Unbound

Kevin Costner, masochism, and a journey to the world's biggest gravel race

^{All videos by Justin Diamond}

Type the word “masochist” into Google, and the first thing that pops up is: “an individual who derives pleasure, gratification, or relief from physical pain, humiliation, or emotional suffering.” Surprisingly, I have never thought of myself as a glutton for punishment. I am a racer; I love to race, and I always thought that the suffering I have faced was simply a byproduct of my desire to compete. However, as a paramedic peeled my eyelid back in an attempt to extract a chunk of mud the size of a small raisin from my eyeball in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, I thought to myself, from an outsider’s perspective, how can I be anything but a masochist?

On Tuesday morning last week, I embarked on a 33-hour door-to-door trip to, of all places, Emporia, Kansas. Normally, when one decides to spend a day and a half of their life in transit—of their own volition—they are traveling to snorkel on a remote island in the Pacific, to visit a Nepalese village at the base of Everest, or to taste some wild cuisine in Tokyo. Instead, my destination was the world’s capital for disc golf, the birthplace of prohibition, and the host city of what is undoubtedly the world’s most important gravel race, Unbound.

“If you ranked the top 50 states to ride your bike in, I think, by popular opinion, Kansas would probably be the 51st,” said Dan Hughes, the only four-time winner of the race, on a podcast I was listening to as I made the final two-hour drive from the Kansas City airport to Emporia. As I drove past mile marker after mile marker of flat open American highway, I could see why. Epic poems have been written about far shorter distances covered, and as I arrived at the front door of the Airbnb (stopping my travel clock at 32h52min), which would house both myself and an undetermined number of Ventum staff, athletes, and contractors for the week, I thought, “Why the fuck did I come here?”

Going to race Unbound isn’t what many would envision as their idea of a good retirement getaway. This isn’t your Tuscan cycling trip or your Bordeaux vineyard tour. There is no lie-flat seat that guides you into the Kansas City airport. Prosecco is hard to come by in a town that was one of the first to enforce prohibition. There are no sprawling villas or fine dining experiences. Like most American small towns, the outskirts of Emporia are populated with Walmarts, fast food chains, and massive parking lots, and when you plug directions into Google Maps, the walking option is seemingly always double the driving distance.

Yet, there I was, in a state I had driven through almost two decades ago, and when I did, said; “I am never coming back here.”

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In the 1989 classic Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner plays an Iowan farmer who builds a baseball diamond in the middle of a cornfield. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, you’ll probably still know the film’s most famous line: “If you build it, he will come.” This is effectively the Unbound story.

“I wanted to turn this race into the Tour de France of gravel,” said Kristi Mohn, the person who built Unbound into what it is today, when I talked to her and her husband, Tim, on the eve of the event. It was inspiring to hear Mohn say this, especially when considering where we were. When Tim raced the first edition twenty years earlier, only 34 participants took part. Today, Unbound is without a doubt the world’s most important gravel race. Winning here can change the entire trajectory of a gravel pro’s career. This year, for four days, the main street of Emporia—a street that, unlike its outskirts, has real charm—would be completely closed for the event expo and races. Countless bike brands would be setting up shop in the small town’s core, and close to 5,000 cyclists would be coming from all over the globe to take part in either the kids’ crit, the 50, 100, 200, or 350-mile events.

“The Flint Hills are stunning,” said Kristi when I asked her about the course. I found this hard to believe. I had driven to Emporia, and at no point had the adjective “stunning” entered my head. I have lived and trained in some of the most iconic places to ride a bike in the world. When I heard this, a part of me had to resist the temptation to roll my eyes. However, when Tim mentioned that, at some point, I would find myself out there in the great plains of America and that I would be stunned by the beauty and sense of isolation, I began to believe them. I come from an area that is not known as a cycling destination, and many would scoff at the idea of traveling to it in order to ride. Yet, if you are willing to get a bit dirty, you can find yourself on some logging road, alone, deep in the Outaouais region of Quebec, thinking how fortunate you are to be on two wheels discovering beauty that most would never think to seek out, let alone see.

