The story below is a preview from our July/August 2017 issue. For the full story Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
How one man discovered true happiness amid sheep, dogs and fellow cyclists, and found gloriously imaginative ways to bring them all together into a satisfying life.
John Park
The morning air lies hot and heavy over the tiny town of Meadows of Dan. It’s only 9 a.m., but the day is already a doozy with no cloud cover and temperatures promised to soar into the upper 90s. But seventeen of us are here, milling around a parking lot, pumping up tires, and swapping cans of spray-on sunscreen. Some of us are girlfriends of chefs, others are entrepreneurs, and some of us are those who spend 12-plus hours a day on our feet making your restaurant experience the best you’ve ever had.
But one thing binds us together: a love of food and Craig Rogers.
On this particular morning, our group forms the inaugural Lambstock Cycling Club. Our motto: Ride, Dine, Imbibe, Repeat. Our initiation? Wake up on the Saturday of Lambstock (a Burning Man-like weekend, but for those in the restaurant-industry), roll out of our tents before breakfast is served, and ride on the Blue Ridge Parkway towards Groundhog Mountain and back. We’re the crazy ones at a campout known, occasionally, for some borderline crazy behavior. For some, crazy meant staying up late slinging pizzas into a traveling brick oven. For others, it was being the drunk ones gobbling down the handmade pies.
As for me, the writer in the bunch, my crazy meant not drinking one too many cocktails on tap and going to tent early. No matter our crazy, we were up, slicked in spandex, and ready to ride into the mounting heat with Rogers, the shepherd of both sheep and cyclists, at the helm.
Two years ago, if you’d told Craig Rogers that he’d wake up early every morning of Lambstock to ride a bike instead of nursing a Bloody Mary, he would have laughed you out of sight. In 2015, Border Springs Farm was gaining notoriety as providing the best East Coast lamb. It was impossible not to find his lamb on a menu this side of the Mississippi and, by necessity and design, Rogers’s relationship-based marketing efforts (if you see his lamb on a menu, then he knows the chef—which is to say, he knows a lot of chefs) had turned both his farm and sheep into culinary rock stars. Rogers spent his days not just raising sheep, but also jetting all over the eastern half of the U.S. to drop in at restaurants and festivals, all while embracing (rightfully so) his status as a celebrity farmer.
That’s all to say that, when Besha Rodell wrote in Modern Farmer in 2012, that Rogers was “big, boisterous, and selling lamb to some of America’s top chefs,” she wasn’t wrong. Much of his persona, and the success of his, as he lovingly calls it, “retirement hobby gone bad,” relied heavily on enjoying and promoting the restaurant industry.
“In the industry,” he explained as we sat down on some hay bales to enjoy a bluegrass band picking on the Lambstock stage, “there’s a tendency for people to live large. To work and party and eat.” When visiting restaurants, he’d often (with the help of friends) sample the entire menu—and it added up to a waistline and a lifestyle that certainly loomed large.
But in Spring of 2015, three events changed Rogers’s life. That March, he decided to take his father, a lifelong Red Sox fan, to Spring Training in Florida for his 80th birthday.
“My father was in a wheelchair, and it was difficult for him to get around,” Rogers recounts. “I had this realization about mobility, that once you lose it, it really affects your life.” While the ball games, the Florida sun and the time spent with his father were memorable, watching his father struggle getting to his seat at the games gave Craig something of an hourglass to watch—time was passing, he realized, and maybe he was on the lighter side of it.
A few weeks later, at the Charleston Food and Wine Festival, while running the Lambs & Clams event with Rappahanock Oysters and enjoying the raucous event, Rogers discovered a cyst on his neck. The pain was debilitating, and after visiting the emergency room to have it drained, he recalls that “the doctor admonished me for not telling him that I was a severe diabetic.”
Rogers couldn’t have told the doctor. He didn’t even know that he was diabetic.
Finally, on May 4, the eve of the James Beard Awards ceremony in Chicago, Rogers, along with everyone else in the food world, was shocked to hear of the passing of Josh Ozersky, a good friend and Lambstock attendee. Only 47 years old, Ozersky was already one of the greats of food writing—as an author of numerous books, the founder of New York Magazine’s food blog, Grub Hub, and an editor-at-large of Esquire. He’d earned a James Beard award of his own and was known for living large—he’d founded the meat-centric festival, Meatopia, after all—and his death, a seizure that led to drowning in a shower, silenced the community.
For Rogers, all of this meant something needed to change, and change fast.
While Rogers had always enjoyed, “good food, drink, and travel,” his original career was that of an academic. With a PhD in mechanical engineering, he spent most of his career as a professor and administrator. After retiring from academia, he then went on to head a microelectronics firm and, later, serve as an intellectual property consultant—careers he downplays for fear their mention might downgrade his farmer cred. Indeed, it’s rare to find a thrice-retired “smart guy” rounding up sheep with the help of a couple of beloved border collies, but it is his true love.
But retirement didn’t sit well with Rogers, even when he decided in 2002 to buy a farm in Patrick County. Nestled in rolling and stereotypical verdant hills, Border Springs Farm looks like a scene from a nursery rhyme. Border collies run the fence behind the Rogerses’ house, turkeys gaggle in a pen a few hundred yards away, and, off in the distance, practically melting into the drinkable blue sky, fluffy white sheep dot the hills. Just try to visit the farm and not fall in love—it’s impossible.
