The Most Savage Edition of Unbound I've Ever Done. Full Race Analysis

Duration: 15:02 2892 transcript words EN summary

Video summary

The narrator describes an exceptionally difficult edition of the Unbound race, characterizing it as a comedy of errors fueled by unpredictable weather conditions that turned into chaos rather than the anticipated dry dirt road. Despite initial forecasts suggesting sunny and hot weather, heavy rain fell throughout much of the event, creating "wet cement" like mud that wreaked havoc on equipment for many riders. The narrator made a critical strategic mistake regarding tire choice; fearing a muddy course based on past experience, he opted for smaller 650b wheels with minimal frame clearance instead of his standard dry setup. This decision proved disastrous when the race conditions shifted from dry to wet mid-race, causing mud to instantly clog his drivetrain and forcing him into frequent stops that cost him significant time and position against a field where many riders had already dropped out due to crashes or injuries. As the race progressed through its grueling first half, the narrator's bike became increasingly unrideable in sections of thick peanut butter mud, leading to mechanical failures such as bent chain guides and chains refusing to stay on rings. To cope with these incessant clogging issues, he resorted to using vast amounts of water from his hydration bladder to clean his drivetrain, eventually resorting to a humorous yet effective hack suggested by fellow rider Payson McElveen: urinating on the bike's gears as a makeshift lubricant and cleaner. This desperate measure allowed him to continue pedaling but highlighted the severity of the equipment struggles he faced. By mile 31 alone, he had lost so much time dealing with mud that he was being passed by women in the field, dropping from outside the top 100 at one point before managing to make up some ground later as other riders pulled out or struggled even more severely than him. In the latter stages of the race, around the eight-hour mark, the narrator experienced a severe bonk due to depleted energy reserves caused by his inability to drink enough fluid while cleaning his bike and cooler temperatures reducing his intake. Although he managed to stabilize himself with emergency gels for the final stretch, finishing in 50th place out of 117 starters felt like an accomplishment given that only about two-thirds of the professional men's field completed the course. Despite the tactical blunders and mechanical nightmares, his normalized power output remained surprisingly high compared to a previous year where he finished tenth, proving that while equipment choices can ruin a race day, raw fitness remains intact even after hours of suffering in mud and rain. The experience ultimately reinforced the harsh reality that racing is defined as much by disappointment and misfortune as it is by success, requiring racers to possess the resilience to keep going when everything seems stacked against them.

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Payson McElveen was in the same spot as me, having the exact same issues, and he asked me if I had any extra water, given how much water I had just wasted, and I hadn't even fixed my own issues yet, I was not about to give him some. But then an idea popped into my head, and I just shouted, "Hey man, just try peeing on your drivetrain." Welcome back to the channel. This video is fueled by The Feed. Unbound, you cruel, cruel mistress. I'm going to warn you up front, this video is going to sound like a comedy of errors. If you consume content from Unbound, then you probably have a bit of excuse fatigue at this point, and I'm sorry to say that this video is only going to add to that. In fact, let's put an excuse counter up on the screen and see how many we can get to by the end of the video. Sounds like a fun way of making light of my despair. Let me guess, you picked the wrong tires. Unbound is one of those races that can change dramatically depending on the weather. If it's dry, it races like a really long road race on dirt, but if it's wet, it can turn into chaos in an instant. We're talking bikes getting so clogged with mud that they're unrideable, derailleurs being ripped off, frame damage, financial damage, emotional damage, ego damage, the whole nine yards. There is a certain sweet spot of moisture that turns the Unbound surface into what I think can best be described as wet cement. It absolutely wreaks havoc on equipment. The weather forecast was pretty ambiguous. There was rain throughout the week leading into the race, but the course was also drying up very quickly. This is where I made the biggest mistake of the day, and arguably the mistake that would cost me any hope of getting any sort of result at this race. Let me explain. Knowing how bad the mud can get here, and knowing that if the mud is bad, the single biggest factor for getting through it is how much clearance your bike has in between the tire and frame, I decided to ask my wheel partner Enve for an old pair of their gravel specific 650b wheels to give myself extra clearance, and they were kind enough to indulge this borderline neurotic behavior. And yes, Cam Jones may have gone up to 32s, but I went in the opposite direction and went for smaller wheels. Who would have thought? Now, these wheels were only going to be used in the case that it was a heinous mud year where frame clearance is the most important factor. And I even found some 47 Pathfinder 650b tires, which they don't even make anymore. On the Friday before the race, knowing that there was a good chance that it was going to be a mud race, I even tested out the 650b wheels in the bike, but during my pre-ride, to my surprise, it was completely dry. The mud section at mile 11 that everyone was worried about might as well have been a highway. After my pre-ride, I put the dry setup back on, which as