To have taken this event and turned it into the mecca of gravel in “the 51st” best state to ride a bike is, and I don’t mean this lightly, incredible. The Mohns are the type of people who have the warmth and energy that can get others to make big things happen, and they also have the perfect ingredients to make an event of this magnitude work.

Those looking for an instant hit of dopamine, constant comfort, and gratuitous pleasure can book a flight to Orlando and go to Disney World. Pleasure in Emporia and at Unbound isn’t something that is just given; it needs to be earned here, and this, I think, is what most gravel cyclists want. The greatest pleasures that I have found are the ones that I have had to work for, and man, it takes a boatload of work to prepare for and complete Unbound.

I’m sure there have been battles fought with less logistical planning than what went into getting me ready for this race. From when I arrived at the Ventum house on Wednesday afternoon to the race start at 5:50 AM on Saturday, I was in some way, shape, or form organizing and preparing for the race. Whether it was assembling my bike, which arrived a day later—as it was lost in transit—finding equipment I didn’t know I needed, assembling feed bags, coordinating gear with sponsors, or actually studying the course, I was preparing for what would be the longest ride of my life. My headquarters for this was an Airbnb rented by Ventum for the week.

I can’t tell you how many people slept each night in this place. Couches, cots, and anything that wasn’t a floor were used for sleeping. I lived with five runners in a four-bedroom house at the University of Michigan. Aside from the stuffed deer heads, family portraits, and Trump hats hanging in the garage, the vibe of the house was not that far off from the dwelling I inhabited in Ann Arbor. People came and went as they pleased, and shit was everywhere. Half-drunk cans of beverages seemed to occupy any table, chair arm, or windowsill. Opened bags of snacks lay on every square inch of the counters. In the garage, which seemed to be permanently open, water bottles, tires, bike bags, cycling shoes, lubricants, bottles of sealant, bike pumps, tools, and every other imaginable bike-related product were scattered across the floor and folding tables.

As someone who has come from the refined, sterile environment of the World Tour, I loved it. I have worked with a lot of bike companies over the years, and I can tell you that a shocking number of the people who work in these companies don’t understand bikes. Yes, they can tell you how their bike should ride and list off the specs that the bike has, but they don’t actually ride. They don’t put in long hours in the saddle or froth at the opportunity to talk about everything related to racing. Staying at this house with Ventum has made me realize the stark difference between this young bike company and a lot of other brands. When we weren’t hatching plans for the race, staff and riders were chatting about everything from the Giro to Ironman. Everyone in the company rides, runs, and loves to flog themselves. It was like being in a cycling frat house, and each night I went to bed buzzing from the long conversations I was having about all things endurance.

Ventum isn’t a big company, so all the staff who were there seemed to wear a hundred different hats. Sam Gross, the Brand Manager, was washing my bike at the feed zones and checking my tire pressures pre-race. Barrett Brandon, the co CEO, helped me sort out gearing issues and lent me his 2L drink bladder, insisting I needed it more than he did as he was “only” doing the 100-mile race. Travis McCabe, Ventum’s Sports Marketing Manager, along with employees Harry Keeran and Ryan Shelton, cooked tacos for a pre-race party in the house's kitchen, sold bikes at the Ventum tent and lugged gear to feed zones miles from where they could park. It was an all-hands-on-deck affair, and from the moment I entered the house, I felt the energy that these guys brought to Unbound. They were all in, and so was I.

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“Just don’t stop,” said Lizzie Hermolle to me when I asked her for some advice on tackling the longest race I have ever done. Although I have more experience in the realm of riding a bike compared to Lizzie, the UK native had just recently completed the Traka 560km, a distance I have never come close to racing. My longest race to date, by distance, was Milan San Remo in 2020. It was 317km, but in all honesty, even a very competitive amateur could have finished that edition and made the time cut. For the first 250km, we noodled around, and at no point was I daunted by the actual distance of the event. However, as we chatted at the Ventum pre-race party (Lizzie is also a Ventum rider), I was legitimately intimidated by the distance and realized she probably had more experience in this realm than I did. This sentiment was echoed by 2021 Unbound 200 winner Ian Boswell the next day.

