we are extremely dependent on sponsorship, which is a very hard way to make a living is very stressful. Like the one year can be great. And you can have a great relationship with a company and then the people you were working with just leave find another job, especially in the bike industry, there's a ton of turnover. So it was every year starting in like October, through December, it was like starting over. You know, like, it didn't really matter what you your contracts you'd had in the past, it was all on a yearly basis. It was all like you had to reprove yourself every year. And sometimes it had nothing to do with you. And they just the budget was just gone. So that we were in 2017 kind of at the point where we're like, we need to do something else to make this sustainable. We need to diversify, need to diversify. And you know, YouTube was something we you know, we're kind of seeing people making a living doing videos, and we were like, could we do this?
And we had, like we had filmed a lot over not a lot. We had filmed some over the old like previous five years that we had been together. And it's funny we actually have that footage still and go back and we're like the riot. We actually filmed like a certain amount of this trip we did in South America in 2012. But we never did anything with that footage like that footage existed and was never used and a lot of it's real bad. Oh, yeah, I mean But cameras were cameras
have come along. Yeah, like action cameras in 2012 are pretty terrible.
But in hindsight, there's kind of these signs of like, oh, we really should have been doing video stuff like we were filming things. And we kind of, we had some inkling of like storytelling and what is interesting and what is worth filming. And we just never did anything with that footage. So at 2017, we were like, well, let's, let's try doing this YouTube thing. Like, maybe it can help us make money other ways. Maybe it just makes us more valuable to sponsors because we're reaching more people. And so 2017 We, what do we do 10 videos over the course of
a week that not that many. Yeah, we did not know what we were doing. We did not understand YouTube at all. We were kind of just like, throwing stuff up there. Yeah, like, see what would stick. But you have to just start somewhere. I think we get a lot of emails and messages from people that are like, I want to start a YouTube channel. What do I do? Yeah, like edit a video and put it on the internet, right? Like, you just have to start and you have to start making, quote, unquote, finished videos like you can't, you know, you have to put it out there and get feedback and see and like progress from there. You can't be stuck, like editing the same thing for a year. You know, I think a lot of people are really paralyzed by
they want it to be good question. The truth is, your first videos are not going to be good. They're just not like, no matter how long you spend, no matter how good you are at video editing, your first videos are going to suck. And that's okay. Like, you put them up there. And some people will watch them and some people won't. And you just keep doing that. And you'll figure out, what do you enjoy doing? What do people enjoy watching? And so we did that for 2017, basically, and we look back at those videos, and
they're terrible. They're pretty
terrible. I mean, there are moments that we're like, Ooh, that was really good. But mostly, they're terrible. We had no storyline, we had no like, like, you had to know us already for the videos to make sense. Which is funny, because nobody had any idea like who we were what we were doing, which is fine. Why would they have and then 2018 We're kind of like, Okay, let's try to do this a little more seriously, we did a like how to YouTube class, essentially, with a guy called named Tim Schmoyer, who runs Video Creators, the YouTube channel, and learned a lot from Tim and his team. And then we were really fortunate in that we reached out to some of the other big mountain bike YouTube channels, reached out to sets, bike hacks, and B kexi. And sort of said, hey, you know, here's who we are, here's what we're doing. We're coming through your area, we would love to meet, if you guys are open to that, and they were super welcoming, and super kind. And, you know, that was that helped us a lot at the beginning, there is like, Seth posted a video about our van because it was very much not your traditional van build, we slept on a rooftop tent on top. And we had dirt bikes in the back and like all this stuff, but that got us essentially 3000 subscribers overnight. So we went from like 1000 to 4000 in the course of like, 24 hours. And that
and also just getting the opportunity to spend time with people who were doing, kinda like what we wanted to be doing was was cool, we learned a lot. Yeah,
making deliberate doing mountain bike related YouTube. And that was really beneficial to us. And, you know, that that sort of started it. And the thing that I'm kind of most glad in hindsight that we did, and we had moments of not doing this, but overall we did this is we really just did the content that we wanted to make. You know, we knew there were certain kinds of content that would get us more views and more subscribers really quickly. bike reviews and, you know, Van build and that kind of stuff. And we were like No, that's not what we want to do. We want to do this about racing about performance about like, you know, basically the the adventures and what we're learning. And I think we did a pretty good job of made
for a much slower build on our channel than any other channels, I think but also like, now we're at a point where we get to do the videos that we want to be doing, and they're well received. And it took a long time to build that community but it was totally worth it worth it. It's
Andrew Vontz 34:46
really early on before that happened. You describe this moment when you picked up 3000 subscribers sounds like through collaborations with other YouTubers who had a high degree of influence so that strategy of leveraging other people's on It says is often a highly effective one. Prior to that, when it hadn't started to take off and sit, as you said, this has kind of been a slow burn, and you build an audience steadily that often leads to the most loyal, highest quality audiences because they're their true fans who are going to stick around. But as you were on that path, did you ever have moments when you felt like yeah, this isn't gonna work? I don't I don't think this is gonna work out.
