There was a time when American gravel cycling felt like coming home to a family reunion you’d been looking forward to all year. It was farm roads and cow gates, a thermos of coffee at the start line, and volunteers who knew your name handing out pickle juice at mile 90. It was an annual gathering built on trust, shared suffering, and the quiet understanding that some things in this world could remain beautifully imperfect.
Those days feel increasingly distant under the expanding reach of Life Time, Inc.
The transformation is perhaps most heartbreaking at what used to be the spiritual heart of gravel: UNBOUND Gravel in Emporia, Kansas. Once a grassroots celebration where friends planned their entire year around reuniting on those Kansas roads, it now carries the weight of corporate expectations and the inevitable distance that comes with scale. At the 2025 edition, after rain turned the Flint Hills into a clay-thick quagmire, what happened reminded us how much we’ve lost along the way.
Multiple riders shared troubling accounts of being injured and left waiting far too long for help. Danish rider Klara Sofie Skovgaard crashed hard, splitting her helmet, dislocating her shoulder, and tearing open her knee. She developed hypothermia lying in a roadside ditch while drones and helicopters flew overhead capturing footage for broadcast. It wasn’t medical staff who found her—it was fellow racers who stopped, abandoned their own races, and stayed with her until help finally arrived hours later. (Note: see editorial Abandoned in a Ditch)
Other riders described crashes into barbed wire, concussions without follow-up, and long stretches of remote course with no medical presence. The silence that followed was perhaps more telling than any statement could have been.
It’s telling that even their routine race recaps read like fill-in-the-blank templates, spending more words on management’s excitement about being in “enter city name here” than celebrating the people who actually raced and how their stories unfolded.
Since 2010, Life Time has steadily acquired many of America’s most cherished gravel and endurance events—Leadville (2010), Chequamegon MTB Festival (2011), Unbound (2018, when it was still Dirty Kanza), Crusher in the Tushar (2019), Sea Otter (2021), along with founding new events like The Rad Dirt Fest and Big Sugar. The promise is always the same: more resources, better athlete experience, greater exposure. But something essential gets lost in translation.
Ask anyone who’s been going to these events for years, and they’ll tell you the same thing with a kind of wistful sadness: it doesn’t feel like our race anymore. The annual pilgrimage has become a bucket-list item. The family reunion has turned into a festival where you might recognize a few faces in the crowd.
What we’ve lost isn’t just about high entry fees or lottery systems, though those changes sting. It’s about the replacement of volunteers who cared deeply about their local event with staff who see it as just another weekend gig. It’s about riders becoming demographic data points rather than the weird, wonderful people who used to define this sport. The stories that mattered—about seeing God after bonking at mile 147, about small acts of kindness from strangers, about finding something true in the suffering—have been supplanted by content creation and social media metrics.
The events still market themselves with familiar imagery—flannel shirts, dirty bikes, “gravel family” language—but it feels like watching actors perform a version of your own memories. The small-town charm is carefully curated now. The finish-line moments are filmed for promotional use. What was once authentic community has been repackaged and sold back to us as an experience at 200 bucks a head, with VIP upgrades and branded merchandise like a 1970s rock band’s nostalgia tour, complete with overpriced, underwhelming t-shirts.
Perhaps most sadly, gravel didn’t need rescuing. The sport was already growing beautifully through regional scenes, word-of-mouth recommendations, and a shared understanding of what made these gatherings special. The corporate intervention didn’t create this culture—it purchased something precious and, perhaps inevitably, began to change it into something more manageable and profitable.
This doesn’t mean gravel cycling is over. But the gravel that many of us fell in love with—the one built by passionate organizers with hand-painted signs and duct-taped coolers—now lives in the margins. It survives in smaller, unsanctioned events, in camping trips that happen to include some riding, and in routes shared quietly among friends rather than promoted through press releases.
The real gravel continues wherever people gather to ride for the simple joy of it, for the stories they’ll share afterward, and for the annual tradition of coming together to remember why they love this strange, wonderful sport. It lives on in spite of the packaging, not because of it.
Gravel was never supposed to be polished or easy to scale. That was part of its charm. But in a world where everything must be systematized and monetized, we’re left mourning not just the loss of specific events, but the loss of a way of being together that felt rare and worth protecting.
If the heart of gravel cycling survives—and we have to believe it will—it’ll be because people remember what made it special in the first place. Not the professional photography or the livestream coverage, but the quiet moments: the shared water bottle at mile 80, the person who stayed back to help fix your flat, the understanding nod from someone who knew exactly what you’d been through out there.
Those moments can’t be bought or sold. They can only be protected, treasured, and passed along to the next rider who needs to know that somewhere, somehow, the real gravel family is still out there, still gathering, still riding toward something that can’t be captured in a press release.
