TLDR
48th place out of 237 with only 60 people finishing. 356 miles in 32hr 37min (10.93mph). Since I rode to the start and back to the hotel afterwards, my own Strava data has me at 366 miles with a moving time of exactly 30 hours with a moving average speed of 12.2mph.
The first 110 miles of the race were dry, fast, and relatively easy with an average speed of 15.5mph! The next 50 miles were in the dark and started out dry and fast, but quickly turned wet and messy with a thunderstorm hitting us about 10 miles from the aid station at mile 160 of the race. Average speed through that section was 15.3mph.
The next 45 miles or so were messy but still rideable at a descent speed until a few miles before the Florence gas station when we hit our first hike-a-bike, which was exactly 2.8 miles long. Average speed for the entire 45 miles was 10mph including the roughly 2mph hike-a-bike section through morning sunrise.
After the gas station was a 17 mile stretch with multiple sections of hike-a-bike with the longest being 6.5 miles long. This was about 12 miles total of hike-a-bike, which is what others were reporting as well. That 17 mile stretch took almost 5 hours with a moving average speed of about 4 mph (but elapsed average speed even slower with the need to stop periodically to clean bike or rest from carrying the bike or strategize how to hike-a-bike the next part).
The last hike-a-bike was in a huge thunderstorm that turned the mud back into rideable mud as it got wet enough that it was no longer sticky. So people who made it there before the storm probably had to hike-a-bike those miles too! The trade-off was very bad lightning hitting close by. There was always a rider up ahead or behind still moving so I felt like I should just keep going, too. But the bigger factor was that without adequate clothing I would have frozen in the rain if I stopped.
It stopped raining, got very hot, and the dirt roads were completely dry again with an amazing tailwind for the 45 miles heading up to the Council Grove gas station. After that stop, we still had 80 miles to go, but by that point and after everything we had been through, it did not feel like a very long distance at all. Will and I did nearly the entire final section together, but we caught and rode with Andrea for a while before getting hit by more thunderstorms towards the end and getting separated in the 200 miler traffic. These were all on good gravel roads, though, so there was no more mud to deal with. Just a lot of rain and lightning.
Will and I rode in together to downtown Emporia shortly before midnight with more than three hours to spare before the 36 hour time cut-off.
Annotated Map
The TLDR summary above is shortened even more in the annotated map below.
The Details
As background, I set out five days before the race to ride 1000 miles from my home in Hoover, Alabama to Emporia Kansas detouring over to Oklahoma to ride through a few of the counties I’m missing in that state on my nationwide county map.
My fully loaded bike weighed a lot, and my progress was slow, but I gave myself enough time to get there. Especially since I did back-to-back heavy days of about 256 miles each on the first two days. So I could split the remaining 500 miles amongst three days. Because I was going so slow I only got to sleep a couple hours the first two nights. This worked out well though because I had nearly 24 hours from when I arrived in Emporia to when the race started. I’m not used to having that much time on my hands on one of these trips so I figured I should be pretty sleepy to be able to maximize my sleep before the race started. This worked out really well and it was only the last couple hours of the race that I got sleepy – keeping in mind that the race took nine hours longer than anticipated (33 hours instead of 24 hours). So I would not have been sleepy the entire race if I had finished in a reasonable time.
Why did it take so much longer? Well, that’s where the fun begins!
The race started out in an amazing atmosphere with thousands of people many of whom were there for the big race the next day turning out to see us XL riders takeoff at 3pm on Friday. I had to check out of my hotel and then had five hours to kill before the start of the race. I felt like I found the secret spot in the basement lounge of the Emporia State university Union building because I had nice cushy chairs and electric socket so I could mess around on my phone without draining the battery.
At about 230pm I made my way to the expo area where there was some mechanics so I could get a tire pressure check given I couldn’t pump up my tires other than with a hand pump and wouldn’t have any real idea of what pressure I was running. Well, from the 45 psi I had started with when I left Alabama 1000 miles and five days earlier, my tires had dropped down to 37 psi which was a bit high and the mechanic recommended I drop it a bit which he did for me.
Also, I also went into the bike shop and purchased an extra tube and an extra patch kit given the XL rider meeting from the night before where they talked about how sharp the rocks were. I didn’t end up having any flats the entire race running my 2.1 tubeless terravail sparwood tires.