Syd 35:26
Oh, definitely. I think the whole first year we were doing YouTube, I was Mackey's very optimistic. I was like, This is dumb.
I was saying anyway, just like the growth of our channel. SIDS acceptance of like YouTube, as a storytelling medium was a slow burn, like, yeah, initially, Sid was like, I don't want to do video. Like, I don't like doing video stuff. I don't like being on video like, yeah, I don't want to do this.
I did not like having a camera stuffed in my face after I'd had like a bad race. I would get very upset. That took a year or two. Yeah, I think that, yeah, it's been an evolution for sure, I have finally kind of come to terms with video as a storytelling medium, I think only in the past couple of years, because I've started doing a lot more of the editing. And that's made it a lot more fun. For me. I think when we first started, Matthew is I did not know how to edit a video at all. So Matthew was kind of doing all of it. And that was a little more distanced, I think
our videos has all have also improved significantly, since it started editing, I will say very much.
So I think it's because it's like both of us. Like we bring different things to the table. Mac is super technologically capable, like he can make it do what it needs to do. Whereas I get frustrated, but I feel like I'm a bit better at seeing the bigger picture of like, what do people not know about this? Or like, how can we introduce ourselves? And like, how can we, you know, make this a story? And how can we keep the POV interesting. And because I think that was, you know, a trap that we fell into early, which I think was partially because that was what mountain bike YouTube was in 2017 was a lot of straight POV videos.
Yeah, it was either POV, which is what like, became exceeded, or it was tips and tricks and how tos, which is what sets bike hacks at the time, Phil and skills with Phil, like, those were sort of your two options. And we're like, well, we're more on the POV side, because we're racing and we're getting POV. And so it took us a long time, I feel like to say okay, what's different and unique about what we're doing about the story we're telling? And how can we tell that in the best possible way, and that's a combo of using POV. You know, that's important, because we're sharing our races. But also we need to sort of like vloggy style, you know, talking to the camera, you know, interviewing each other. So we needed both of those things. And it took us a while to figure out that balance where, you know, initially it was either all POV or all vloggy stuff. And we needed sort of a combo of the two.
Andrew Vontz 38:39
And in the midst of all of that, this is stating the obvious, but you're in a relationship. So how did how did that go?
Syd 38:49
Mostly good. Yeah, I would say we do argue about YouTube videos more than we argue about anything else, which I think is probably perceived. That's probably good, though, because
that's the most stressful thing. And it's always
just usually like, I want it my way and Mackey's wants it his way. Or I want it my way. And but I don't actually understand how difficult it is to like create a graphics. Like, I'll be like, I want an explosion here. And it's like that's gonna take me two days. Yeah, like, but I want it.
Do you really want an explosion? Or maybe we should do not an explosion.
