I felt the mist as goosebumps gathering on my arms before I could make it out visually in the moonless darkness. I glanced at my Garmin to recognize mile 155.5; start of the infamous Little Egypt Rd. The spot where, earlier that week, a chance encounter with filmmaker John Mathews had saved me from attempting to ford a turbulent sea of mud slowly baking in midday sun. Such an attempt, per John’s warning, might leave the bearings on my trusty Waheela C gunked up with muck just three days before her grand undertaking. Now descending into the misty void just past midnight, those 83 hours had shifted everything for the aqua-blue bicycle: ground surface (bone dry), company (just its rider), view (only the mono-chromatic lens of a single handlebar-mounted light), and speed (fast).
A common slight made against those who cycle from sunset to sunrise through a foreign land is that they aren’t really experiencing it. “How can you say you’ve even been there? You didn’t see anything!” Instead, classic bike touring would have you sleep a full 8 hours each night, explore a museum for a day on foot, take an intriguing wrong turn, and chat with a waiter for an hour at a cafe. Though I agree that you miss certain things when in race mode, there are certain things you see in race mode that you miss in tour mode. In my ideal world, you get a bit of both: first a tour, then a race. The way a meal will taste better when you meet the people who grew and cooked it, or a song will sound better after hearing the life story of the musician who performs it. The race is that act of actually tasting the food, or closing your eyes and feeling the rhythm of the song. After gaining context, you shut off your brain and feel it. At Unbound XL, I’d say I hit both marks.
When I flew into Wichita, KS, my journey started before I even touched my bike. Looking out the windshield of a rented SUV, I salivated at the rolling, wildflower-covered Flint Hills, saturated by storms smelling of the sea. It was just the same six years earlier, when, driving across the country, I experienced the magic of the area for the first time. After pillaging an Aldi’s dumpster for dinner (a sampling of tangerines, grape tomatoes, broccoli, sourdough bread, blackberries, bananas, salami, rice cakes, pico de gallo, and mixed berry pie), I reclined my seat for sub-optimal sleep beneath rain and above the heightened waters of Chase Lake.
The next day I drove to my Unbound base camp in Council Grove, a bedroom above a former downtown auto shop. When the Colorado Trail broke my gravel bike last summer, I befriended a family who gave me a ride back towards my car. That family, the Honers, happened to live just 25 miles from the Unbound start line in Emporia. Their kindness in offering me a place to crash was what sealed it for me that I would take on the XL in 2025.
Covering 360 fast-rolling gravel miles and allowing drafting, Unbound XL sees winning times under 20 hours, and thus can barely be called an ultra race. This means that fast resupplies are key, so I spent the afternoon visiting three gas stations ahead of time to familiarize myself with their layout and amenities. Travel Store had an air compressor in the back. Valero’s soda fountain was out of service. The Alma Store had homemade cookies and a hose. During the race, I decided to hit only the latter, prioritizing limited stops after falling behind due to mechanical issues. A fresh cookie, a familiar soda fountain, a Snickers bar, air in my tires, and a quick bike wash had me refueled in a handful of minutes.
Multiple bike rides from Council Grove to scout the XL route gave me the opportunity to learn more about the Flint Hills region. The buildings of Alma are largely assembled from locally sourced limestone, giving the city the nickname “City of Native Stone.” This limestone was not only abundant but shallowly covered with soil, precluding the never-ending corn and soybean fields that blanket the rest of the Midwest. Instead, the region’s largely German settlers used the limestone to build fences around cattle pastures, finding the rich, diverse tallgrass prairie to be remarkably conducive to raising a large grazing mammal. This was a natural conclusion, as previously the landscape had been dominated by bison.
Two days before the race, I carb-loaded at the Trail Days Cafe in Council Grove, enjoying bison pot roast with sweet potatoes, succotash, and bread. My meal was an approximation of a typical Plains Indian diet, but Trail Days has a variety of historical menu options, meant to show culinary contributions from the variety of peoples who have lived in the area, from German schnitzel to French Croque Monsieur. Next door, Shirley McClintock showed me around the bison exhibit at the Trail Days Arts and History Center. I was brought to tears by her passion for preserving the past, specifically the part of it where the majority of bison and native people were either killed or removed from the land. On the wall were drawings from local elementary school students, depicting the landscape before and after the age of the bison. Now, since bison were reintroduced to the nearby Konza Hills in the 1980s, the plant biodiversity has doubled.
