I Got My Ass Kicked By America’s Dirtiest Bike Race

June 20, 2023 6:19 AM

Unbound is a 200-mile race on the dirt and gravel roads around the Flint Hills of Kansas, and is notorious for its extremely challenging course and weather conditions. Unbound is now the most prestigious bike race in America. It's the crown jewel of gravel racing, a sub-discipline of cycling that prides itself on being far more independent and inclusive than Euro-style road racing. If the modern pro peloton is so high-tech and ready for the limelight that it's got its own Drive to Survive-style docuseries on the way, gravel racing like Unbound is closer to the Tour's early days: Here's the course, you figure it out, see you at the finish line. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan (29 comments total)

Phew. I ride road, not gravel, but every word of this resonates deeply with me. Great story.
posted by adamrice at 6:52 AM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

There was an interesting (long) article about the world of that race in the New Yorker last year.
posted by bitslayer at 7:19 AM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

I ride the Erie Canal trail which has paved sections along with dirt, sand, dust, and gravel sections from fishtank to railroad ballast-sized. It's much, much more enjoyable than riding the roads as well as being free of cars. I've lost count of the number of different animals and birds I've seen. If you're tired of wondering when (not if) you're going to get hit by a car I heartily recommend at least trying it.
posted by tommasz at 7:25 AM on June 20, 2023 [9 favorites]

Nice post. Really enjoyed. This resonated re: the joy of biking:

My favorite way to pass the time on the road is to catalog all the wildlife I see. Seeing the hawks and the foxes and the newts is a great way to feel far away from the ordinary day-to-day world. Bikes take you places your feet never would, and let you see and hear and feel the world in a way that cars are designed specifically to avoid, one I will always wish more people would experience. On the last ride I had at home before flying to Kansas, I looked over to a field full of cows and saw a calf being born. As in, I looked to my right and the calf just plopped out into the world.
posted by latkes at 7:43 AM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

I used to mountain bike but got out of it before the industry went to 29" wheels and foot-long travels in the suspension... I went back to road. I've gotten into gravel in the last couple of years thanks to a co-worker who gave me a carbon gravel frame that he wasn't using. I'm finding again the parts of mountain biking that I liked, and enjoying that when I want to get from home to a gravel trail that I can ride on road *almost* as fast as on my pure road bike.

If you're a roadie and haven't tried gravel, I highly recommend it. Not to replace road cycling, but to expand horizons while making use of skills you already have.
posted by Snowflake at 7:45 AM on June 20, 2023

Hip hip hooray for the Flint Hills! They are really beautiful—a wild, romantic and spare landscape animated by storms.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 8:04 AM on June 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Coincidentally, My Man Rhett Shull just released a video about him writing music for video he shot during the race.

“I Didn't Know This Would Make Me A Better Guitar Player”—Rhett Shull, 19 June 2023

Recently, I got to film out at the Unbound Gravel Race in Emporia, Kansas. Out in the flint hills of rural Kansas, I got really inspired to work on a project I've wanted to try for years. Come along and explore some new territory with me. This project has been an experience that really stretched my musical abilities, and it's reminded me of why I started this channel in the first place.

posted by ob1quixote at 8:05 AM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

There are a ton of us riding off road, and I can't help but feel like the media focus on the sport aspects marginalize the parts of gravel riding that are a reaction to those of us wanting to get out into nature and just feeling unsafe on the road. I would love to see more stories about people doing the lonely (or communal!) trips on the Cascades-to-Palouse, or the various folks riding the entire length of the East Coast Greenway, which is still missing a massive number of miles of protective trail. Or Cycle Oregon. Even the Tour Divide is relatively interesting as a "race" because the terrain and length amplifies the effects on the body and shifts it away from the competitive aspects towards more engagement with your mobility and physiological sustainability than "winning." I will say I'm less interested in the ascetic/body punishing aspects though.

BikeShopGirl got me into the Wandrer app a year ago and it's transformed how I think about the space I live in. Gameification for running/biking, but instead of measuring speed and KOMs like Strava, it focuses on "new miles." Where haven't you gone? Gravel and road included. I suspect I've been in more parts of Durham, NC (where I moved to in 2021) than most natives. But in the end, I'm really just trying to find the best and safest ways to get far from home for a little while.
posted by SoundInhabitant at 8:08 AM on June 20, 2023 [6 favorites]

+1000 to the Erie Canal Trail! I run that when I'm up in the Pittsford area and it truly is a gem.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:13 AM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

...Here's the course, you figure it out, see you at the finish line.

♪That's life ♫

...as a certain Mr. Sinatra once sang.
posted by y2karl at 10:07 AM on June 20, 2023

Question: in the Unbound gravel race, you are technically allowed to ride a mountain bike, or even a fat-tire bike. Those would handle the muddy section really well, in my experience!