Andrew Vontz 39:26
I think always have an explosion if you can do and you have to think you have to think about the level of effort that it's going to take to get that explosion. So in the midst of all of this going on, I think another thing that I find to be really interesting about the content that you all create is that it's oriented around a discipline of cycling. That is not the most popular in the United States right now. Right like cross country mountain bike racing. I grew up doing it in the late 80s, early 90s during the heyday of cross country mountain bike racing when The United States was still pretty dominant before it shifted to Europe. And I was in the industry for a minute and had the opportunity to kind of see norba mountain bike racing at its peak during that time, it was pretty amazing. I still love the discipline, I strongly believe that I think we've seen it like there's definitely been a resurgence. And it's on the rise, and also with so many people into gravel cycling now. Bikes getting more rugged, they're adding suspension, fatter tires, the next thing you know, you start turning on the bikes, and you're mountain biking, right? And you're cross country mountain biking. But in the midst of all this gravel starts to get super hot. And you haven't gone in that direction. Why have you decided to stay the course and do what you're doing as athletes and creators?
Syd 40:48
Well, so for a long time, we were racing enduro, essentially exclusively, for about 2013 to 2019. And in 2019, we both sort of said, We've enjoyed enduro, it's great. We're racing a bunch of AWS, the Enduro World Series Series was getting more serious is maybe the best word like getting a
lot harder to dabble. In AWS racing, you know, it would have, we were kind of at the point where we're like, we would need to move to Europe to do this.
Yeah, either. We need to commit to like racing the whole series, at which point we need to be in Europe, because five out of the seven races are in Europe every year.
And to just get good at writing that style. Yes, we pretty much would have had to do that.
Andrew Vontz 41:35
And for people who are listening who don't know what enduro is, which is probably most of the people who are listening I've gotten I've started to go deep, deep into cycling direction with this podcast. It's not an entirely or even partially a cycling. Podcast. Cycling is kind of the thing that enables us to have conversations about all kinds of other things. But what is enduro for someone who has no idea what we're talking about.
Syd 41:58
So enduro is technically a downhill discipline, but you typically pedal the bikes to the top of the hill and race down, and you'll do multiple stages in a day. The name comes from Moto enduro, which would usually be like a very big loop, which had timed segments on it. So in mountain bike enduro, the segments are pretty much exclusively downhill that are timed, but you might be out on the bike for seven, eight hours a day. There's a lot of variance in enduro races, especially in the US, like some of them are in bike parks, and you actually take a chairlift to the top. But I think the most pure definition of enduro is like you're riding to the top of the hill untimed, you can take as long as you want, and then you race down.
And then they combine your times from all of those stages. And whoever has the shortest time or the fastest time wins. And this is in contrast to cross country, which is a mass start event. So everybody starts together. And then the first person, you know, you'll do one or multiple loops, and the first person to cross the finish line wins. And then on the other side is downhill, where you will practice a single stage or a single course a bunch of times, and then you race that course and you only you get one shot, whoever has the fastest time wins. So enduro was sort of something in between those two in that, you know, it was more like downhill and that you're only timed on the dissents. But you needed the fitness to be able to pedal your bike to the top, you needed a bike that could pedal to the top. And so it was somewhere in between, and it was it sort of saw a big surge and was the new hot thing in 2012 2013. We sort of saw that said, Hey, cool, enduro looks fun, we're going to do that. It's the new thing. Race that and then around 2019 said, Really, we want to be able to race, whatever kind of racing looks fun, we want to be able to race these bucket list events that, you know, you're in an epic place, or it's an especially difficult race. And to be able to do that, we need to get fitter. Because we had the descending skills. We had enough fitness to ride our bikes all day, but not to ride them really fast for you know, two hours like you wouldn't across country. So at that point, we started training for our fitness more, doing a different, you know, a mix of events. And at this point we're doing you know, a little bit of everything. Although I'd say our focus is more on the cross country side at this point.
Andrew Vontz 44:40
In Mackay, I don't want to body shame you're here. I've only seen you on YouTube, but it's for anyone listening. It's not highly typical to go from a gravity oriented discipline like enduro or downhill in the direction of cross country unless you were Shawn Palmer and anyone out there who remember Shawn Palmer. He was in his legend and he was tearing it up and downhill racing in the late 90s. And also was a pretty outstanding cross country racer, and also was into a lot of other disciplines that I don't think were additive to his bicycle racing. Anyhow. So Did did you have to undergo like a body transformation did you have to cut a bunch of weight to be a competitive cross country racer.
