My 2026 Unbound 200 Race Recap: Not Fast, Forward

I crossed the finish line at 2:47 in the morning. I had been awake for nearly twenty-three hours. I had spent more than twenty hours on the bike. I rolled through the finishing chute, sat up, took my hands off the bars, and tried to take it in for a second.

The barriers.

The lights.

The announcer.

The people still cheering in the middle of the night.

The finish line I had been thinking about for years.

Then I saw Jessie. I rolled over, and gave her a kiss. I collected my medal, grabbed my finisher’s swag, and a few minutes later found myself sitting in a parking lot in Emporia eating pizza at three in the morning.

More than anything, what I felt was satisfaction. Overwhelming, emotional satisfaction. This was my third attempt at Unbound Gravel 200, and for a long time I wasn’t sure I would ever finish it.

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My first attempt ended around mile 120. That day I went out with delusions of grandeur. This was the last edition before the pros got their own start. I hung on to the main group that included multiple current and former World Tour pros for the first 20 miles. I knew that was a bad idea, but it was my first Unbound, I was excited and in pretty good shape. Ultimately, I paid the price of getting caught up in groups that were moving too fast, burning matches I couldn’t afford to burn too early. I also under-fueled, and had to deal with five punctures in one of the hottest recent editions of Unbound.

There is a particular kind of misery that comes from a true bonk. It’s not just fatigue. It’s like a switch is flipped in your body and everything shuts down. That’s what happened to me that day.

As much as that one hurt, my second attempt hurt much more. That year I made it all the way to mile 166. I had excellent fitness, but I had gone into the race with a picture in my head of what success looked like. I wanted a fourteen or fifteen-hour finish; I believed I could “beat the sun”. I didn’t want to make the same mistake as last time, but I wanted to ride hard and have a good result.

Halfway through the race it was obvious none of that was happening. The day had gotten away from me. Conditions were hard, there was the infamous peanut butter mud, and an early 4 miles of hike-a-bike. Later in the race there was immense heat, followed by heavy rain. My pace gradually slowed well below the 14.5MPH needed to beat the sun. I was looking at twenty-plus hours, at least.

I was physically exhausted, but more significantly, I was psychologically broken.

I remember sitting at that final checkpoint at 11 PM. Phone dead. Headlamp dead. Body, mind, and soul destroyed. I was convinced I couldn’t finish. Not wouldn’t, but couldn’t.

I didn’t believe I had it in me.

I didn’t believe I could make the 3:00 AM cutoff.

I didn’t believe the remaining miles were possible.

And I quit.

For two years that race lived in the back of my mind.

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I wanted this year to be different, but my preparation was far from ideal. Through mid-April I wasn’t even training for Unbound, but for my first marathon. I ran the Bend Marathon with Jessie in April, finished in a little over five hours, and only then shifted my focus fully to cycling. That left me with just a handful of weeks to build bike fitness.

With the Marathon in my legs, I believed overall fitness probably wasn’t the biggest question. Durability was.

Could my hands survive twenty hours?

Could my neck?

Could my back?

Could I stay on top of nutrition?

Could I stay positive when things inevitably went sideways?

Most of my conversations leading into the race weren’t about watts or speed. They were about finishing. They were about survival. I talked endlessly with Jessie. I talked endlessly with ChatGPT. I thought through scenarios over and over again.

What if it rains?

What if it’s muddy?

What if I’m walking?

What if I’m slower than expected?

What if I need twenty hours?

For the first time, I wasn’t preparing for the race I wanted, I was preparing for the race I might get.

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The race started the same way most Unbounds start, a neutral lead out for a few miles to the gravel, then chaos.

I lined up in the fourteen-hour corral, though those corrals don’t mean much once the race begins. Thousands of riders pour out of Emporia and onto the gravel, and within minutes the entire field stretches into an endless ribbon of cyclists.

My plan was simple. Ride around 130 beats per minute the entire race, hoping to only see a gradual increase in the final third.

Splits happen quickly. Every few minutes a group would surge ahead. I’d let them go. Another would come by. I’d tuck in behind them. I spent the first several hours doing little more than managing effort and trying not to get caught up in anyone else’s race.