So would that be a huge faux pas? In fact, the rules say you are allowed to change out tires (not frames) at checkpoints! With that much prize money, why not, and if need be, invent a frame that can take fat or skinny tires?
posted by TreeRooster at 10:43 AM on June 20, 2023

The closest that I come to this (or really want to) is the Rock Island Trail, a rail/trail that's paved with dirt and (I think) fine gravel. The Illinois & Michigan Canal State Trail is also pretty good.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:16 AM on June 20, 2023

I’ve done several gravel races including the storied Almanzo. Almost all gravel races and free and volunteer run. The riders are great and the motto of “ride what ya brung” is strong. If you like riding try one out!
posted by misterpatrick at 11:43 AM on June 20, 2023

In the two gravel races I've participated in you're allowed to bring any bike as long as it doesn't have a motor or aero bars. So yeah a fat bike would be great in the really muddy sections but once you've passed that you're at a serious disadvantage. It'll depend on the course layout but I think for the people that are in it to do well the thinking is generally to use the thinnest, smoothest tires you can get away with because the increased speed on the smoother sections more than makes up for the fact that you'll have a harder time on the rougher ones.

Actually, at one of the races, the Paris to Ancaster (P2A), there were a couple of sections that were super muddy and you had to walk your bike. The fat bikes I saw were being walked as well.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 11:48 AM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

TreeRooster: "So would that be a huge faux pas?"

Wouldn't matter if it were a faux pas, but I don't think it would be. The problem is that mountain bikes are a lot slower in general, and this is a race. The category of "gravel bike" covers a considerable range, from almost-road bikes to almost-mountain bikes (with full suspension). A lot of gravel bikes are marketed on the premise that you can swap between 650B wheels (a typical size for mountain bikes) with fat tires and 700C wheels (the most common size for road bikes) with skinnier tires.
posted by adamrice at 11:50 AM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm mostly a randonneur (same ethos of self-supported adventure and being challenged by a course, but our events are mostly on asphalt and very much Not A Race) and before gravel racing was A Thing, was involved in off-road events like the Deerfield Dirt Road Randonnee. I love how the gravel scene has a lot of the same ethos around adventure, self-reliance, discovery. I've had a couple of bad crashes that have made me kind of squirrelly in dealing with gravel; but it's been so fun watching this scene evolve from afar.

With regards to tire swapping, in general while that's an interesting idea, one ought to recall that support on these events is very limited. It's not like there's a van or a pit crew hanging out at checkpoints that can hot swap your tires based on the next segment. Support only exists to pick you up if you DNF. That's it. Everything else is on you. So if you are swapping tires, you have to pack them on your self or your bike and you have to do the work yourself to remove and replace them when you're tired and muddy.

In general, from my experience, you want to rig up your bike to perform optimally throughout the entire ride and accept some tradeoffs here and there. You just don't have the logistical support to try min/max reconfiguring the bike at different sections; esp. since that means having to pack the components that you're not using, and that unneeded weight plus the time to uninstall and reinstall components will likely penalize your performance more than what you get from the component swap. And I think that's a good thing. Professional and hobby-enthusiast cycling can get very gear heady, and I like that the self-reliance aspect of gravel riding and randonneuring has some natural limits around gear optimization and keeping the focus on the rider.
posted by bl1nk at 11:51 AM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Big ole' tires help in super-sticky mud but it tends be a drivetrain problem. Derailleurs and chains do not like ingesting a lot of debris: it forces the chain off its line and makes it skip, jump, and also prone to breaking. Clumpy enough mud will even foul up a belt-drive system and can damage the belt. At some point you just gotta decide to hike it.
posted by introp at 11:59 AM on June 20, 2023

I know several people who did Unbound this year. Only a few finished even though they'd finished before. One good friend was in the saddle from 7 am Sat until almost 1 am Sunday. No one wanted to talk about it when they returned home except to say they weren't going back.

I have mixed feelings about this event (like the author) that started out as a ride among friends from Kansas and surrounding states in the mid-00's to a race promoted by Lifetime who bought it out in 2018 and now pays pros to show up. IMO it's become everything that the original event shunned and the 4-mile hike-a-bike fiasco this year puts an exclamation point on it.

The spirit of gravel riding is supposed to be inclusive and that includes people of all abilities. It's supposed to be a challenging day in the saddle away from busy roads where you can sprint for county lines and ride at a conversational pace. It's about enjoying yourself and when you do ride into a downpour you can pull into a convenience store, have a coke, and wait it out. When's there's a mechanical, the group stops and helps fix it. When you finish, you've got stories and an experience that inspires you to do it again.