After that, I found a spot in the shade as a lot of the XL riders were gathered in the starting chute in the full sun. It makes sense if you want to be at the very front, but I felt no need to be at the very front so I was gonna maximize my time in the shade. Especially, since every single person I saw was carrying probably close to twice as much water as I was carrying. I’m still not sure what the thought process is unless you are preparing for an extended stay somewhere because of the mechanical. I still had half a bottle left when we made it to the first stop 60 miles into the race. And I was not being conservative with how much I was drinking, but it also did help that it started to cloud up almost immediately after the first few miles of the race and the temp did drop because of the wind and the cloud cover.
Back to the start, it was amazing. There was a helicopter with a big camera hovering around the area, and it followed the leaders for the first few miles of the race, I say the leaders because there was pretty quick separation from me in the back and in the wide open fields, they probably put a mile or maybe even 2 miles into my group within the first 10 miles of the race. Which means they were basically going 25 to 30% faster which is pretty crazy since we were averaging over 20. I’m guessing they must’ve been rolling closer to 30 mph.
Back behind the leaders, groups started to form and I ended up in a smallish group of about six riders that disintegrated at some point and then came back together and then merged with other groups and so on. There were so many people in the race with everybody on pretty heavy bikes wanting to take the hills at their own speed. And it was very hilly. There’s a famous hill called Texaco Hill on the course that had a spectacular sweeping view of the area. There was another long section like that through what is called old growth grassland that I could not stop saying “wow”. It was just so spectacular. I think I took close to 100 pictures during the race. Well, the first half of the race. More on that in the next paragraph.
The first half of the race was fast and pretty easy for me. All I can attribute that to is riding for the first time on a much lighter bike after unloading all my stuff for the trip plus what I considered a relatively slow pace since I had been anticipating people trying to push 17 to 20 mph average for the early part of the race. Instead, we were rolling along at 14 to 16 mph average over every 5 mile segment before that first stop.
That first stop was epic. It was indeed the Casey’s I had stumbled upon the day before after rerouting myself to shave off a few miles of my route to try and get to Emporia a little bit earlier on my commute. But this time there were bikes everywhere, and I mean everywhere! I think it’s safe to say there was 50 to 75 riders inside or outside the store maybe even more.
Thankfully, people were leaving their jugs of water outside and telling people to use what’s left – so that’s what I did! I filled up my bottles which is all I needed to do since I had accidentally packed two additional cliff bars that I forgot about thinking I was going to buy food at the first Casey’s. But thanks to those two Cliff bars. I didn’t need to wait through the line inside the store. So I probably ended up passing 25 to 30 people at the store.
I rode by myself for the next 5 to 10 miles catching and passing a few people and getting caught and passed by a few others. This was heading towards the setting sun and the views were just spectacular wide open grasslands and dirt roads rolling on into the distance forever through a sea of grass. It started to get quite hilly, and we ended up making it to the highest point of the race at an elevation of 1650 feet. I still rode solo to the top of the climb and wasn’t seeing anybody in front of me and just felt so alone (in a good way) and had a huge grin on my face, snapping a picture of the now setting sun when I heard a rider coming up behind me saying “isn’t it spectacular”?
This was a pretty good sized group of maybe five riders? We were starting the descent and I was a little worried about my light set up not as bright as some other people’s set up. So I decided it made sense to stay with this group and use the communal light system as we rode into the dark. These riders were very strong and we started catching people almost immediately all the way to the next stop.
One of the people we caught was Phil from Atlanta who does a lot of ultra running and into ultra cycling now too. He recognized me and we chatted for a bit and our group by this point had about 10 to 12 riders as we rolled into Eureka for our second stop at mile 112.
We had been watching an amazing lightning show directly in front of us the entire time as we headed south towards Eureka, but it hadn’t started to rain yet. I was hoping that the storms would stay to our south, but as we turned west and northwest there was storms ahead of us to our side. There was now a bunch of lightning in that direction too. But one of the other riders said “we can’t even hear any thunder”. It’s probably pretty far away. Then we saw a flash and the thunder came about 10 seconds later which means that storm was only about 10 miles away. It wasn’t more than a few minutes later when the first heavy drops started to fall.
It did not take long for the dirt roads to get very wet. This was still a good kind of gravel though so other than a lot of spray of rocks and dirt and water there was no mud. The problem is there was a heavy wind, and the temperature dropped quite a bit right as we came into the aid station in Matfield Green. It was a veritable deluge, and people were crowding under things they could find. Many riders were were stopping quickly and then just continuing to ride. Phil and I found shelter at the church door stoop next to a guy who made the call to abandon the race. I was tempted to call it right then too knowing that there was likely now going to be a ton of mud on the course. And I was weighing that I still had 2500 miles left in my trip, so I had some bike survivability concerns.
