Dodging lightning, 5 hours of hiking, and a trip to hospital – Maddy Nutt recounts 3 key mistakes and plenty more stories from her 'absolute adventure' at Unbound XL

The last time I spoke to Maddy Nutt was after her debut for the ultra win at The Traka Adventure, a race where she not only secured the victory but also set a new course record.

She was, despite being incredibly chipper, clearly totally hollowed out after the finish in Spain.

In Kansas, Nutt led Unbound XL for a long time, then finished her first entry in 27 hours, 46 minutes, 13 seconds, which was a runner-up position a little more than 34 minutes behind now two-time winner Svenja Betz.

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While I spoke to her over the phone this time rather than over a cold beer, it was clear Unbound XL, a race she had upgraded to from the usual Unbound Gravel 200, had taken its toll.

Her voice was cracked to a degree I hadn’t heard since those heady days of school discos.

"How are you?" I asked.

“I'm surviving, not thriving. That's how I would put it.”

Unbound XL recap

Unless you’ve had your head in the sand you will know that Unbound Gravel this year was an infamously mucky affair. Stories abound of the mud, hiking, and general carnage. As I spent most of the race weekend tending to my allotment (sorry, the strawberries needed some TLC), I was keen to hear from the horses mouth (or should that be hoarse?) how the race went:

“Oh my God, it was an absolute adventure. It started really hard; I would say it actually started harder than the elite women's 200 started last year, because this was the start with men as well. So you had the pro men in the 350, who were absolutely whacking the pace at the beginning to try and trim down the group, and everyone was trying to do their best to hold on," Nutt said.

“Considering it was a 27-hour race at the end of the day, I did some one-hour power that I definitely should not have done in the first one hour of the race, and at that point it was only me, Heather Jackson [2025 XL champion - ed.] and this girl called Larissa [Hartog], who I've never raced before… people were literally racing like it was a 100-mile race.”

Unlike The Traka Adventure, where it is technically a non-draft race (although this rule gets bent at the start to some degree), drafting is very much legal at Unbound XL and introduces some different race dynamics.

“This race drafting is legal, which it wasn't at Traka, so you do have to think a little bit like… ‘if I can get in a group that's moving a lot faster I'm going to make quite a lot of time’.

“If men and women start together, it then becomes a little bit luck-of-the-draw as to whether you end up being able to draft someone later in the race or not. I ended up on my own for quite a bit of time, but it's so hard. I think you wouldn't be able to do a separate men's and women start with the size of the woman's field.”

Curious as to whether drafting makes life easier, it seems the answer was a counterintuitive negative:

“It felt unbelievably hard at the beginning, but I know even for the men they were saying it was unbelievably hard at the beginning. I think just everyone goes unnecessarily hard in these things and they just forget that it's however many stupid amount of kilometers they still have to ride, and they just have blinkers on, and they're just racing.”

Three key errors

While shorter races can be won error-free, there will always be mis-steps in ultra distances. Nutt recounts how she felt good for the first 300km, at which point she was leading the race, only for things to unravel in the endless cloying mud for three key reasons.

“One was wearing stiff carbon race shoes… and I'll tell you that my heels are not in a good way. So, one was like, not thinking about the fact that I could have to walk in my shoes.”

It must be said that I don’t think this is a slight on her Q36.5 shoes; hiking for hours on end in bike shoes, even those with a bit of flex, will slough the skin off most feet. I suggested, somewhat flippantly, that perhaps barefoot might have been preferable (and if you’d seen the pictures you’d probably be with me on this):

“I mean, I really should have done. I should have just taken my shoes off. And this is where the crucial error was, because we didn't know how long the mud sections were. And the problem with this kind of mud is you don’t know it's gonna get stuck on your bike until you try and ride on it. It doesn't look bad.

“It was honestly five hours [walking]. I think the fastest guys did it in four. I think Svenja [Betz] did it in about four, and when Svenja passed me she was just carrying her bike on her back, and I think she's just got much better upper body strength than I do because I tried and I tried to carry it on my shoulder and I just kept dropping it! I just couldn't carry it.

“There was some bits where it was actually hard to walk; there was bits where you couldn't even walk on the grass on the side, and it was just deep mud, and and I kept having to take breaks because I was struggling to carry my bike.”

While the footwear choice might have been far from ideal, it wasn’t the only reason that Nutt dropped from first to third in the endless slop.

“The other two: These are more crucial. One was I put wider tyres on the day of the race because I hadn't brought with me the right tyres that I needed, because I changed my mind about my tyres and I wanted thicker tyres for more puncture resistance.”

It transpires that the day before the race on a recon ride, Nutt suffered a puncture that went unseen until a puddle of sealant revealed itself on her final bike setup session later in the day. If she wanted to go for a sturdier tyre she would also have to go wider, due to limited available options on hand from her tyre sponsor, Panaracer. This then reduced tyre clearance, added to the glogging factor, but it must be said Nutt did not mention any punctures, something that afflicted many in the race.

All of that pales in comparison to what many will see as a quite extraordinary decision to jettison her paint stirrer stick before the mud section, a decision she describes as ‘extra silly’.