Very early on we hit the muddy section that had turned into a four-mile hike-a-bike nightmare in 2023. I had been thinking about that section for months. When I got there, it was muddy, slippery, and messy, but rideable. I rolled through it thinking, this is good, one hurdle down. Many more to go.

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The weather quickly became the defining character of the day. Around mile twenty the first truly torrential rain arrived. Not a drizzle, not a shower, a downpour. I stopped and pulled on my rain jacket, something I didn’t have in previous years, which led to my body temp fluctuating too much, which I think was a signifigant contribution to my last DNF.

The rain hammered the gravel, hammered me, but I manged it.

Then, an hour later, the sun came out.

Then it rained again.

Then it hailed.

Then it became hot.

Then humid.

Then stormy again.

The weather never settled into anything predictable. It simply rotated through every possible condition Kansas could offer. But somehow, none of it really bothered me. I don’t mean it wasn’t miserable, it was. But I had already accepted that miserable was part of the deal. Every storm became just another thing to ride through.

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The first checkpoint, mile 44, in the town of Madison came quickly. I felt surprisingly good. My neck, back, and hands were fine, something I was worried about not having spent a lot of long days in the saddle this year. I refilled bottles, dumped hydration and carb mix into everything, scraped mud off the bike, lubed my chain, ate some aid-station food, drank a small Coke, and got moving again.

Looking back, aside from psychological readiness, nutrition was probably the single biggest difference between this year and every previous attempt. I believe I spent years under-fueling endurance events. This year I was taking in close to 100 grams of carbohydrates per hour. Drink mix, chews, aid station food, Coke, whatever was available to me, I just kept eating. Hour after hour.

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The miles after Madison were a long, gradual grind upward toward Texaco Hill and Teter Hill. The weather turned ugly again. Dark clouds rolled in. Thunder started rumbling. I got hit by hail again. Lightning flashed in the distance, and some not so distant.

The climbs at Unbound aren’t especially steep or long. Unbound climbing is just a relentless recurrence of kickers and rollers that add up over the course of the day. It’s death by a thousand paper cuts to the legs.

But unlike some of the long Oregon climbs where I struggle to keep my heart rate under control, I was able to ride most of them comfortably and steadily. I wasn’t fast. But I was always moving forward.

That became the theme of the entire day. Not fast. Forward.

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The middle of the race blurred together into a series of problems to solve. A saddle bag that wouldn’t stay attached due to muddy velcro. A grinding chain that lost all lubrication in repeated storms, so much so that I resorted to drenching it in hydration fluid, which was surprisingly effective. Rain and mud, thunder and lightning, wind and heat, rocks and dirt, all the things. I wasn’t racing, I was navigating the situations that presented themselves. Every hour brought a new issue. Every hour required another decision. And somehow I kept solving them one at a time.

Checkpoint 2 came at mile 100 in Matfield Green, and I repeated the process. Eat, drink, scrape mud, lube chain, fresh socks, and even fresh kit, there were a few cups of mud that had made it’s way into my bib shorts, and thankfully I came prepared with a fresh kit in my drop bag.

Around mile 115 I reached the flooded railroad underpass. Jessie had texted me a picture of it earlier. That ended up being incredibly helpful, because when I arrived, there was no surprise, just acceptance. There it was, a flooded tunnel beneath a train crossing. People stopped. People stared. Some tried riding through. Others walked their bike. I picked up my bike, threw it on my shoulder, not wanting to wash off any more chain lube, and carried it through. The water came nearly to my knees. My feet were soaked again, just 15 miles after getting fresh socks at checkpoint 2. And then I climbed out the other side and kept going.

In a sense, that moment was symbolic of the whole day. The obstacle didn’t need to be enjoyable. It didn’t need to be fair. It simply needed to be overcome.

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The hardest stretch of the race came between roughly mile 125 and the final checkpoint. Not because it was the steepest, or the muddiest, but because it felt endless. The miles barely moved. The rollers never stopped. The weather returned. The mud returned. At one point I trudged through a stretch of true peanut butter mud that forced nearly everyone to walk. At another I was startled by the sound of thunder cracking louder than I’d ever heard before.

Then I started to get a headache. It was manageable, but I was so happy to find a local standing beside the road after a tough mud segment handing out water and Coke. I drank an entire can in seconds, and within minutes I felt better.