Rolling along on day two of the race, I could imagine seeing herds of bison roaming the sea of rolling tall grass spreading to the horizon in every direction, broken only by the ribbon of Camp Creek Road before me. From afar, the cows almost looked like their fuzzier predecessors.
Up the street from Trail Days, a knowledgeable National Parks Service docent at the Last Chance Store told me about how the historic structure had been the final spot to buy provisions for west-bound traders on the Santa Fe Trail, back when Santa Fe was part of Mexico. I heard about how the Kanza Nation (recognizable to some in the previous name of Unbound, “Dirty Kanza”) had recently bought some land near town, and used it for cultural gatherings. It was hopeful to hear of the tribe getting some of the land back from which they were expelled to a five-acre cemetery in Oklahoma in 1825, and that their population is likely currently greater than it was pre-settler contact.
As a visitor, I thank the local limestone’s hardiness for keeping the prairie largely intact, as it would have looked 200 years ago. However, two hours into racing the XL, I found myself cursing it, as the bedrock’s nodules of sharp chert and flint sliced open my tire, beginning a trend of tire mishaps that would cost me over three hours to fix throughout the night. I likely would not have finished without the help of Bear Schickel and Henry Barze, who stopped to offer me extra plugs, tubes, and kind words. Far ahead of me, Rob Britton would narrowly beat Lachlan Morton to set a course record, both of them absurdly averaging over 20 mph.
In the end, I’d cross the finish line in 19th place, well behind my dreams of top five that fueled a fall, winter, and spring full of the sacrifices needed to justify such a lofty goal. Performance is a process, and there will be failures along the way. I’ve still made massive improvements in the last year, and I know my ceiling is high. In the meantime, I can’t complain about the places bike racing has taken me.
The day after the race, I would be taken to Council Grove Lake to join the Honers in hosting a cookout. We feasted on tacos and some savoy cabbage, black kale and potato subji (of course, I packed whole coriander, black mustard, and cumin seeds from Tucson), over such conversion topics as the purposes of silage fermentation. The night ended with some taking turns riding my Waheela C around the block. Nothing beats seeing the joy on middle-schooler Casten as he experienced what speed on a nice bike feels like. The sensation was immediately recognizable, so I capitalized, inviting him on a short bike ride the next morning before my flight.
We set off early on the Flint Hills Nature Trail, me on my Waheela, him on his old haggard mountain bike, to the Allegawaho Memorial Heritage Park, where a 10-foot-tall red boulder stands, originally carried hundreds of miles south by glaciers. Here was that piece of ground the Kanza had recently reclaimed in their homeland. The sacred rock monument had been removed by the town of Lawrence, KS in 1929, before being repatriated by the tribe in 2020. We soaked it in before realizing the time and zooming back home, with Casten smiling on the Waheela.
An ultra cycling race is many things. It is, of course, a race, a chance to test one’s strength, cunning, and preparation. It is a gathering of like-minded athletes, an opportunity to connect with those who share an uncommon passion for boundless pedalling, adventuring, and munching. These were present at the 2025 Unbound XL gravel race, but my experience most keenly showed me how a bike race is an invaluable avenue to absorb a landscape, especially one I likely would not otherwise seek out. Casten Honer has since bought a gravel bike and is working up to a full ride of the 125-mile Flint Hills Nature Trail on his birthday. Whether he moves on to crazier and crazier distances or drops the habit completely to take up crocheting, I look forward to where a long ride will take him. Surely, he’ll learn about himself and his place in it.
Sources:
•Early Kansas Settlement, Konza Prairie Biological Station, Kansas State University
https://keep.konza.k-state.edu/handbookdocuments/Early%20Kansas%20Settlement%20-%202012.pdf
•History of the Kaw Nation, Sovereign Nation of the Kaw
https://www.kawnation.gov/history-of-kaw-nation/
•K-State researchers study impact of bison on Flint Hills grasslands, K-State Research and Extension News, Kansas State University
https://www.ksre.k-state.edu/news/stories/2022/09/agriculture-bison-grazing-tallgrass.html
•A sacred boulder stolen to honor Kansas settlers was finally returned to the Kaw Tribe, Frank Morris, KCUR
https://www.kcur.org/news/2024-06-26/kaw-kanza-sacred-rock-lawrence-kansas-flint-hills-monument-tribe