Two weeks from today I’ll be standing at the start line in Emporia, Kansas, watching the sun come up over the Flint Hills, and wondering, not for the first time this season, exactly what I’ve got myself into.
Unbound Gravel is 200 miles. In May. In Kansas. If you don’t know what that means in practice, I’ll explain.
What Unbound Actually Is
Unbound Gravel started in 2006 as a small event called Dirty Kanza — 34 riders on gravel roads through the Flint Hills of eastern Kansas. It has become the most famous gravel race in the world. The 200-mile distance is the flagship, and it attracts the best gravel racers on the planet alongside thousands of amateur riders who’ve trained for months or years to attempt it.
The course covers roughly 322km of unpaved road through the Flint Hills, which are characterised by rolling prairie, loose limestone gravel, creek crossings, and a weather window in late May that can deliver anything from pleasant and dry to brutally hot to violent thunderstorms. Sometimes all three in the same day.
The distance alone is not what makes Unbound hard. It’s the surfaces — the Flint Hills’ distinctive crushed limestone becomes grinding and slow when dry, treacherous when wet — and the fact that the terrain never relents. There are no flat sections where you recover. The hills are constant, never enormous but never-ending, and they accumulate across 200 miles in a way that destroys people who went out too fast in the first 50.
How I Got Here
I qualified at Sea Otter Classic in California in April. The Sea Otter gravel race is an Unbound qualifier, and I came away with a start. Given that the turnaround between Sea Otter and the Traka 360 in Girona was three days, and the Traka itself was 360km, the legs have been through quite a lot between that qualifier and now.
Jacob and I have managed the recovery block after the Traka carefully. The instinct after a big event is to either rest completely or to immediately start hammering volume again. Neither is right. What the body needs is structured recovery that maintains the adaptations from the Traka while allowing the fatigue to clear, followed by a short sharpening phase before Emporia. That’s what the past three weeks have been.
I’m going into Unbound in better shape than I expected to be at this point in the season, which is the product of the planning we did back in December. The season was designed to peak here, and it seems to be doing what it was supposed to do.
The Plan for 200 Miles
I’ve spoken to riders who’ve done Unbound multiple times. The advice is consistent and I’m going to follow it:
The first fifty miles are not the race. The atmosphere at Emporia is incredible — it’s a genuine festival, thousands of people lining the streets for the start, the biggest names in gravel racing all on the same road — and the natural response is to treat it like a fast road race, to surge with the front group, to race the excitement. That’s how you blow up at mile 120.
The race is won and lost between miles 100 and 180. That’s where the pacing in the first half either pays off or catches up with you. I’ve done enough long races now — the Traka, the Everesting, a year of events that have consistently been longer than anything in my road racing career — to know that patience early is not weakness. It’s strategy.
Nutrition is non-negotiable. The OGT plan for Unbound is the most detailed we’ve built. There are aid stations on the course and I have a drop bag plan, but I’m treating each aid station as a precision stop rather than a grazing opportunity. What I need, when I need it, and then back on the bike.
Weather is an unknown. I’ve been watching Kansas forecasts with the same obsessive energy I used to reserve for Belgian classics. Late May in the Flint Hills can be anything. Hot and dry, I can handle — I’ve been training in Girona and California. Thunderstorms and muddy limestone are a different matter. You pack accordingly and you adapt on the day.
Why This Race
Road racing gave me a lot. But it never gave me a race that felt entirely mine — where my specific strengths, the ability to suffer for a very long time at a sustained effort, were the decisive factor rather than one factor among many.
Unbound is that race. 200 miles doesn’t care about your sprint. It doesn’t reward short, explosive efforts. It rewards the person who prepared the most carefully, paces the most honestly, fuels the most precisely, and can still make good decisions in hour eleven when everything hurts.
That’s a profile I recognise. That’s what I’ve been building toward since September 2025 in Dalby Forest, when I became national champion in my third-ever gravel race and thought: right. Let’s find out how far this goes.
Kansas in two weeks. Let’s find out.
Supported by Merlin Cycles, Ventum Racing, OGT, Gravaa, and Questa Financial Planning. Coached by Jacob Tipper at JT Performance Coaching.