I talked about in my wind tunnel video, was the 700c Enve GS ES wheels with a Conti Race King 2.2 mountain bike tire in the rear. Minimal clearance, but if the course was anything like it looked on Friday, then it should work just fine. I still sprayed the bike down with SC-1 to prevent mud build-up just in case, but I was pretty confident. Famous last words. Now, we were supposed to get some rain that night, but not a lot, and we had somebody checking the course the morning of the race to let us know whether or not it was muddy or dry. The text came in, and they said it was a bit damp, but passable, and by the time the race went through it, it should be dry. So, I went with the dry setup. When we hit the mud section at mile 11, it was in fact dry, and it was looking like we were in for a dry day of racing. And then in another 8 mi we hit the first of many terrible mud sections that would actually set the tone for the first half of the race. My bike clogged up very badly in this section, but so did a lot of people's bikes and I know there are some racers that got through this section without stopping and believe me all of us who got stuck are trying to figure out how they managed that. This is my working theory so far from looking back at the footage. Hans as gravel tends to have two main lines in the tire tracks where car traffic beats it down and then the rest of the gravel is much less worn in. If you took the main line through this section then I think you were fine, but if you deviated off of it even slightly, then you found yourself in the kind of peanut butter mud that unbound is known for. The kind that clogs your bike instantly and means you have to spend 5 minutes scraping mud out with a paint stick before it's ridable again. This is what happened to me along with most of the field in this section, but it actually wouldn't be the worst of my mud issues. I got going again and my bike wasn't working well, the gears were skipping and I was hardly able to clip in, but at least the wheels could spin and I could start chasing and find a group to work with. At mile 31 my chain came off in another section of mud and I looked down and my drivetrain was absolutely covered in mud. I had a chain guide on my bike, but the mud was so thick that it had actually bent my chain guide. I removed the chain guide and put the chain back on, but the build up of mud on the chain was so bad that the chain refused to stay on the chainring. I spent 15 minutes in this one spot and used two full water bottles with water and water from my hydration bladder trying to clean the drivetrain well enough so that I could pedal it again. Paysen McElveen was in the same spot as me having the exact same issues and he asked me if I had any extra water, given how much water I had just wasted and I hadn't even fixed my own issues yet, I was not about to give him some. But then an idea popped into my head and I just shouted, "Hey man, just try peeing on your drivetrain." This was half a joke and half serious, but he whipped it out, pissed on his drivetrain, and then started pedaling off again. So, obviously, I tried the same thing and it did work well enough for me to get myself to a creek where I could dunk my bike in a creek just like I did in 2023. Yeah, my mechanic hates me. Honestly, when you take a step back, it's almost comical that there is a sport where peeing on your equipment is considered a hack, but I guess that's gravel for you. So again, this issue took me 15 minutes to deal with just 31 mi into the race and during this time I was getting passed by everyone, including the women's field. The mud really did disproportionately affect some riders more than others and there are probably a lot of factors for why that happened, but in my case I think it is the lack of clearance I had with such a terrible tire decision that was sending mud into my drivetrain. And I want to take personal accountability for that decision. Making the right equipment decision is a huge part of the sport of gravel and in this instance I screwed it up royally. At this point in the race, I was in 106th place out of the 117 pro men that started the race and probably 15 or 20 women had passed me as well. Man, that whole wind tunnel trip is really starting to look like a big waste of time and money right about now, huh? Things start to get a bit better from here, but to be fair that is an incredibly low bar. I ended up linking up with Frederik Rasmussen who rides for Canyon and he was the rider that I would end up working with for most of the day. It rained on us pretty steadily for two or three hours and I just want to take this moment to point out that the weather apps were completely and utterly wrong about the forecast on race day. I actually don't know if I've ever seen a weather prediction be more wrong. It said it was going to be sunny, hot, and dry and for most of the race it was the exact opposite. Despite the rain, I felt good and we were making up places, but my mud mechanicals were not over yet and I can hear the collective sigh from the audience come through the screen, so I'll keep this one brief. At mile 131 you come onto W Road, which is a two-track minimum maintenance road. The mud was particularly bad in this section and clogged my chain again and I spent a significant amount of my water trying to unclog it and I spent a total of 7 minutes in this one spot trying to deal with this issue. Now, if you're counting, that's four water bottles worth of water and a bladder full of piss that I have used to clean my drivetrain up to this point, which brings me to my last excuse. I promise, if you're still with me then I applaud your perseverance. Dude, no need to apologize. You're a pro gravel racer. We've come to expect this. After this I was by myself a lot, occasionally catching a rider here or there, but mostly floating in no man's land in the latter half of the race. It was around this time