Ian, a rider who had to walk away from the World Tour in 2019 due to concussions, has had a successful transition from road to gravel/privateer life. The Oregon native and Vermont resident now manages riding on the gravel scene, raising kids at home, and working at Wahoo. I wanted to pick his brain on how he has transitioned into this life and get some advice for race day. Talking to him not only calmed my nerves about the distance but also reaffirmed my decision to do this calendar this year. I underestimated how dramatic the transition out of pro racing would be, but racing in gravel has dampened the impact of this change. Ian felt the same way about his move into gravel, and he also gave me hope that a guy with my engine could do well at this race while training for less than 20 hours per week.

The biggest week I had done in the last month was 24 hours on the bike, and when I checked in from the year before, in that same week, I had done 34. Therefore, I was still nervous. I was racing the 200 (207-mile actually) race, and this would be, at minimum, nine hours on the bike, with very limited to almost no support in very demanding conditions.

Kansas is known for having weather that changes faster than my six-year-old changes into her swimsuit when a pool is on offer, and every day on the forecast, thunderstorms, humidity, intense sun, and strong winds were predicted. It was impossible to choose which tires to run due to this variable weather and the wide range of terrain. Pavement, lots of gravel, a “rock garden,” and a ton of mud were to be served up. If you decided to run a larger tire with too much tread, you risked getting stuck in the mud—mud sticks (paint sticks or plastic scrapers) were given in the pre-race tote bags. If you used a smaller tire or less tread, you risked punctures and losing traction in the slick sections. It was a true damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario, and one that left me spending four hours the day before the race trying to sort out. Fortunately, twin brothers and Ventum pros Marc and Nathan Spratt swung by the house and helped expedite my tire swapping.

I rode to the start of the race on Saturday morning, pre-dawn, with the feeling that I had forgotten something. So much had gone into getting things ready for the event that it felt like when you leave the house for a long road trip, round the corner, and your partner asks, “Did you lock the door?” The garage at the house was definitely open, but was it a tube, a tire lever, or a bottle for the second feed? I couldn’t tell.

Thunderstorms had raged throughout the night, and in the distance, I could see the remnants of the storm on the horizon and feel the static energy and humidity left behind. Thinking I had solved the tire problem, I decided to run a larger tire (51mm Schwalbe Thunder Burt) on the front and a smaller tire on the rear wheel (a 45mm Conti Terra Speed). I felt pretty confident that a technical issue wouldn’t be my undoing. As I nervously chatted with other riders on the start line and fist-bumped Thomas DeGendt, I thought the post-race beers and the rodeo that Tim and Kristi had suggested I go to would be a well-deserved reward for getting through all of this.

Unbound has the same beginnings as every World Tour road race: a neutral start, riders cracking jokes and jockeying for position. But upon hitting the first gravel section, everything changes. Every attempt to enter the breakaway is deemed a potential race-winning move, and the same intensity to fight for every inch of the road is applied, but on a far sketchier surface: gravel.

After 20km of fighting, we entered the first of what every Unbound participant calls “MMRs” (Minimally Maintained Roads). The minimal in MMR is a bit generous. If by minimal maintenance, they mean that somebody drove the road in the last month and at one point in the last decade shoveled a few rocks into a gaping hole, then “minimal maintenance” would be very accurate.

When we hit the first MMR, all semblance of my knowledge of bike racing was thrown out the window. Like the expression that Inuit have 20 words for snow, Unbound participants have as many for mud. One of those types of mud that I consistently heard about in the days leading up to the race was “peanut butter mud.” People spoke about this stuff like it was the Boogeyman. Stories of the 2023 edition or the infamous 2015 race are often told like ghost stories around a campfire. “The peanut butter mud was everywhere! We had to run… with our bikes… for 10 miles… uphill!”

