Stephen Fitzgerald gets lots of messages from people asking for free bikes. Some of them are young, “strong regional juniors,” who may be at the top of their field and ready to take the next step in gravel racing.
As the owner and founder of Rodeo Labs, a small boutique brand in Denver — ironically made more famous when Fitzgerald and two buddies finished Unbound Gravel on beach cruisers from Walmart — Fitzgerald cannot, and does not, care to respond to many of these emails.
“I’m sure many of those emails come from good kids, but they tend to be stuck in an older ‘I’m fast so can I get a free bike and disappear’ paradigm,” Fitzgerald said.
When Edyn Teitge sent Fitzgerald an email in the spring of 2023, Fitzgerald first lumped the then 14-year-old into that category. Then, he did a little digging. He learned that Teitge already had a foot firmly planted in endurance and ultra-endurance riding “with solid finishes at events that would certainly scare me at three times his age.”
“Enough seemed special about him to keep talking, but it occurred to me that I was talking to a 14-year-old. Is that even legal?” Fitzgerald wondered.
Fitzgerald set up a call with Teitge and his father where he learned even more about the teenager from Hailey, Idaho. It became clear that Teitge was not looking for a free ride, nor were his parents putting him up to it. Teitge, Fitzgerald said, was “a scrappy guy,” who worked in a bike shop and sourced his own equipment.
Still, Fitzgerald was not in a rush to offer Rodeo’s support, especially considering that Teitge had goals well outside doing the occasional gravel race — including racing the Tour Divide, the 2,750-mile bikepacking behemoth, in 2024.
“Honestly, I thought a lot about the risk and danger of our sport,” Fitzgerald said. “Is it exploitative for us to try to get a youngster riding on our gear because it’s such a cool story, all the while knowing that self-supported and ultra-distance sport is not without real risk?”
Fitzgerald didn’t close the door completely but with those hesitations he didn’t invite Teitge in, either. Then in August of 2023, Teitge simply showed up.
Teitge had just scratched from the Colorado Trail Race, a daunting 530-mile singletrack epic from Durango to Denver, after injuring his knee. He and his dad traveled to Denver to visit the Rodeo Labs HQ and meet Fitzgerald in person. That visit was the race-winning move, so to speak.
“I find it very indicative of an athlete’s ethic when they will go out of their way to meet and engage with us in person, and not just through DMs and emails,” Fitzgerald said. “Edyn showed up. I met him and his dad, we got to talk about his goals. Edyn has focus and maturity at least a decade beyond his actual age. That visit was the final push I needed to know that he was absolutely the real deal, and with or without our support he was going to go out and go after his goals.”
Fitzgerald signed on to sponsor Teitge, building him a custom-painted 56cm Trail Donkey 4.0 and Rodeo 2.0 carbon wheels. In September, Teitge raced the bike at Rebecca’s Private Idaho, a three-day stage race in Idaho. As part of his agreement with Rodeo, he wrote about it for the brand’s online journal.
Throughout the fall of 2023, and the winter and spring of 2024, Teitge rode a ton, racing cross-country in his local NICA league, doing a few winter fat bike races, and putting in miles on the Trail Donkey. He was also a freshman in high school. What Teitge did not do, was “get a free bike and disappear,” as Fitzgerald had initially feared.
Rather, he stayed the course — going after his own goals — and on July 3 this year, he became the youngest solo finisher of the Tour Divide, completing the 2,750-mile ultra-race in 19 days, 13 hours, and 14 minutes.
Bikepacking roots
Most people’s stories of racing the Tour Divide are, to use an overused word, epic. Hallucinations of predatory people and animals, nights spent shivering in pit toilet stalls, ride-ending saddle sores — the list goes on. When you ask a 15-year-old how it went, they tend to go into less detail.
“I didn’t really have any expectations going into it, except that it would be hard,” Teitge told me. “And it was.”
Teitge said that one of his favorite memories was the first day of the ride, after leaving Banff. He remembered how “dramatic and pretty” the Canadian Rockies looked jutting against the sky. He also liked riding through Colorado, where the roads were smooth and fast. His lowest points were weather-related: the early days in Montana where it was “raining and snowing for five days straight.” And then, when he was approaching the finish line in New Mexico, afternoon storms would blacken the sky and unleash torrentially across the high desert.
But camping alone? Evading grizzly bears? Finding stores where he could buy enough calories to keep him fueled for 12+ hour days on the bike? Even knowing how many calories that was?
None of that seemed to fluster Teitge at all. Nor did the riding itself, which he says averaged about 140 miles per day.
Teitge’s upbringing may have something to do with it. He grew up in the Wood River Valley of Idaho, where his dad always “put a bike in front of him.” And not just any bike, but a “cool” bike, Edyn’s dad Miles Teitge told me. Edyn went on his first bikepacking trip with Miles and another friend/dad duo when he was nine or 10. Another bikepacking trip — both on the Idaho Hot Springs route — followed a year later with his mom and a friend/mom duo.
In the meantime, Edyn started participating in school-based cycling activities, joining the local National Interscholastic Cycling Association (NICA) mountain bike league when he was old enough.
But Miles thinks it was the early long-distance trips that might have ignited the spark that is a full-blown flame for Edyn now.
“I think those rides are where he picked up on that independence, freedom, that possibility,” Miles said.
According to Edyn, the bikepacking racing bug bit him in 2022, when he started following the Tour Divide. It was a notoriously snowy and brutal year, especially in the high country of Colorado.
“I thought, ‘Oh that’s interesting,’ and started following it through Instagram or whatever,” he said. “And then in 2023 it was like, ‘Oh I wanna do that.”
