Yeah when you step back and think about its not a prudent expendature of cash…On the other hand when we are committed we sometimes have blinders on… I am not 
rethinking all these unsupported races for cash…
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Concur on all accounts!
Madness
All valid points for any gravel race even more so for a bucket list race like unbound where there are plenty of riders new to self or partially self supported events.
I glanced at the garmin plans. I won’t pretend to know if the structure per se is correct but looking at the 200 there seems to be plenty of volume and long rides.
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am doing a gravel race this weekend. Free entry but they ask for a donation that they put towards charity. They do the work to plan the route, check if it is riding shape ahead of time, put on a party after, etc. It seems like a fair trade to me, especially since the money is going towards charity.
This sounds like The Spirit of Gravel 
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The muddy road was the muddy road for everyone and the guy in pink was right at the front (Lachlan Morton, who finished 3rd). The actual road surface was mostly unrideable for everyone whether you were first through it or came through 90 minutes later, that mud doesn’t get worse with travel (unlike the grass sections that I assume got worse throughout the day).
That video of the leaders going through the mud was a good example of a racing mindset. If you weren’t on your bike, you were running. If you were clearing mud from your bike, you were doing it as quickly as possible. In the lead amateur group, I saw people acting the same way as the elites in that video and I saw others who shut down when they got to the mud and were just walking along at a quick walking pace. I know it’s a long day, but it’s a race. At least for my group, different people approached those sections very differently (both approach and attitude). I don’t know if it’s based on MTB vs. road background or just how different people respond to adversity, but that’s what I saw in the group I was around. Further back, maybe it was just too crowded or the grass strips were too torn up to run/ride by the people choosing to walk, but I suspect there were still a mix of people racing and other people just waiting for the bad part to end. A big part of this event are people who aren’t racing and just want to finish (and that’s great), but I think those folks looked at that mud section as something that made their goal harder to achieve, rather than a racing mindset of “everyone has to deal with it, it may or may not be good for my race result, but it’s fair”.
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disagree. I am a 5 time finisher and was about number 400 through and the surface was completely different and unrideable when I went through. I personally witnessed at least 10 derailleurs break and I would say that 2/3 of people who tried to ride by me had a mechanical within distance that I could see.
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Sure. As an adventure race. Is that what unbound wants to be?
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Not to mention that the MG has a rider limit (666 combined 
) that is small compared to UG #'s well into the 4-digit range last I saw.
I’m not doubting you. Like I said, I’m mainly reporting on what I saw in the group I was in. I saw videos from folks in the 200 and 100 that showed folks riding the grass, but it’s impossible to get context on that for how far they made it. From what I saw, the congestion appeared to be so bad in spots that it was single file. As for folks breaking their RD, I saw a bunch of that also. Yeah, it’s fine to blame the mud, but it’s ultimately operator error in those conditions. You have to know the risk and how it happens and be on hyper-alert. I’m not saying they aren’t paying attention or that they are dumb for letting it happen, but some folks just don’t have the experience to identify the situation before it’s too late. Happens to pros and amateurs alike. If you haven’t delt with or educated yourself on these kind of conditions before, you’d likely just pedal until your wheels jam up or your drivetrain has issues.
Yea they’re having an identity crisis.
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I was probably just a little ways behind you at this point as I was amongst the first of the group who got caught by the train to hit the mud. I hopped off my bike pretty early on as soon as I saw the mud and started walking on the side, while others zoomed right into it. No one made it far and multiple folks who did it said “Well that was a mistake…” or “that was dumb…”. It is what it is…
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Yep I was behind the Amtrak train and did try to ride it for maybe 20 meters before deciding that was a bad idea and got into the single file line. I did ride about the last 400 meters out though. There were sections of it that were rideable if your tires were clean.
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Different dude - check the 5.35min mark of the vid.
FWIW was I did the 200… I loved it. I’ve done only three gravel races prior and my longest gravel ride was ~80 miles. I spent a lot of time thinking and tweaking my setup to make it work, but never anticipated that mud, what a curveball indeed. My bike came out pretty okay, though I def need to look at the cassette more closely when I unpack.
I found the few hours of heat following the mud was what almost broke me. That and trying to ride with far too strong a group up until the mud. It was a wild adventure.
Wrote up race report here for anyone interested https://www.strava.com/activities/9208140918
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Those videos are great. Nice ride.
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My impression, until this year, was that they were trying to move away from the ‘epic adventure’ to ‘have fun by racing hard’. Didn’t they expressly change the course to go south a couple of years ago because the pros all bitched about the headwind on the way back and the number of destroyed tires they were getting?
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I think they alternate north and south on a semi-regular basis which is why times year to year aren’t necessarily comparable
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they rotate the course every 2 years
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just to change up the thread a bit.
I used Effetto Mariposa Flower Power for chain lube and carried the tiny bottle of squirt lube with me. zero issues through the mud and rain. I wiped the chain and added squirt at checkpoint one and mile 124 water oasis
Rode my lauf Seigla with rival axs xplr and pirelli Cinturato m size 45 tires. Plenty of clearance between tires and mud but honestly with the peanut butter mud it didn’t matter all that much as that stuff builds up so quickly. Bike was great though
Nutrition wise had Maurten 160 powder in 3 bottles and water in hydration waist pack. I’ve used Maurten for awhile and I think I might stop as it always ends up settling in a glob at the bottom of the bottle.
Used Betty Lou fruit bars, skratch energy chews, untapped maple syrup, Maurten gels, and cranksports e-gels. The longer the day went on the more I just wanted the syrup and plain water. But as sensitive as my stomach is in regular life on the bike it’s rare that the gels bother me.
My feet were the only thing that bothered me and I took my shoes off at checkpoint 1 and they were fine.
So the only thing that failed me was my physical self. 
I stopped at mile 140 when person I was riding with had their SAG picking them up and offered them a ride. We knew coming out of water oasis at mile 124 we weren’t going to meet cutoff at checkpoint 2 at mile 167 but figured might as well just keep going for fun.
Overall I had a blast. Sure rerouting that long first mud section would have been nice but in a long event like that there are lots of issues/challenges/decisions throughout the day that often contribute to a DNF.
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