that I noticed that my power started to dip quite a bit and it wasn't long before I felt a bonk coming on. At 8 hours into the race, all of a sudden I had to ratchet my pace down significantly because I was on the edge of bonking. Luckily, I had grabbed emergency gels at the last feed zone because I had anticipated this happening and I started downing one every 10 minutes to keep the bonk at bay and it kind of worked as I got a second wind towards the end of the race. Now, I honestly can't remember the last time I bonked. With modern fueling, it almost never happens. So, why was it happening here? Well, it doesn't really take a rocket scientist to figure it out. In fact, even a wannabe YouTube scientist like myself could figure it out mid-race, which is why I took the emergency gels. I rely on fluids quite a bit to get my calories. Yes, I do consume gels, too, but if I'm consuming 110 to 140 g of carbs per hour, then probably 70 to 80 g of that comes from drink mix. The problem was that I was using this drink mix to clean my chain in the mud section to get it ridable, and on top of that, instead of being hot and dry, it was raining and cooler, so I drank less than I anticipated. The result is a lot of missed carbs throughout the race, and by hour eight, that was starting to catch up to me, but that's completely on me. I should have recognized that this was happening sooner in the race. The final 20 mi of the race went relatively smoothly, or at least as smoothly as they can when you're 9 plus hours into Unbound, your drivetrain has been power washed with drink mix, creek water, and human desperation, and your soul has left your body somewhere around mile 170. Well, okay, now we're just getting a bit dramatic. I found myself with a group of four coming into the finish. I launched an attack on the final climb right before the finish, and the only rider to stay on my wheel was Frederick, who I was working with earlier that day, who dropped me when I had the chain issues on W Road. He outsprinted me because on top of my inability to deal with Unbound mud, I also still don't have a great sprint, and I ended up in 50th place. So, you may remember that back at mile 30, I was outside of the top 100, so I did make up a solid 50 plus places throughout the race, but you should probably also keep in mind that a lot of those riders simply pulled out of the race. In fact, out of the 117 pro men that started the race, only 80 finished. I don't think I need to remind anyone that I wasn't the only one having a hard time out there. There were many riders that had it worse than I did. My own teammate Adam Roberge was forced to abandon with a concussion. Previous Unbound winner Lachlan Morton was out with a crash. Roman Bardet unfortunately had to pull the plug as well, and the list goes on. Upon reflection, I think I can confidently say that this is the most savage edition of Unbound that I have ever done, and I've done it six times now. I don't say this about most professional bike races, but I think it applies here. Just getting to the finish line was an accomplishment in itself that day. And despite how horrendous my race played out, I'm proud of myself for having the perseverance to stick with it all the way to the end because there were numerous times where I could have easily thrown in the towel. Now, you may have noticed that I haven't talked about power numbers at all for this entire video, and that's because given everything that was going wrong, I felt like it was a bit irrelevant. But, in case you're curious, here they are. Even with the 30 minutes of stop time total for the entire race and the near bonk at the end, my normalized power was still 279 W for the entire 10 and 1/2 hour race, which is only 4 W lower than when I got 10th place here in 2024. And my average power was 243, which is actually 2 W higher than in 2024. And of course, I have to consider that the race was an hour and 15 minutes longer for me this time around than in 2024. So, when I factor all of that in, it shows me that at least from a form perspective, I'm still on par with that 2024 shape. Of course, power numbers don't win races, and never has that been more apparent than with this example. Last time I was at the pointy end of the bike race, and this time around my biggest tactical contribution was telling Payson to piss on his bike. The last thing I'll say before I wrap it up is that despite me cracking jokes about it now, I was actually really torn up about this race right after it happened. I felt like I absolutely blew it by making a terrible equipment choice, which is supposedly one of the parts of this sport that I pride myself on being really good at. I remember when I was a teenager, I had a string of bad races, and my dad told me something that I would quickly forget, but has recently popped back into my mind as of late. He said, "Racing is about disappointment." Upon reflection, this is an absolutely terrible thing to tell a kid, and I don't know what my dad was thinking by telling me this, but it's actually accidentally pretty profound. Racing has disappointed me more times than I can count, and recently it has been disappointing me a lot. But as they say, "That's racing," and that's what makes the good races and the good periods of a racing career so well worth it. And in order to be a racer, you need to be able to handle disappointment because misfortune will always be part of the sport. I think in this instance, you could use racing as a metaphor for life, honestly. happens. And on my mom this year, that may be a little too literal, actually. The fact that I didn't pick up a parasite from all that cow poop on the course is probably one of the few positives. All right, if you're still watching at this point, I'm sure you know the drill. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like, subscribe, and share it with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.