Syd 45:24
So I actually started off racing cross country. You know, as I mentioned, I got my pro card in 2006. So when I started racing enduro more seriously, I would say that I gained a certain amount of weight, mostly, you know, I,
I drank more strength training. Yeah,
I did more strength training, I did less high intensity, long, you know, intervals. So I, I built a fair amount of muscle, especially upper body and muscle and gained a certain amount of weight over the course of racing enduro, coming back to cross country has definitely been a transition. I, you know, we, we laugh sometimes, because you'll get these pictures of me and races around with my fellow competitors in we have very different builds would be probably the best way to put it. I tend to have a lot more upper body than a lot of the people I'm racing against. And this year, with the goal of going uphill faster. I have kind of, you know, we've worked with a dietitian and done some body composition stuff. And I have lost about 10 pounds. But with the goal of not decreasing strength, or necessarily muscle size a whole lot. So I have you know, slimmed down somewhat, I would say, I'm a little bit skinnier. But mostly I feel like I'm similarly strong. I'm just lighter, which has been great. I've had people say that they can kind of see the difference. It's a little bit harder for me to see it until I like look at videos from last year. And then I'm like, okay, yeah, I can I can see that. That difference now. But yeah, it has been, you know, I have made an effort to make some body composition changes, which is something I've never sort of thought about or tried to do in the past. And it's been it's been really interesting. It's been a neat experience, seeing what that entails and figuring out a way to do that in a way that is healthy for me, in that I'm not constantly thinking about food or worrying about, should I eat this or not eat this like that was our goal going into it is we want to healthy relate a continued healthy relationship with food. We don't want to be obsessing about it. We don't want to be thinking about it all the time. We just want to make some small tweaks that help us meet our goals without being you know, real obsessive about it. Because I know for me, that would be very unhealthy
Andrew Vontz 48:02
to go in a completely different direction. First, I feel like I have to note you mentioned that you went to Middlebury I had. In my career, I've had several interns from Middlebury, both of whom were national champions in different cycling disciplines. One was one was Zeke mastaba, who I believe was tired, maybe under 23, or junior Time Trial national champion, and then shout out Spence Peterson, who was Yeah, Jr. I believe his junior cross country national champion, so some strong intead King went there as well, right? Yep. As well, yeah, some strong cyclists coming out of Middlebury tearing it up, but to go in a completely different direction. What did you learn about cars and vehicles and what can go wrong with them? During your time on the road? What should people know about the realities of Van life? I have a couple of buddies who were early van lifers shout out John Gaffney. But besides going to the bathroom and buckets, what else kind of sucks about van life?
Syd 49:03
I mean, to be honest, living in a van is a really hard. Like, I suspect it's different if your van was built out and costs $150,000. It's probably easier in a lot of ways. But there's just things like we had a cooler we never had a fridge. But even if you have a fridge, they're tiny. So you can only fit like what maybe two days worth of food in there. A
lot of grocery shopping a lot of logistics. You're constantly
looking for a place to get water. You're constantly going grocery shopping, you always need more ice, you know, we had solar panel that we'd like set up. But if you're editing, you're never getting enough power for like the computers and the charging things that like basically you spent your whole life dealing with logistics instead of like it wasn't much of relaxing. Yeah.
It was really like not viable. So we ended up going back to Mackey's parents house. His parents were there some several of his siblings also came back. So pretty much spent COVID living with family, we were sleeping in our van in the driveway. So yeah, that was kind of the point where we were like, we always kind of thought van life would be good in the zombie apocalypse, but like maybe not. Like maybe we had that wrong. And you know, that was sort of when we started thinking about buying a house. And then it took quite a while after that to actually make that happen.
Andrew Vontz 52:15
How did you think about that from a storytelling point of view? And of course, I've seen your dramatic video where you announced it like you're coming off the road. But did you have any concerns about what that might do to your brand and your like, just what you were doing as creators?
Syd 52:30
Yeah. Yes.
I mean, we had never been deep into van life. YouTube, I think we didn't really have an idyllic van life.