I kept moving. The sun was setting, and I kept moving.

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The final checkpoint, mile 162 in Council Grove, was where everything changed. The last time I reached this point in the race, I was destroyed. This time I wasn’t. I was tired, certainly. But I wasn’t broken, and more importantly, I still believed I could finish. All day I had been looking forward to seeing Jessie, Emma, and G at this checkpoint. Just seeing them when I rolled in was a huge emotional release.

I changed socks again, along with the rest of the checkpoint ritual. I drank a Coke and some rice from Chipotle Jessie had brought me, and headed back into the darkness.

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The final forty miles contained some of the worst conditions of the entire race. The storms returned almost immediately, dry socks just weren’t meant to be this day. The rain intensified more and more, the roads became muddy and had some of the most technical and rutted sectors on the course.

Then my headlight started dying. I had waited as long as I could to turn it on, but the darkness that remained was too long. A little red light started flashing just like it had last time. At first I tried not to think about it, but it was obvious I wasn’t going to make it to the finish with the light I had.

I knew I needed to find someone to ride next to and share their light. Around that time, I came across another rider named Will from San Francisco. I explained the situation, and he immediately agreed to ride together. Shortly after my light died. For roughly fifteen miles I rode beside Will, sharing his light through some of the sketchiest terrain of the entire race.

At one point I nearly went over the handlebars descending through deep muddy ruts. For a moment I was certain I was crashing. Somehow I unclipped both feet, stumbled forward, caught myself, and stayed upright. I still don’t entirely know how.

The only time I truly became worried all day came in those final miles. Not about the terrain or the weather, but the clock. For a while I became convinced I might finish the course and still miss the 3:00 AM cutoff, technically DNFing my third Unbound. That thought bothered me deeply.

I started doing math.

Watching the clock.

Calculating miles.

Calculating pace.

Trying to figure out whether I still had enough time.

I started pacing Will. He sat in my draft just off center of my wheel so my shadow didn’t completely block his light that I was relying on. Every time I tried to raise the pace Will would drop. He wanted to finish within the cut off too, but I wanted to press on to make sure it happened.

Will and his light got me through the final technical sections of the race. Once we reached smoother Gravel in the outskirts of Emporia, Will encouraged me to press on in the dark to not risk missing the time cut. I thanked him and pushed on. I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again, but I won’t forget him.

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I was riding in the dark, navigating shadows, pressing as many watts as I could nearly 20 hours into the race, hoping I wouldn’t puncture on the sharp flint rock. Somewhere around ten or fifteen miles from the finish, I realized I was going to make it. Not maybe, not probably, I knew.

So did Jessie.

The final miles passed quickly. The gravel ended. The pavement returned. The lights of Emporia appeared. I weaved around Emporia State University and stood out of the saddle and climbed the final climb, Highland Hill. It’s a short paved kicker, where the pros make one final effort to drop each other to avoid a sprint finish. Some riders were walking. I couldn’t imagine walking. Not now, not after all of this.

At the top of the climb, the barriers start. I turned the corner and entered the final straightaway. I saw the finish line.

And for a few seconds I simply tried to appreciate it.

The failures.

The preparation.

The uncertainty.

The storms.

The mud.

The 206.7 miles.

The satisfaction.

Everything.

And then I crossed the finish line.

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For a long time I thought finishing Unbound was about becoming fitter, stronger, and faster. Now I think, at least for me, it was mostly about becoming honest. Honest about what the race is. Honest about what I’m capable of. Honest about how long it might take. Honest about how much suffering I’m willing to endure.

This year I wasn’t the strongest version of myself. I wasn’t the fastest or fittest I’ve been. But for the first time, I showed up prepared to accept whatever the race became. And whatever the race became, I just kept moving forward.

At 2:47 in the morning, after more than twenty hours on the bike through what is said to be one of the hardest editions of the race ever, that forward movement was enough. I finished Unbound.

I love cycling. There’s something about endurance sport that resonates with me deeply. It’s about endurance, perseverance, suffering, pressing on, navigating the course whatever the terrain may be, and the incredible joy and sense of accomplishment that comes from finishing. There’s something there that mirrors life in many ways, and I love it.