Category: Racing
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Unbound Gravel XL+, Part 1 – my thousand mile commute to the race
Last week, I finished a 4124 mile gravel / road / trail adventure that included the Unbound Gravel XL bike race in the middle. After biking 1000 miles from my home in Hoover, Alabama to the race in Emporia, Kansas, I finished 48th in the XL version of the race in particularly muddy conditions this…
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Unbound XL 2026 Race Report
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…
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Follow My Unbound Gravel XL+ Adventure
I’m ready to race the Unbound XL 350 mile gravel race today in Emporia, Kansas. Having biked over 1,000 miles over the past five days to get here, I’m about 1/4 of the way done on the 4,000 mile loop. I’ve got my full radar lateral passing setup and will be collecting data for the…
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Skyway Epic 2025
For many years I’ve viewed cycling as a time machine, but that view has always been external … the awe and excitement of finding cool, old, abandoned long forgotten things like roads and bridges sometimes in the middle of nowhere and sometimes in the middle of chaos and modern mostly unsustainable infrastructure. One thing that…
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2024 statistics and maps
I used to call this post my “season statistics” or “season summary” in reference to the cycling racing season. I would calculate all my statistics from December 1 of the prior year to November 30th of the current year. This was based on the Eddie Borysewicz cycling training book called “Bicycle Road Racing”, from which…
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The Rift 2024
What an amazing experience this race was. I came into the race doing it mostly to have a reason to visit Iceland. I was surprised by how challenging and perfect and awesome the race itself actually was. There is a reason why more and more people keep signing up for this race with this year’s…
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Paris-Brest-Paris 2023
TLDR – It was tough I had imagined this as being a slightly faster, slightly longer version of my normal multi-day adventures around the South. What I hadn’t counted on was how exhilarating it would actually be to do the ride and how I would overextend myself early in all the excitement. They had great…
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2023 Skyway Epic
Another year, another skyway. This is the life. This was my 11th year racing the skyway. It would be one of the few races I’ve ever had the opportunity to do every single edition … except for getting hit by a car and spending the week of the race in the hospital in 2014. This…
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Tour Divide 2022 – Day 18 – June 28th, 2022 – Finishing the Tour Divide on our 19th wedding anniversary
On June 28th, 2003, in a beautiful small town with no traffic lights in rural Northwest Wisconsin, my beautiful wife said “I do”. The featured pic above is an hour or so later taken by a dear friend who snapped it after we finished the drive even farther into the woods to a cross country…
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Tour Divide 2022 – Days 16 and 17 – June 26th/27th, 2022 – Grants, NM to Silver City, NM via the toughest ride of my life
Keep in mind by the start of this ride I was averaging about 3 to 4 hours of sleep per night for 15 days in a row. Also, keep in mind that by the start of this ride, I had already ridden over 2,400 miles over those same 15 days. Lastly, keep in mind that…