Bond Almand is no newbie to long, adventuresome rides. First arriving on the scene with a smashing Pan-American record, from northern Alaska to southern Patagonia, he’s on a tear. This latest wild ride was in Rwanda, which is the 1,000km circumnavigation of the country. We recently caught up with Bond after his return stateside.
Welcome home Bond! Let’s start from the top, how did the Race Around Rwanda hit your radar in the first place?
The first time I heard about Race Around Rwanda is when UnTapped’s very own Mr. Ted King took on the race and won quite handily last year. The photos Ted shared were absolutely stunning, and Rwanda is a place that I’ve read a lot about for obvious historical and governmental reasons, so I really wanted to see the place for myself. It seemed like a fantastic opportunity to escape the New England cold for a week, and a great way to kick off my 2026 season.
Your undergraduate graduation is a light at the end of the tunnel. How challenging has it been to fit in the training and preparation to be ready for this season opener?
To be honest, it has been really hard this winter. The classes I’m taking this term are a bit harder than I was expecting, so there have been a lot of times when I’ve been stuck in lab when I really felt like I should have been training. Going into Rwanda I felt as if I were woefully undertrained. I tried to ease my nerves by convincing myself that everyone else was probably undertrained too. I mean, who is peaking at the end of January? But yeah, the training has been very sporadic this winter. When I’m in school, my training plan is always “train every second you aren’t doing schoolwork or sleeping.” Some terms that works better than other terms, and unfortunately this term I haven’t had as much time to train. The weather hasn’t been helping me much either. This is by far the coldest and most protracted winter I have experienced in my four years in New England. It’s been pretty awesome from a skiing and environmental standpoint, but it’s been dubious from an ultra-cycling standpoint.
You had a bit of a phoenix rising from the ashes scenario in Rwanda. Tell us about your experience — before, during, and after?
I did have a bit of a pheonix rising from the ashes moment, and I’m proud of how I bounced back, but that pride is tempered because I essentially shot the phoenix dead, then had to resuscitate it. Just before mile 100, so in the early stages of the race, I suffered a double flat on a fast descent. What should have been a 15-minute fix, quickly turned into a 22-hour race-ending catastrophe because I brought the wrong size of tubes. I brought my road tubes, not my gravel tubes, so I couldn’t fix either flat. Because my wheels are 50mm rim depth, I needed valve extenders and new tubes, so I had to catch a taxi back to Kigali, then return to the course the next day. When I finally got back on course, the leaders were a full 22 hours up the road and I was in dead last place.
Photo: @JamesBusbyImages
I tried to recalibrate my expectations. The win was obviously out of reach, but I could still have a really strong ride. I decided to reset my internal race clock, and pretend as if it were a time trial, not a mass start race. I became obsessed with having the fastest splits between the checkpoints. Because the race win was out of reach, I let myself linger at the checkpoints a bit longer than I otherwise would have, just to enjoy the country a little more. I was definitely really mad at myself, and I still am really mad at myself for making such a stupid error. But I tried to put all of that in the past and just ride my bike. It’s not very often that you have the opportunity to ride in such an amazing place, so I tried to soak it all in.I’m walking away from Rwanda super grateful for the experience, but I’m still kicking myself for what could have been. On paper, this was the easiest race on my calendar and I was really hoping to open up with a strong result so that I could walk away with a bit of confidence. Instead I’m walking away with a chip on my shoulder, which is par for the course over the last few months. I have really high expectations for myself and the last couple of months I haven’t been living up to those expectations, so that’s a little difficult to deal with, especially since with my current workload at school, it feels like I am not able to train as much as I need to to meet the burden of my expectations.
What was going through your head when you’re stuck on the side of the road so early on? Was it some kind of blessing in disguise for it to happen so early as opposed to 300 miles later?
I was pretty resigned to my fate. As soon as I realized I had a flat and I had no way of fixing it, the reality of my situation hit home with striking clarity. The rest of my race seemed predetermined from that point on. I am glad the mechanical happened when it did. If it had happened at mile 300, it would have split the race into two manageable chunks, and I probably would not have been satisfied with either chunk. As it was, I had over 520 miles left to cover when I got back on course with my fixed bike, which felt like a big challenge. If it had only been 300 miles it would have felt like a pretty manageable ride–I’ve done that plenty of times before. Not to say that it would have been easy, but it would not have required a boundary-pushing effort to conquer. As it was, I was able to tackle the 520 miles in its entirety, which really pushed me physically.
What were the actual logistics of the race? I think you had the fastest moving time for the 2026 race, is that correct?
I think my moving time was the second fastest. I had the fastest splits through several checkpoints, but on aggregate, I slowed down a bit from the last checkpoint to the finish, and my time from the start to checkpoint one (even taking out the 22 hour mechanical) was a decent bit slower than the leader. There are four checkpoints, which break the race into five roughly even segments. Each segment had its own challenges, but I found the middle sectors to be significantly more challenging due to high elevation, more technical terrain, and steeper climbs. Compared to my competitors, the middle segments are where I made up a lot of time, especially in the middle of the night.
