I was about 13 hours into my ride when tears began rolling down my mud-crusted cheeks. Thankfully, I was by myself (again), the finish line only a handful of dusty miles away, so I didn’t have to hide them from anybody. Just me and the gravel road that lay ahead. It wasn’t a sobbing cry, more like a deep, slow emotional release that had been building all day. I’ve shed more than a few tears riding my gravel bike in the Flint Hills of Kansas over the years—tears of frustration, tears of sadness, tears of joy and tears of loss. But this year’s tears felt heavier to me than years past. Not “sad” heavy tears but rather cathartic “happy” ones that emanated from a deep place inside of me and were born from the weight of what I’d been pedaling for. But before I can tell this story, you need to know about my past and the impact that this place, these roads and this community have had on my life and career for the past dozen or so years.
If you’re not familiar with Unbound Gravel, it is based in Emporia, Kansas and is considered by many to be the Super Bowl of gravel racing, attracting thousands of folks from all over the globe. It’s an event that I have an intimate relationship with. I did my first Unbound, formerly Dirty Kanza, in 2013 and immediately fell in love with the landscape, the community and the challenge of the 200-mile distance and I’ve been back to it every year since. While I didn’t know it at the time, I was one of the early adopters of gravel, hopping on a new cycling wave that would forever change the trajectory of my professional racing career.
I was lucky enough to win the race in 2015, the true mud year, in a two-up sprint, all of which was captured in a film called “I Ride For Her”—a title that came from a finish line quote I gave on dedicating the win to my wife who was four years clear of a stage 4 cancer diagnosis. Then, in 2018, I was honored to be part of a small but mighty crew that got to be the guinea pigs for the inaugural DK XL, a 350-mile event, in which I placed second. In the years since, I have completed a total of six 200s, the 100 and done the 50 the past two years as I felt I never needed to do the 200 again—especially because my last 200 in 2021 nearly put me in the hospital with heatstroke.
It’s safe to say that I’m not the greatest at saying never saying never again, because sometimes in life there are causes that transcend self, that are for the greater good, that tap into personal connections and that make doing something you vowed never to do again so worth doing again. And that’s exactly what happened. At the end of 2025, Unbound’s community partnerships manager Kristi Mohn and Sarah Emola, the executive director of Life Time Foundation, asked me if I’d come “out of 200 retirement” to raise funds to help build a bike skills park and other cycling infrastructure in Emporia. Having taught elementary school for 12 years and witnessed the positive impact that bikes, and movement in general, can have on youth, there was no other answer for me other than an excited and resounding yes!
Knowing that I would be pedaling to help youth experience the joys of riding a bike, literally, in a place that has been extremely impactful on my life and career was just the goal I needed to forget the fact that I swore I’d never ride 200 miles again. The twist, though? I would start dead last and chase down as many riders as possible, all fundraising dollars predicated on the pedalers I passed over the challenging course.
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