“I had a mud stick in my pocket and about, I think it was like 200k in, I was, like, ‘I'm sick of carrying this stick. It's not been muddy, it's so dry’, and I just threw it in a bin at a gas station!

“FIVE HOURS of hiking was to be on the cards for later in the day, and I would have needed that stick, and instead I had to use my fingers. There was mud everywhere, and I was having to pretend my finger was a mud stick and try and get it out. It was silly.

"I lost two positions in the mud. But then after the mud when I actually was able to ride again in the bike race, I did manage to move forward quite a lot, and I actually got within two miles to Svenja, but I couldn't catch her.”

Despite these hardships, her attitude to scratching was a commendable mix of pragmatism and sheer bloody-mindedness.

“Scratching's probably as hard as continuing, so I might as well just keep going.”

Thunderstruck

While the mud was cloying and attritional, it was caused by an absolute deluge from the heavens and some quite severe weather, though preceded initially by swarms of fireflies to add some early night magic:

“We had horrific lightning storms, and it was actually really scary. And I was really lucky that I was in a little group when the lightning got really close, and we actually looked to see where the nearest town was, and it was 30k away! I guess, if we stay together, at least we're not one person on their own, and I just kept ducking really low, hoping that if I'm closer to the ground, then if lightning does go for us, maybe I'll be the last one to get struck.

“We were right in the thick of it; proper, proper, proper lightning storms everywhere. At the beginning it was kind of magical because they were in the distance, and then it wasn't magical when our turn directions started pointing towards the lightning.

"I did question whether I should stop a few times and find refuge and maybe get picked up, but I did think this would be quite a good way to go if I was to go. It's kind of ‘if it will be, it will be’.”

Having seen the footage it’s no great surprise that it had riders questioning their mortality, and Nutt casually drops in that one of the riders sent a message to a friend to give to her husband in the event that they were struck down from on high: Just tell my husband that if I go, I was doing something that I like.

Three wees, this time

If you’ve read my previous interviews with Nutt, or seen the various clips of her circulating social media (clips that got her recognised in Walmart for her infrequent urination), you’ll know she’s extremely candid, though she is the first to admit that this is elevated following a race when the filter is degraded by hours of exertion.

Amazingly she managed to complete the Traka Adventure with only two stops for a nature break, and would have matched that at Unbound were it not for a tactical stop to draft a lofty chap coming over the horizon:

“Yeah, well, I actually thought I was gonna get away with only two, and I thought, wow, that's quite impressive. And then it was this real bad headwind section towards the end, and I've been alone for hours, and I was pretty sure considering the time gap that Svenja had someone with her and I’m really sitting in the wind on my own and I look behind me, and there was a very, very tall man, and I was like that man. Looks like a brilliant draft, Maybe I should wait for him.

“So I had a wee just to wait for him. And then, when he caught me, he was like, ‘I need a wee’, and I was, like, ‘oh no’. So I had to leave him, and I felt really guilty because he asked me for a tube, but my tube was like stuck underneath my tracker in the bottom of my saddlebag, and I was really too scared like faff with trying to get my tube out to give it to you.

“So I didn't give him a tube, and I still feel guilty about that. And I owe that man, definitely a tube and a coffee.”

Her openness reached new heights after this anecdote when we touched on the subject of the risky gas station breakfast burrito:

“I very stupidly was convinced about this burrito, that it would be really good to have a breakfast. burrito in the morning, and then I accidentally picked up the wrong one with jalapenos, and I just really almost had an accident on the bike.”

What's next for Nutt?

The race clearly had taken it’s toll physically, so much so that a trip to to the hospital was needed after the podium (priorities, right?):

“Did I tell you that I ended up going to ER yesterday?! I went to the podium in the morning, and then we went to hospital because I convinced myself I'd like got a serious injury in the downstairs region, but it turns out it was not as bad as I thought.

“They’re basically like saddle sore-esque, and they've given me antibiotics, but I shouldn't ride my bike for a few days. And I would say riding bikes for 27 hours is not good for you.

"I could barely sit on the saddle at the end. I was like, this is agony.”

It’s perhaps a damning indictment of US air travel that, despite all the trials and tribulations, her worst experience came in the airport on the journey back to the UK:

"I had a horrific flight home where it was delayed by hours when I was stuck in my connecting airport for, like, three hours, not able to get on the flight until 3 a.m., which was horrible. And there was no wi-fi, so I didn't even have anything to distract me. So I literally just sat staring into space for three hours. That was worse than the race.”

It seems that the ultra bug has worn off, at least temporarily. Home, and recovering, there doesn’t seem to be any more plans to enter ultra-distance races, though Nutt clearly sounds like she’s got eyes on next year for some longer events given her impressive podium placings.

“For the rest of the season I think I am gonna stick to my original plan, which is to go back down to the short and faster staff, and just like bash out of a few UCI races and end the season on that. Then have a think about next year because I think it would be crazy if I ended up doing something like Badlands now. Obviously I would be tempted, but I think it's not sensible.”

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