It shouldn't be some type-A clusterfuck where a fitness corporation makes over $200k+ just off people who weren't able to finish.
posted by photoslob at 12:05 PM on June 20, 2023 [10 favorites]

Yeah, at the race I was at my wheels stopped moving as I was walking my bike because of all the mud packed up between the wheel and frame. I got off fairly lightly, my front brake pads wore out so they had to be replaced but those are consumables anyway. Quite a few people's derailleurs broke, not the hanger but the actual derailleurs themselves.

I actually had to replace the entire front brake because the pin holding the break pads in place wouldn't come out, but that's more Shimano's fault than anything else.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:06 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am involved in a totally different hobby that is also moving from inclusive and experimental to more popular but sometimes less inclusive and I really enjoyed seeing the same questions arise in a totally different context in this article.
posted by dame at 1:33 PM on June 20, 2023

This is a great article, and when I read about a machochistic, hypercompetitive 'there can be only one', I am the toughest bastard alive — or half-alive, at best, at the end of the race — type of event I try . . .to be glad that the people who like this kind of thing have found each other and found something relatively harmless to do with their truly formidable energies:

Riding a bike is pure, simple joy. But bike racing is a sport that always demands more, because there's always someone willing to give more. First you train five, then 10 hours a week. Then you find out other people are training for 15, or 20, or doubling your mileage like it's nothing. Plus there's all the gear you have to maintain, the additional exercises you have to do to protect your body from the contorted position you force it into, and hours of research and obsession over your numbers, your training, your diet, everything else. It feels incredible to push beyond your limits, but if a sport's only metric success is doing more, it'll never be sustainable for any but those willing to give it everything.

But 'relatively harmless' doesn’t necessarily mean harmless to relatives;

Partly that's because I'm not big on ether, but I return to that attrition-slog 1919 Tour 104 years later because I attempted to race just one 200-mile day in atrocious conditions last week, and sadly it did not end with me, at the finish line, getting badgered for a race report by drunken Frenchmen. It ended with me lying against some mailboxes in Neal, Kansas, having just escaped a terrifying lightning storm and trying to text directions on a mud-soaked phone to my pregnant wife who was driving through a scene from Twister in a desperate bid to rescue me from my own decisions.
[…]
I never expected a series of cascading problems that set me hours off my schedule, and in such a shitty position that I had to get rescued in conditions I never, ever wanted Sarah to deal with, especially after asking her to fly across the country to support me in riding some dumb race.

I've had plenty of bad days on the bike: poor performances, bad crashes, getting threatened, getting hit by various cars and one particular minivan. Sitting under a tree at Unbound, trying to send directions to Sarah with spotty service on a touchscreen so wet and muddy that it couldn’t sense my fingers, hearing her cry with stress and fear as she drove herself and our unborn child along a road she couldn't see in a blinding storm in a shitty rental car—that's the worst bike-related moment I've ever had. I ride my bike because it makes me happy and healthy, and I tell myself that all the time it takes away from my family at least pays off with a happier, healthier, longer-living version of me. I've never felt so selfish as in that moment.

His wife was pregnant, one of the toughest races any human being has to run, with a sovereign inexorability unlike almost anything else, and instead of centering her and their unborn child, he chose to drag the focus to himself at significant risk to her and their unborn child.

It seems fitting that the benediction for the event was delivered by the widow of the founder.
posted by jamjam at 2:09 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

TIL the word 'grundle'.
The town[ship] I live in has only 2 paved roads, and they were not built with bikes in mind, so I spend a lot of time on gravel, in the woods, and I love it. My bike has a little suspension, but I've been thinking about maybe getting a chamois or a softer seat.
posted by MtDewd at 2:30 PM on June 20, 2023

This is a great article, and when I read about a machochistic, hypercompetitive 'there can be only one', I am the toughest bastard alive — or half-alive, at best, at the end of the race — type of event I try . . .to be glad that the people who like this kind of thing have found each other and found something relatively harmless to do with their truly formidable energies:

I think gravel races in general are more like marathons than anything else, and that point is made in the article too. At one end you have pro riders and motivated amateurs who are actually trying to win the thing. Everyone else is there for a "good time" trying their best at the race which is probably why it's so common for people to offer help: I have no chance of winning so if you've got a mechanical issue and I can help then I'll help you even if it takes me a couple of minutes because I don't really lose anything to stop and hey I might have an issue later on and I'd sure like someone to help me out.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 2:33 PM on June 20, 2023

Helping someone working on a mechanical: you pay it forward because it's a good investment.
posted by k3ninho at 2:50 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

I had only gone half through the article before posting my comment and now finished. Re: the part about getting other folks involved and/or inflicting harm or misery on your loved ones, this is a legit challenge with events like this. When you're planning an event that's 200+ miles in length, figuring out a plan for the 5%, 10% or 30% of people who won't finish takes up a significant amount of the logistics. When I volunteered to administer some of the events for my randonneuring club, I spent a lot of time rescuing people who had their ride go south on them. A couple of them had the fortune of being able to abort near home, and their bailout plan was just "I'm going to change course and ride to my bed." But a few folks would get stranded with a breakdown at 2 or 3am, and I'd have to guide them to a gas station or Dunkin Donuts where they could hole up while I would come and get them.