But Phil and I decided that we would at least make it to the next stop and see what we encounter before getting there. It stopped raining shortly after we left the aid station, and we were climbing up some hills right away. This helped warm us back up after getting very cold standing around at the aid station. Phil and I started having fun just the two of us riding and talking and committing to not quitting. If I had been on my own through here, there’s a good chance I may have pulled out at that next stop.
Well, a lot did happen before that next stop. First, we hit the first section of hike-a-bike mud in the predawn light. Next, the sun rose. And we continued walking and walking. It’d be an exaggeration to say the sun was high in the sky by the time we finished walking, but not much of one because there was a section after this first section that was only a few miles later and it truly did take us until after lunch to finish both sections. By my account, it was at least six hours of walking altogether across the various mud sections.
After that first section of hike-a-bike was the Florence gas station. And you could tell that probably 100 or more completely filthy muddy cyclists had come through that gas station. The attendants were expecting it, but it’s still a lot of work and they had mops out. They mentioned to me that their strategy was to mop the floors again between each group as they came in. On the flipside, the cyclist probably did buy many thousands of dollars worth of stuff so not a bad profit for the gas station owner for one day.
A lot of cyclists had gathered here because people were abandoning the race in groups, as well as waiting it out to try and figure out whether they were going to continue. This is what Phil opted to do — wait and decide. I think he did end up abandoning there as that is what he was leaning towards when I left. But I encouraged him to really think about it.
One of the reasons a lot of people were abandoning at that gas station is because word had gotten out from the race leaders who had been there many hours earlier that they were still stuck hiking through the mud as there was at least 15 more miles of mud to hike-a-bike. Even without that hike-a-bike, this was a 70 mile stretch with no resupply and it was getting hot. So with all that mud, you needed to take enough water with you for a good 8 to 9 hours of hiking and riding.
I ended up loading my backpack down with about 150 ounces of fluid and I did go through a good chunk of it, but was kicking myself because I still had a couple bottles left and that’s a lot of extra weight that you’re having to carry through the hike-a-bike mud.
Let’s talk about the mud now. I had a bad experience with peanut butter mud while racing the Tour Divide in 2022 in the Gila National Forest. That night of riding (and hiking) through that forest still ranks as the hardest thing I have ever done on my bicycle hands-down. If I were to somehow rank them, I’d say it was at least twice or three times as hard as what we ended up doing in this race. Why? Well, the concept was still the same with hike-a-bike mud, but in the Gila National Forest, there was no shelter, nothing, no man-made structures other than the dirt road – completely on your own so far away from everything. Also, it was pouring down rain in the upper 40s so I was frozen and I was also 2400 miles into the race so my body was not in great shape. I slept under three different trees to try and at least get a little shelter from the rain. In my mind, there was just so much uncertainty with whether I was actually going to make it out of there.
For this race, we had a number we could call to get a jeep come rescue us if we were stuck or ready to quit the race. There was nobody coming to rescue me in the Gila national forest. But I made it through that and I made it through this!
For that first section of mud, I was determined to make sure not a spec of mud made it onto my tires. So I stopped riding immediately and started walking as soon as I saw people up ahead of us walking. A couple people in our group tried to ride just a little bit farther and boy that was a mistake. It doesn’t take more than a few feet in that mud to 1) come to a complete stop and 2) have many pounds of mud on both of your tires and bike and now your shoes, too, when you step down into it.
But I made a mistake in the second section and tried to ride too much in the second section. The sun had started to come out and get hot and dry things out and the gravel road we were on looked rideable. And it was indeed rideable, but only for a little bit and then the mud started to stick and I was just so optimistic that I was gonna pull it off that I rode until I clogged everything up. Thankfully, the race organizers had given us a mud cleaning tool – a sturdy hard plastic knife that was actually quite effective for scraping the mud off the tires. It just took a long time. So all the people walking I had passed while I was riding caught up to me, passed me, and were long gone by the time I could even walk again.
This section was a few miles long, but then we hit a rideable gravel road and even a paved road for a little bit before turning onto double track which was grassy enough that it was also rideable. But the infamous six mile section began when we turned off the double track back onto one of the minimum maintenance roads. Let me say this again we walked for the next six miles straight. I say “we” because a few people had kind of come together right around the beginning of the mud and we were actually catching and passing or getting caught by other people while we were hiking. It was still actually a race.
