I’ll be honest: when Jacob and I mapped out the 2026 season in December, I looked at the Unbound Gravel and Gralloch dates and said something along the lines of “that’s close.” Jacob looked at the calendar, made a noise that wasn’t quite agreement, and said we’d manage it.
Unbound Gravel: 30 May, Emporia, Kansas. 200 miles. The Gralloch: 16 May, Galloway Forest Park, Scotland. 111km UCI race, or 323km ultra.
Wait. Unbound is May 30. Gralloch is May 16. That’s Gralloch first, then Kansas two weeks later. That’s better. That is still quite close, but better.
What the Gralloch Is
The Gralloch is a Scottish word for the act of field-dressing a deer — gutting it, essentially. It is not a soft name. The race lives up to it.
Galloway Forest Park is the largest forest park in the UK, in the south-west corner of Scotland, and it is emphatically not the kind of landscape that flatters you. The terrain is remote, the weather is a variable that you account for carefully, and the course — 111km for the UCI race, with over 1,761 metres of climbing on 80% gravel — is genuinely demanding by any measure.
What’s new for 2026 is the Gralloch Ultra: 323km. It was added to the programme this year and I’ve been watching it with interest, not least because the kind of rider that event attracts is the kind of rider I’m trying to become. I’ll be doing the UCI race this year, which gives me a proper competitive result to aim for while I understand the full event better.
Scotland
I grew up in the north of England. I understand what British weather means for outdoor sport in May. The Galloway Hills are not Girona.
That’s partly why I want to do this race. The 2026 calendar has taken me to Catalonia twice, Belgium, Italy, California, and the Traka. The Gralloch is a reminder that there’s world-class gravel racing in Britain — technical, remote, challenging racing that doesn’t need a backdrop of Catalan vineyards to be serious.
There’s also something that feels right about racing in the national champion’s jersey on home ground. The Scottish countryside in May can be extraordinary — the kind of light you don’t get anywhere else in Europe, the kind of stillness in the forest that makes you glad you’re doing this particular thing with your life.
Then it rains horizontally and you remember where you are.
The Race in Context
Coming two weeks before Unbound, the Gralloch sits in an interesting position. It’s not a tune-up — 111km of Scottish gravel at UCI pace is a race in its own right — but Jacob and I have planned the surrounding training to treat it as part of the Unbound build rather than a peak effort in isolation.
The target at the Gralloch is to race well and come away healthy and sharp. The Flint Hills in Kansas are the primary objective for May, and everything in these two weeks is calibrated to land me at the Unbound start line in the best possible condition. That means racing the Gralloch properly without leaving anything I’ll need in a fortnight.
It’s a balance I’ve been getting better at throughout the season. You learn when to hold back and when to race fully, and the learning usually comes from getting it wrong a few times first. So far this year I’ve mostly got it right.
Gatehouse of Fleet
The race starts in Gatehouse of Fleet, a small town in Dumfries and Galloway that probably doesn’t get many mornings with 500-odd gravel cyclists descending on it. I’m looking forward to it. These are the venues that road racing rarely reaches — the remote places where the sport becomes something you have to genuinely go out of your way to find.
The course heads deep into the forest and doesn’t come back for a long time. That suits me fine.
Supported by Merlin Cycles, Ventum Racing, OGT, Gravaa, and Questa Financial Planning. Coached by Jacob Tipper at JT Performance Coaching.