After learning about the Divide in 2022, Edyn began to research bikepacking races with the foresight of someone much older. He was comfortable with the nuts and bolts of bikepacking from the tours with his parents, but the racing part was new and he wanted a beta test. He learned about the Smoke n Fire 400 in Idaho, and he and Miles toured the 370-mile route that summer. A few weeks later, at age 13, Edyn signed up for the race.
Then, he ended up finishing sixth overall, despite smoky conditions and reroutes due to wildfires. In a recap on bikepacking.com, Edyn summarized the race with the humblest of brags.
“I was only about eight hours behind the winner, Jay Petervery, and three hours behind the second-place finisher, who was also the first female, Lauren Brownlee. I want to continue to do endurance races like this one and hope to continue to meet such kind and encouraging people.”
Competent and trustworthy
What puts the Tour Divide in a league of its own among bikepacking races is its scale. The route is massive, in distance and in vert. It traverses a wide swath of the American west where there isn’t much in terms of infrastructure. For that reason, having dialed equipment is incredibly important, as is being self-sufficient. There are enough hotels and stores along the way to meet a racer’s basic needs, but all of it — the equipment, the logistics — requires a lot of planning.
Edyn did most of that on his own.
In addition to reaching out to Fitzgerald at Rodeo Labs last year, Edyn asked for frame bags from Tailfin. He applied for a bikepacking scholarship from Rebecca Rusch’s Be Good Foundation to cover some costs. Then, he built up his rig just so by “watching people’s YouTube videos of what they brought and sort-of knowing what I needed based on other rides I did.
“I was super stoked with everything I had,” he said. “I used all my gear and felt like it was all worth it.”
On the trail, Edyn only had two mechanicals the entire 2,750 miles —one puncture and one sidewall tear in southern Canada. He rode with a tube in until Columbia Falls, Montana where he bought a 45c Maxxis Rambler because that was all he could find. 200 miles later in Helena, he replaced that with a 2.1 Maxxis Pace.
From a lifetime spent around bikes and a weekend job working at a local bike shop, Edyn knows his way around a mechanical. Really, without knowing how to work on his own equipment, the Tour Divide probably wouldn’t have been possible for such a young rider. Same goes for not knowing how to pitch a tent, to boil water, to poop in the woods — all skills Edyn mastered at a young age.
In fact, that explains a lot of how and why the parents of a 15-year-old boy would let him ride his bike down the spine of the Continental Divide by himself for nearly a month.
“In life in general Edyn’s pretty competent,” Miles said. “And he’s pretty competent with the biking and navigation and the bike mechanic’ing skills. Staying out riding and camping. I have a lot of faith in his capacity in those realms. So it was just an extension of that, I think.”
“They just trust me and they know that I can make pretty good decisions and stay safe out there,” Edyn said.
While his parents did trust him, they are also his parents. So while Edyn had initially told his dad, ‘Just drop me off in Banff and leave,’ Miles didn’t feel comfortable doing that. So he “shadowed from the periphery,” occasionally weaving through the route just to make sure his son was OK.
“It was excruciating at times,” Miles said, not because he was worried about Edyn’s well-being but because he witnessed Edyn indulging in the gas station buffet that bikepackers subsist on. A self-proclaimed “helicopter parent around eating organic,” it pained Miles to know that Edyn was eating things like Twinkies.
Nevertheless, he was thrilled when Edyn came home with an empty ziplock baggie that had been filled with vitamins 20 days earlier.
The other side of bikepacking racing, once the calories have been consumed and the tent stakes put away, is the mental one. What do people think about for so many hours as they turn the cranks? And where do their minds go when the going gets tough?
For Edyn, “a really long Spotify playlist,” podcasts, and audiobooks helped him pass the time. When the conditions were shitty — which, in Montana and New Mexico, they often were — the focus was forward momentum, “just to keep pedaling,” Edyn said.
More often than not, though, “you just sort of like get in a zone where you’re not really thinking about anything. You’re just zoned out and riding,” he said.
To Miles, Edyn’s being zoned out translated to a “super receptive state” — one not always accessible to the parents of a teenager.
“Near the end, he was calling, not even to talk really,” Miles said. “It was like he was in a super receptive place, where he was actually willing to listen to me. Which was great because I never know and especially around this event, any of my suggestions, he wasn’t really taking them. I think it’s just where he’s at right now, he really wants to find himself.”
For now, Edyn is pretty happy to be home, where he can sleep in and not jump on his bike first thing in the morning. He decided, while on the Divide, that he wants to focus on shorter cross-country racing this year and maybe do another 400-mile race with a friend this fall.
But he’s definitely not done with ultra-distance bikepacking. He has unfinished business on the Colorado Trail, and he’s interested in the Arizona Trail Race, too. He even said he’d do the Divide again, “it was super fun.”
Back at Rodeo Labs in Denver, Fitzgerald was awestruck by Edyn’s accomplishment on the Divide. While his initial hesitation in supporting him was vanquished by Edyn’s in-person visit last summer, the father of three still wasn’t sure the 15-year-old could actually do “2,750 miles across the wilds of America solo.”
“I made peace with the fact that we weren’t betting our support on him finishing, which might only have 50/50 odds of success,” Fitzgerald said. “Instead we were betting on his incredible passion and work ethic, which were already 100 percent proven.
“Most of Edyn’s drive is unrelatable to me, but the one thing I can absolutely empathize with about Edyn is his love for bikes, and the passion that he has at his age. Even though I wasn’t into endurance and ultra-endurance at his age, bikes captivated me entirely at 15-years-old. Since that age bikes have given me the framework to build an identity, career, and now a business. It’s awesome to see that passion burn even brighter in someone else.”
Source URL: https://velo.outsideonline.com/gravel/gravel-racing/edyn-teitge-youngest-solo-tour-divide-finisher/