Our rides rarely crack more than 100 riders, and we're very clear to tell people that they're on their own. If your ride goes south and you have to abandon, you're responsible for sorting out the mess. Don't expect the volunteers to save you. With that said, I'd still help if I can, because it sucks to be in that position. People don't quit just because they're having a bad day. These sports draw people who want to succeed at the challenge, and aborting usually means that you're in some peril. But if you've got more than 100 riders, you're beyond the stage where volunteers can handle sweep and rescue.

The notion of having the riders provide their own support and rescue is, imho, reasonable though that drives up the expense as noted in the article. I don't think the answer is to make the event provide rescue services, keeping this in the responsibility of the rider is important for the self-sufficiency ethos. It's interesting though, that the rules allow for multiple riders to have one shared rescue team, and that may be a good direction to build up as this sport grows.

I also liked this question that they pose:

And so we come to the question that faces anyone who loves anything that suddenly becomes popular: Do you try to hold to tradition, knowing that memory evolves and traditions are extremely hard to keep frozen in time? Or do you change to build the sport, build the culture, and bring something you love to more people than it could reach before? Can a culture that's popular because of hundreds remain palatable to the thousands?

Randonneuring's premier event: the Paris-Brest-Paris, happens only every four years. The next running is this August. It is also a ride with thousands of riders, and it doesn't do rain days. It's 750 miles over the course of 90 hours.

When I did it in 2007, it rained every day of that ride. People got hypothermic. There were more than a few ride-ending crashes and collisions. The DNF rate in 2007 was 30%. It was pretty brutal, but the sport continued to grow. The PBP field in 2007 was capped at 5000 riders, now the cap is 8000. It's fueled by the same forces that fuel gravel racing -- a backlash against the elitism of professional road racing, a desire for an adventuresome community.

I do not think tradition vs. growth is an either/or. I think there are audiences who will want to join because of the tradition, and discarding that tradition (which usually means transforming the culture to be more friendly to corporate sponsors) will drive growth in the wrong direction. Then you wind up making yourself more like the things you tried to evolve away from.
posted by bl1nk at 3:01 PM on June 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

I thought the Paris-Brest-Paris was fueled by delicious pastry.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 3:10 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

For fitness and fun I ride all cycling "disciplines". I have raced 6 cyclocross seasons, a few road races, and a couple mtn bikes races, and 4 - 100 mile winter races, but five years ago I stopped racing. I like riding. I ride a lot. I ride with friends, mostly gravel-riding with a bit of bikepacking, but no racing. For me it's the racing scene that can't avoid being subsumed by the competitive and aspirational "my kid's gonna play in the big leagues" folks that build toxic behaviour into it.

When I started racing cross, it was pretty chill and organic: family, friends, food and beers. As it grew though, the more competitive folks in the crowd started "growing the sport" and courted sponsors and coaches. Soon there was a provincial team for "promising" young riders, a few paid coaches, and kids with matching uniforms and training regimes.

You know how it goes from here. Once the kids start beating the 40 year olds, it's going to go sour. Not because of the kids, but because of the older dick-swingers (mostly men) who insist on trying to keep up. A lot of new-ish "fun" sports that suddenly experience social success follow this pattern. So it goes.

Gravel racing however, because of its long-range suffer factors, has seemed to resist the pattern, because you won't find many youth development programs that can attract kids to that long term pain. But now it seems the reverse has happened, as another aspirational dip-shit crowd - formerly fast roadies - have showed up driving weekend warriors to lose their minds.

To be fair, some people really like this kind of scene, but I think they make it more likely that race organizers will lose sight of the more gentle "welcome all-comers" ethos and succumb to the pressure to let the chips fall with the weather, rather than plan sensible alternative routes.

I've planned a 170 km gravel ride/race. I live where dirt roads and gravel roads are NOT the same thing. If it rains, you don't ride on the dirt, because you CAN'T. So we planned a rain route that avoided the dirt - a bit longer, but all ridable. It wasn't that hard to make a game day decision.

I don't understand what would make organizers not use this strategy for the Unbound, except that the welcoming and positive race culture has been overtaken by the competitive toxicity it started out riding away from.
posted by kneecapped at 4:33 PM on June 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Does everything have to have a philosophy these days?
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 9:34 PM on June 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Apparently the word "peloton" comes from "platoon" in French, but in Finnish it means "fearless". More appropriate in this context.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 2:32 AM on June 21, 2023