In the first MMR, we crested a climb, and I saw in the distance that the storm that had slammed the Ventum house a few hours earlier was far closer now. The roads were freshly wet, and when I looked at the riders in front of me hurtling down the following descent and into a muddy section, I got to learn why peanut butter mud is an Unbound rider’s worst nightmare.

In a matter of moments, after hitting the mud, the space between my front wheel and frame began to clog up with a mixture of mud denser than your bowel movement after eating a strict diet of no fiber and regular doses of Imodium. This stuff was dense, and I, along with every rider around me, went from speeding along at 50km/h to 0. Everyone began to dismount and pull out their mud scrapers. I ripped the electrical tape that had been holding my mud scraper to the frame off and watched what other riders were doing. Having never practiced scraping peanut butter mud from a frame before, I had no idea what the best technique was, so like most of my high school math tests, I just tried to copy as best as I could from the person beside me.

My decision to go with a smaller rear tire had been rewarded, as nothing was clogged up there, but the larger tire on the front was completely jammed. I managed to finally get the wheel to move, and then I picked up my bike and ran for the grass. With less mud there, I could push my bike along without having more mud collect against the frame.

In all of the chaos, I had completely lost track of where I was. My transition had taken a lot of time, and a few riders who had made the bold choice to ride smaller tires or had better technical skills were far ahead. In the melee, my rear derailleur had also jammed, but I stayed calm and quickly found a group of riders who had suffered a similar fate.

The mayhem that the mud had caused transformed this race from everything I hate about road to everything I wanted from gravel. Chopping off with a small group of hard men on rusty-colored roads snaking their way through lush rolling fields of grass, while lightning strikes spurt out from ashen clouds and flash against steel-blue skies, is, I imagine, a masochist’s wet dream, and there I was, rolling in it.

It was stunningly beautiful. The sense of isolation was profound, the feeling of insignificance great, and the aura of vulnerability was everywhere. The backdrop would have been fitting for Dances With Wolves or a Coen Brothers’ western. As our chase group vacuumed up dropped riders ahead, whipped past others fixing flats, and started making inroads on the front group, my glasses became impossible to clean. The same peanut butter mud had sullied the lenses, and no amount of drink mix I could squirt out of my bottle could clean them off. In my frustrated attempts to clean them with my muddy hands, I broke off one of the arms and was forced to tuck the remaining arm into my helmet.

Knowing that we still had seven hours left of racing, I did not want to sacrifice any draft afforded by my newfound companions, so I stuck close to their wheels. This meant that due to the rain, mud, gravel, cow shit, and whatever else was on the road, was launched into my mouth and eyes by the tire in front of me. As I rolled past my fellow chasers, I said, “It will be a minor miracle if we don’t get pink eye.” I wasn’t wrong.

When we hit the “rock garden” on the next MMR, I felt a glob of mud hit me in the eye. Unable to move my hands from the bars due to the technicality of the section, I couldn’t dig whatever had made its way into my eyelids. It was painful, and by the time we got through the section and I could use my fingers to pry the glob loose, it was too late. The mud had packed deep in my eyelid, and my hands were so muddy themselves, that nothing I could do to clear my left eye truly worked. I sprayed my eyes with drink mix; I rubbed furiously, but the sensation of something still being stuck in there remained.

Then I felt the pressure in my rear wheel drop. My decision to run a smaller tire in the rear had, until that point, proven to be a good decision, but the lower volume only left me with a puncture some 50 miles later. The unsettling sensation of carbon rim on rock reflected up my seat post and through my saddle. Not wanting to lose the shelter of the group this early, and only 12 miles from the next aid station, I tried to nurse the loss in air, but each pedal stroke grew harder, and I could feel the resistance building. So, with a CO2 canister in hand, I quickly pulled to the side of the road, jammed the nozzle onto the valve, and pushed. Nothing came out. I pushed harder, and a burst of carbon dioxide came out around my hands, and I felt the sting of cold on my fingers. No air made it into the tire. Sealant from my tire changes the day before had become stuck in the valve, and no air could get in. I knew, at that moment, I would never see the front group again.