Back in those early days, Rogers had no intention of becoming a full-fledged shepherd. Border collies were his first love, and he traveled all over the U.S. for competitions. At these events, he’d run his dogs through trials, swap stories with other regulars, and even arrange ‘on-the-farm’ experiences with ranchers—all with the goal of becoming a better Border Collie competitor. In order to train his dogs, though, Rogers needed sheep, and “after a few years, I realized I was a sheep hoarder,” he laughs.
“I was leaving 600 sheep behind when I drove away for a competition.” Those 600 sheep, of course, required quite a lot of work, and, importantly for the evolution of the farm, Rogers understood that he enjoyed the work more than the competitions.
“Chefs are passionate, obsessive people,” Rogers muses, then pauses, looking out at the two bearded cooks from South Carolina grilling handmade sausages over an open flame. “To be a great chef, you have to be obsessive about food. I think that’s why cycling is so perfect.” It’s this obsession that drove Rogers to learn how to raise the perfect sheep (it’s all about the grass they eat—“you could say I’m a grass farmer,” he laughs) and this obsession that, eventually, turned him from overindulgence to road warrior.
As a former marathoner, it didn’t take Rogers long to realize that pounding the pavement wasn’t what he loved anymore. Although he tried walking on the treadmill, it just didn’t give him the pleasure that running used to—and as anyone in the industry will tell you, pleasure is just as important to the success of something as any other element (i.e. a dish can’t just look good, it also has to taste good).
That’s when a conversation with Chuck and Diane Flynt, the farmer-cidermakers behind Foggy Ridge Cider in Floyd, Virginia, saved Rogers’s life.
Every year in September, they told him, Chuck celebrates his birthday by riding his age in miles on the Blue Ridge Parkway. That year, he planned to ride 75 miles for his 75th birthday. It seemed like the perfect challenge for Rogers—slightly ludicrous and unimaginable, but something that had to be doable if a friend almost 20 years his senior was up to task. So on April 15, 2015, Rogers bought a Bianchi comfort bike from Mt. Airy Cyclery, drove over to the Emily B. Taylor Greenway, and pedaled the first mile of the rest of his life.
From the first mile, he was hooked—road cycling offered both the challenge and the rush that a treadmill lacked. Adding on the miles every day, Rogers quickly graduated from flat rails-to-trails like the New River Trail, and began to tackle the Blue Ridge Parkway, where elevation became the coach he needed.
“Chuck’s birthday ride was going to be 75 miles and 7,000 feet of climbing,” Rogers explains. “It’s not easy on that part of the Parkway in Floyd.”
To prepare, Rogers rode almost daily, taking his bike with him on business trips to restaurants and food festivals, finding saddle time even when it seemed his schedule was slammed. So by Chuck Flynt’s birthday that September, Rogers was ready, and he celebrated his friend on two wheels—the best toast either of them could have imagined.
At that point Rogers was riding over 250 miles a week. Not only were the pounds falling off—over the past two years he’s shed over 100 pounds and 10 waistline inches, all while never dieting—but, after just six months on the bike, his doctor declared him diabetes-free. Rogers reversed his most life-altering illness simply by discovering, as he tells it, “the joy in each big mountain climb.”
What happens at Lambstock stays at Lambstock, chefs often joke. It’s a safe space for those in the industry to relax and unwind free of the public’s eye. While every meal and snack is a treat prepared by teams of camping chefs, there’s also a stage with rotating sets of visiting musicians, skeet shooting, farm tours, foraging lessons and unlimited naps. As of this year, of course, there are cycling trips every morning.
When Rogers invited Bryan Voltaggio seven years ago to bring his staff to camp, roast a lamb, and enjoy the Virginia countryside (the first iteration of Lambstock), he couldn’t have quite envisioned the hundreds-strong crowd that arrived this year. Seven years into something, however, and things change. Thankfully, in the case of Lambstock, the soul, the meat of it, hasn’t been lost.
That’s the thing about Rogers—he wants to share the best of life with everyone he knows and the more who know, the merrier. He isn’t one to be stingy. Border Springs became the farm and the product that it is today because he wanted to share the best lamb with the best chefs. Lambstock is now, arguably, the most famous secret campout because he wanted to extend Southern hospitality to a group of overworked, often underpaid, and hugely talented chefs. Now cycling has become Rogers’s call to action, his “go tell it on the mountain” passion.
As we’re wrapping up the interview, Rogers turns thoughtful.
“There’s a maturity in the industry lately,” he says. “It’s a movement in chefs of a certain age towards sobriety and towards being more healthful.”
In other words, that stereotype of the work-hard-play-hard chef might be changing—for good.
“When I travel, I reach out to other chefs to see if they want to ride, and chefs call me up and ask for advice, to ask how a big guy gets on a bike,” he explains. “My marketing went from afterparties to cycling. My branding changed!”
It’s more than just rebranding though—it’s renewing life. It’s about being ready to succeed every day on the bike, to tackle each new mountain as it rises, and to preach the good news of cycling to a very receptive flock. There were only 17 of us riding that inaugural Saturday morning at Lambstock, but I bet my next fried chicken drumstick that this year, we will double. Just like Lambstock itself, once word spreads, the flock always and enthusiastically gathers.
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