Unbound course preview with four-time winner Dan Hughes

With Pace

Payson McElveen

Photography, Interviews, Adventure, Basketball, Mountain Biking, Outdoors, Entrepreneur, Athletes, Culture, Current Events, Inspirational, Health & Fitness, Society & Culture, Sports, Gravel Biking, Gravel Cycling, Celebrities, Cycling

4.8 • 767 Ratings

🗓️ 24 May 2026

⏱️ 99 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dan Hughes is a certified Unbound legend, having won the very first edition way back in 2006 and another three times for good measure. He’s seen the race go from 34 people in a hotel parking lot in Emporia to the most prestigious gravel race in the world. An Emporia local, he now works for Life Time as a Content Specialist and has already spent hours doing recon in the Flint Hills. In other words, there is no better person to talk to about the course. Payson sits down with Dan this week...

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Pace McElvin and this is the WithPace podcast.
0:11.7	There was a big impetus this year to make the 20th route, something that not only was classic, but was also new.
0:18.5	There was a point in time where it was 213 miles.
0:21.6	And this year's course was going to be, whole dude.
0:25.6	There were some options that were that were 213.
0:28.6	And I think that was with good intentions.
0:30.6	People wanted to, they were like, oh, this road is cool.
0:32.6	We got to have this one in.
0:34.6	And you get to an embarrassment of riches where you can't have all of that in there.
0:42.1	Hello everyone. Welcome back. As promised, double episode week and the second episode is a special one.
0:48.1	We don't often do advice related or informational content really. know usually there are interviews with people
0:57.3	about the people about adventures about people's thoughts feelings experiences all that sort of thing
1:02.6	but today is a bit of a hybrid episode because it is about dan hughes but it's uh it's mostly a
1:09.6	course preview of the unbound 200 course for 2026, the 20th
1:14.6	anniversary special course. We've never done a course preview like this before, but when I
1:21.7	started hearing that they were going to put together this kind of 20th anniversary special edition
1:27.0	course that hits a lot of the best of
1:30.6	sections from over the last, you know, two decades of Unbound. It seemed like a cool opportunity to
1:36.7	pair that with some history about the race. And, and yeah, provide some insight and maybe some gems, some words of wisdom from a veteran racer
1:50.0	about what can be expected from this year's course.
1:54.0	When thinking about who the right guest would be for this episode, there wasn't really much hesitation for me.
2:01.2	It was Dan Hughes.
	...

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