It seemed like we had been walking forever so I was surprised to see that it was only 1pm when we made it out of that long section. Still, we had entered it at 8am. You lose all sense of time at some point in this kind of thing. The last parts of the hike-a-bike became rideable as another thunderstorm with heavy rain watered down the mud enough that it didn’t stick. It was raining hard and long enough that I got quite cold when we left that final muddy MMR and turned onto a gravel road next to I-35. There was somebody with the race there, and I kept thinking they were going to make me stop or shelter with all the lightning, but they just cheered me on, which I was thankful for because I really didn’t want to stop. Shortly afterwards, in very quick succession: 1) it stopped raining, 2) I had a long climb with steep sections 3) the sun came out, and it got hot.
Also, I reconnected with Will and Josh and a few other people I had been riding with earlier and we got a good small group working in the wind, which was a massive tail wind blowing us up towards the next gas station at Council Grove. Shortly before that stop we merged with the 200 mile route where there was a lot of 200 miles coming through. So we hopped on and picked up our pace quite a bit until we split again off from them to head to our store stop.
This was my highest position in the race at that store stop because there was a lot of people there and for whatever reason it put me into 31st. But I was one of the last people leaving with just me Will and Josh. We were expecting a fourth rider to go with us, but he decided to bail right there at store, which none of us could understand or possibly imagine quitting at that point so close to the end with only 80 miles left in the race.
The route still continued north, so there was some tailwind, but we did start to mix our way back to the east and then back to the south, which was straight into a headwind. Josh came off our group and so it was just me and Will setting a pretty good pace when we came across Andrea, who had been with that lead group for much of the early part of the race. I was pretty delirious and the first signs of sleep deprivation was starting to show for me since I had been expecting to be done with the race by that point and we still had 50 to 60 miles left. So the three of us rode for a bit and had a blast chatting in the beautiful sunset setting sky cloudy sky great temps. But you could also see a huge thunderstorm ahead of us with lots of lightning.
That brings us to the end of the race where we got hit by that thunderstorm about 20 to 30 miles before the final stop which was only 15 miles from the finish. That storm soaked us, but it went over fairly quickly. Through this stretch we were catching and then being caught by 200 mile riders as our pace varied wildly from super fast on the downhills (because any ultra rider will tell you once you get tired enough in a race there’s absolutely no way you were going to touch your brakes) to very slow up the climbs. My knees were sore and standing wasn’t a real option any more so I had to spin up all those climbs in easy gear.
So storm number one of the night round of storms hits us about 30 miles before Americus, our final stop. Right before rolling into that town storm #2 hist us like a hurricane with tons of lightning and wind as we made it to the stop. But nobody wanted to stop or shelter. Everybody wanted to finish so some people would just ride right on by. Will and I were on our own through here and ended up getting some water and food and hanging out for a few minutes. I did not bring a rain jacket, which was a huge mistake but he had a poncho that he wore and let me wear his rain jacket. I ended up falling off his pace after we left and then literally falling (my only fall in the race) on a rut in the downpour. I slid for a bit on the mixed gravel. But thankfully nothing came off my bike as it was pretty impossible to see in the dark rain. A couple riders almost hit me in the rain b/c my bike was sideways as I was putting things together so my lights were not directed at them.
I caught up to Will as his Garmin had died and he was working to get it plugged in under a tree to get enough battery to finish. That second storm had pretty much finished by that point as Will and I were trying to figure out our navigation through the outskirts of Emporia. We made it to the end where much of the stuff had been packed up because of the high winds in the storms. Still, there were volunteers there to hand us our finishers medal and beer mug. I still needed to ride a few miles to get to the hotel, and wouldn’t you know Storm #3 comes rolling in as I made my way to the hotel.
I had left all my extra stuff that I need for this entire trip, including my research project materials and electronic equipment at this hotel that I knew I would be checking into after the race. It all went really smoothly. I got all my stuff back and made it up to the room soaking wet. My plan had been to do laundry that night, but after I showered, I thought I would just lay down on the bed for a minute and then didn’t wake up until the next morning when the fire alarm went off at 6 AM, which was actually by this point only about five hours after I had accidentally fallen asleep.
[Side note: I wrote most of this report using voice-to-text while biking 75 miles from Emporia to Topeka as I began the next part of my XL+ adventure – completing a 2500 mile loop back home to Alabama by way of Ontario, Canada. I’ve made it back home now, finishing the 4124 mile loop in 25 days and have added pictures and captions to what I voice-texted during my ride].
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