Our van wasn't nice enough to Van life. Yeah.
Andrew Vontz 52:44
But I think that's part of what was compelling about your content, because I discovered you prior to you exiting van life, but I, the feeling that I had was, this is what it's actually like, yes. Rather than disparaging way, but I was like, yeah, if if you went out and did this, and you're a professional athlete, this is probably about what it would be like for most people, unless they have, I don't know, some kind of massive financial backing or a huge trust fund or have some kind of transcendent wealth, you're probably not in a $200,000 vehicle. You're in a shitty economy wide band, no offense. You got your stuff in a cooler, it's probably not a Yeti cooler, you're probably getting in fights about what happened to the last by the yogurt, whatever, maybe you maybe you didn't, that probably would happen to
Syd 53:31
me, you did learn if you don't refrigerate half and half, it turns into yogurt.
Andrew Vontz 53:37
Yeah, so so all these factors, there's a confluence of these factors. You're sleeping on your rooftop tent in a driveway. It sounds like and then when do you when do you decide, okay, we got to pull the plug. And then what kind of second and third order consequences did you think might happen as a result of that?
Syd 53:55
Yeah, I mean, I think we should probably like, like 2020 2021 was rough for us. In general, I had a really bad injury at the end of 2019. So I didn't ride a bike between November of 2019 and April of 2021. So so that was, I mean, the pandemic just completely blew our YouTube strategy to bits. Because it was just kind of funny, like in 2019, end of 2019. We'd finally like had the light bulb moment that we should have had years before which is that our channel is about racing. And 2021 No racing, I can't even ride. We're not even living in the fan anymore. We ended up renting in Boulder from I guess November of 2020. When we were we had been with family until then we moved up to Boulder in November so that I could do PT there
three days a week. Like we basically went to Boulder because since injury was not getting and better. And we realized if we want SID to be able to get back to racing and training the way she wants to, we have to commit more than we were, which was, you know, sort of remote work and seeing this PT up in Boulder, every couple months, we were like, We need to be in Boulder three times a week pte, like really commit to this. And we did that. And that's what you know, finally, tipped the balance. But it that was a hard. That was a hard time, just like from many, many people, the pandemic was really hard. And for us, it was just in a slightly different way.
Yeah, so I think by the time we got to actually buying a house, we were, we had not really done van life for over a year, you know, like we didn't really have another home, we were bouncing between places in Boulder and his parents house in Taos. You know, I think there was like a glimmer, like summer of 2021 where like, maybe we'll go back to me in life. And then it was very quickly like, this is not what I like can do with my injury, like continuing to recover like that is not going to happen in this environment. So that was when we were like, we're actually going to start trying to buy a house.
And I think we realized like sit it said in 2019. We sort of said, Okay, this channel is about racing, and performing and trying to be as good of bike racers as we can be. What, like, what does that look like? What sort of decisions do we need to make with that as our goal. And it became pretty clear that having a house was going to be more beneficial to those goals than living in a van, because then we have a place to recover. And we have a place to come back to and, you know, decreases the general level of stress on a day to day basis so that we can focus more on training and performance and racing and that I think we just sort of said, this is the right decision for us. We hope that our YouTube audience will support us in that and will still want to watch our videos and will understand that, you know, we're sharing these goals and we're sharing the fact that what we want to do is be as good of racers as possible. And this is working towards that. And we were really fortunate in that people did and they've been amazingly supportive. And it's I mean, we've seen We've certainly improved our videos. Since we got to house like it, it made a big difference. Our videos back here that made a big difference.
dual monitor computers theater that actually can export. Not it doesn't take 24 hours to do it. Yeah, I mean, I think we definitely had a lot of concerns when we're like, Oh, if you like tell people we bought a house like maybe they won't support us on Patreon anymore, because now we clearly quote unquote, have money. We're not dead broke. You know. And then I think we kind of have realized over the past year and a half that like, people do not expect us to live our entire lives in poverty just because we started. Poverty is not the right word. But like, you know, I mean, like we don't have to repeat dirtbags forever because we were for a while. I do think if anyone's like starting a brand of their own, like, maybe don't make it dependent on living in a van and having no money because that will become unappealing at some point.