It’s impossible to play the “what if” game. There are so many variables in bikepacking that if you play the “what if” game for long enough, you can convince yourself that anything could have happened out there. The race leader was essentially a full day ahead of me, so we experienced different weather, conditions, people, etc. It’s just impossible to compare. The guy who won was very strong and rode the second fastest time in Race Around Rwanda history, despite some pretty muddy conditions during the second night. Hats off to Borsos Benedek, he rode a very strong race.
I will note, though, that even after I got my flats fixed, my bike was not in perfect working order. In fact, it was almost comical how jank the bike was for most of the race. When I was attemptingto change the flats, I was surrounded by hundreds of little kids, and they were all over my bike. My brakes repeatedly got squeezed when the wheels were out, so the pistons were pushed all the way in and despite my best efforts, I never go them fully back out, so I had a pretty catastrophic brake rub for the majority of the race. My bottom bracket also came loose so there was an inch of play in my spindle, which I didn’t even realize could happen. This was my first time riding the bike, and my first time riding outside in over a month, so there were a lot of kinks to be worked out, including the bike fit, which I was adjusting the entire race.
You’ve mentioned that this was a successful learning experience in the ability to ride through two nights no sleep. The actual logistics of that seem bonkers. Can you talk a little bit about the psychology of that experience — what goes through your mind?
Riding through two nights with no sleep is something that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. My freshman year of college I rode 500 miles nonstop, which was my first time riding through the night. I was just dipping my toes into the ultra space and I remember thinking how freaking insane it was that I rode through the night. It just seemed like an impossibly long distance and duration to ride. I finished and was already plotting my next big milestone. After 500 miles you can shoot for 1,000 kilometers (622 miles), which I did the next year, but after 1,000 kilometers, I had really thought I was at an impasse. The next milestone is 1,000 miles, which will probably take about 60 hours of riding. That requires riding for 3 days and 2 nights. The days are easy enough, but that second night is brutal. I’ve ridden through the night countless times now, but this was my first time riding through the second night in a row. I’m more excited about the proof of concept for my 1,000-mile ride than anything else. I can’t wait to give it a shot this spring, hopefully.
The first night went by relatively smoothly. I expected some slight sleep deprivation delusions, and they came and went as expected. When you get sleep deprived you get delusions and hallucinations. Delusions always come first. A delusion is when your brain takes something that it sees, and transforms it into something that it is not. For example, every shadow became a monkey out of the corner of my eye, especially when I was biking through the national park, where they told us to look out for the chimpanzees! Hallucinations are when your brain totally makes something up. I didn’t get hallucinations until the second night. Because I’m pretty attuned to sleep deprivation on the bike now (I’m still not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing in the long run), I knew what to expect and kept my delusions and hallucinations under control for the most part, until around 23:00 on the second night (36 hours with no sleep). Things got a bit spooky for a couple of hours. I was coming out of the national park in the South of the country, and was clawing my way up and down these incredibly steep and technical descents. I’m still not sure how hard these roads actually are, but it felt like the hardest riding of my life. I know that some of the climbs were over 20% on these deeply washed out and rutted roads.
Anyway, I started to loose all sense of self. I couldn’t comprehend the fact that I was biking around the country just for fun. My actions made absolutely zero sense to my sleep-deprived mind. The only thing that kept me going was the line on the map of my cycle computer. I have drilled into my mind “never leave the line, always follow the line, follow the line above every other instinct in your body.” I held true to that and just went. I don’t remember much from that part of the ride. I have some videos I took of myself just staring at my phone and muttering incoherently. It is an awesome experience to look back upon. Our bodies are capable of some pretty insane stuff. When I got to checkpoint four around midnight on my second night, I was ready to take a nap because I was totally checked out, but when I got off the bike I got a second wind (more like a 10th wind at this point) and I never ended up sleeping. I laid down on the tiled floor with the intention of taking a twenty minute nap, but I remember staring at the ceiling thinking “I came to Rwanda to bike, not to sleep.” So I got up, drank a cup of coffee, a coke, and hammered a 5-hour energy, got back on my bike, and rode towards the sunrise, which was still over 5 hours away (so I took another 5-hour energy around 5 am, of course).
Nutrition is a bit of a challenge in any ultra event. Tell us about the highs and lows and everything in between of how nutrition factored into your RAR?
The hardest part about nutrition for me is remembering that I need to eat. I have subsisted on a pretty heinous diet for a number of years, both on the bike, and off the bike as a low-budget college student. I have a bulletproof stomach for almost any food, so when I remember to eat, I eat a lot, and I eat well. Unfortunately, I did not remember to eat much in the middle of the night(s), which really set me back. My nutrition strategy for this race was to take an UnTapped every hour, and put 3 Mapleaids in every 32 oz water bottle until I ran out of UnTapped product. I bought 36 UnTappeds and 15 Mapleaids. I ran out of Mapleaid sometime during the second day, but because of my poor nutrition in the middle of the night, I didn’t run through all of my UnTappeds until the 3rd morning. Other than maple syrup, I gorged myself at every checkpoint. There was a buffet at every checkpoint, so I would sit and eat as much as I could in about 10 minutes. That usually amounted to around 2k-3k calories per sitting. I would also occasionally stop between checkpoints to refill my bottles and grab a snack.