Everybody in this race seemed to have one type of mechanical issue or another. Even this year’s winner, Mads Wurtz Schmidt, suffered from a serious flat. I would learn that Unbound is about who can manage problems best, and I didn’t do that well.

I got back on the bike and thought I might be able to ride the flat to the aid station, but the gravel grew chunkier, and any last vestige of air seeped out of the tire. Realizing that racing for any competitive position was over and that I would likely be faced with a 135-mile solo ride, I stopped again and tried to change the tube. I inserted a latex tube into the tire as elegantly and successfully as a teenage boy using another type of latex product for the first time. Sealant and mud were everywhere, making seating the tire on the rim next to impossible, and with all the sand and grass getting into the sloppy mess, I began to doubt that even if I got the tire back on, the tube would hold any air. Then Marc Spratt appeared. Marc had crashed hard in the first mud section; his pedal was broken, and his knee was sore. He told me he would be dropping out at the next aid station and therefore was unconcerned about stopping to help me out. The far more mechanically adept and calmer car junkie, with the help of his extra tire lever, managed to wrestle the tire on.

As we entered the next aid station Travis swapped my wheel, and Harry chucked bottles into my cages and gels into my pockets. My agent, Simon, asked me what I thought of retirement. I laughed and then jumped back on the bike.

Eventually, I caught a few straggling riders. We plugged along, but each time I came back into their draft, another splash of mud would hit my left eye. Soon I could no longer keep the eye open. The level of discomfort became so high that when we entered a section that passed under a railroad, with standing filthy brown water that came up to my waist, I desperately tried to use the stagnant water to wash it out. The relief was temporary, and my eye could only remain open for a moment.

Riding became very dangerous. For the next 40 miles, I tried to race with one eye open, but my right eye started to fatigue, and the left felt like it was on fire. I rubbed at it furiously, only worsening the pain, and finally, when we hit another MMR section and I watched a rider in front of me crash on a rut, I knew that doing 80 more miles under these circumstances would likely lead to a broken collarbone and potential blindness. I pulled over into the tall grass on the side of the road and yelled in frustration. Lukas Postleberger, who somehow was behind me, came riding past, laughing like a madman, and yelled at me, “Come on, Woodsy!”

Fittingly, the clouds above opened up just at that moment, and rain poured down. I walked and cautiously rode out of the MMR and came to a pickup truck at a highway intersection. Sheepishly, I asked an official if I could bum a ride to the next aid station. Not many races in the World Tour have defeated me as swiftly and as easily as Unbound did. I did stop, and the sting of not finishing hurt almost as much as my eye.

It was one of the lamest ends to a bike race that I have had in my career. My legs could keep pedaling; my energy was still there, but I just could not see. Riding for 6 hours is nothing new to me; there was no venturing into the unknown or testing myself to see what my limits truly were. I got no cathartic release or euphoria from seeing all that I worked for finished. Instead, I spent the final hours of the race hitching rides and getting my eyes washed out by the paramedics.

When I later went to the hospital—on the paramedic’s recommendation—a doctor told me I had a “huge scratch” on my cornea but that, with some antibiotic drops and rest, aside from some potential scarring subtly impacting my vision, I would be fine. The doctor also suggested using an eye patch, something that, when I tried it on, I could not bring myself to wear in public. Instead, I put a bandage over the eye and drove back to the Ventum Beta Kappa house to sink beers and wallow in self-pity.

I had come all this way only to be humiliated, put through significant pain, and experience extreme frustration. Yet, as I write this on my long plane ride back to Europe, through one eye that is still slightly blurry, I can’t help but think of how much fun I had this past week. If you asked me if I would come back to this race, I would probably, crazily, say yes. Somehow, someway, I still drew a lot of pleasure and gratification from going to Emporia, Kansas, to race Unbound. Clearly, I am a masochist.

image cred Zach Dolinaj