You will I would say think carefully about what is the the basis of your channel? And is this something that you want to do long term? Because like our friend Paul, who ran Paul, the punter YouTube channel, his YouTube channel is called Paul the punter, which is basically like Paul the the rookie,
but he actually became like quite a good rider. And I think that was like a difficult transition for him as people want it. People didn't want to see him as a more expert level rider.
Yeah, they wanted him to still be a punter. And so like, I think that and so I'm, I'm so glad in hindsight, that we call her channel Sid Mackay. Yeah. Because, you know, like, sure if we broke up or, you know, whatever, that would have changed things. That has not happened. But like, I'm so glad that we did that. And I'm so glad that we just said like, we're going to talk about what we are doing and what we're excited about. Instead of, you know,
yeah, it's easier to transition. I think there's still been a transition phase. And I, this year has been really cool. Because I think it's the first year that we've started, like, people are really, really into the racing content. This year and last year, yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's been really cool to see because we're like, this is what we want to be doing. What we want you to be excited about, like, that's cool. Yeah.
Andrew Vontz 59:57
And then other than at this point, I have to assume that we have a world's first exclusive here that we are going to see the last tapes released at some point, the 2013 to 2017 videos, I have to assume that this is going to be like the vegan cyclists. I forget what is the last adventure, whatever his series is called, I assume we're gonna get the sit and Mackay Lost Tapes coming out soon.
Syd 1:00:23
I'm not sure anybody wants that. But
we have talked about doing a longer video at some point, sort of talking about our journey.
Maybe when we hit 100,000 subscribers, you know, good idea. Awesome.
Andrew Vontz 1:00:38
Yeah. smash that subscribe button. And by the way, rate, this podcast five stars on Apple podcasts or Spotify, if you're listening. What do you all what do you all want to do next is storytellers like, where do you want to take this thing? Where are you going?
Syd 1:00:54
That's really funny, because that's actually the second time today that someone has asked us that question. And we do not have the answer.
Andrew Vontz 1:01:02
We already got to practice. So.
Syd 1:01:05
I mean, I think yeah, it's hard. Our previous conversation about an hour ago, someone was encouraging us to enter in film festivals, which had never occurred to us before. So maybe something like that, maybe something a little longer form, like we definitely have considered, you know, going back and doing some of the, like, the videos that we've done a series like, could we pull that together into like a single kind of documentary style piece, which I think would be a good storytelling challenge, for sure. Because we're pretty good at that story of like, you know, when it's all within one day, you know, but to try to take the whole race or the whole event and do a longer form video, I think, something we're super interested in doing. I mean, we're changing things all the time, you know, we're adding more graphics and figuring out how to do that to like, kind of add different layers and, and give people a better idea of what we're doing.
I think just in general, it's always, you know, it's been a continuous process of learning how to tell a story and make what we're doing. Understandable, and consumable, hopefully to people who aren't even into mountain bike racing, that's, that's always sort of been our ultimate goal is, we want people to be able to share this with, you know, a spouse, or a friend or a relative who isn't into mountain biking or isn't into racing, and have them enjoy the video also, because it's a, it's a story of, you know, working hard and trying something that's difficult and pushing your limits and failing sometimes and succeeding sometimes. And, you know, those are all the components of it's all the components of life. I mean, to be totally honest, but also happens to be the components of storytelling. And so our goal is to share that in a way that is accessible to anybody, just the way that you know, Netflix has the like, BIG WAVE SURFER series that like most people aren't big wave surfers and know nothing about it. So how can you make that accessible to everyone? And I think our goal is to do do the same as make this idea of mountain biking and training and racing at a professional level. Something that anyone can enjoy following and, and watching. Yeah.
Andrew Vontz 1:03:39
Well, I certainly have enjoyed following and watching and said Mackey thanks for being here today. I appreciate you taking time to chop it up with me and I'm really looking forward to see where this adventure goes next, whether it's on four wheels 18 or in a static dwelling unit. It's it's exciting. So thanks for making time for this. It's been a lot of fun.