Beyond Pain
Postscript No. 4 | Bond Almand IV on cycling and the Pan-American world record
THE NEW CRITIC — POSTSCRIPT
*What follows is a conversation between Bond Almand IV and Elan Kluger, founding editor of The New Critic. Bond is a 21-year-old professional endurance cyclist, climate activist, writer, and student at Dartmouth College. Elan is a 22-year-old writer from Michigan studying intellectual history at Dartmouth College.
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This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*
*I started following Bond Almand IV in the same way many other Dartmouth students did: via his thorough, vivid, and thrilling journal entries as he completed his record-breaking Pan-American route, a 14,000-mile cycling journey from Northwest Alaska to Southern Argentina, in 75 days. Almand broke the previous world record by almost nine days, a record that had been established by an athlete with a whole team to change his tires, cook him food, and provide other aid. Almand was self-supported.
I spoke with Bond about his motivations, hallucinations, writing, and pain.*
ELAN KLUGER I’ve heard a rumor — I’m not sure about the details — that in high school, in some race, you broke your legs and crawled to the finish line.
BOND ALMAND IV There is a route through the [Great] Smoky Mountains National Park, which is right next to where I grew up. The Appalachian Trail runs straight down the middle over the tallest peaks in the park. The Appalachian Trail through the park is 72 miles. There’s a run called the Smoky Challenge Adventure Run, [but] everyone calls it the SCAR. I was obsessed with setting the fastest known time on the Double SCAR, which is running it one way and then turning around and coming back the other way. It was a 144-mile trail run that I was trying to do in one go with 36,000 feet of elevation gain.
Senior fall, I attempt it my first time and I get halfway 72 miles in, and am feeling alright, but it is the middle of the night, and I’ve never done an endurance event through the night. I turn around and start climbing back up the mountains, and I fall into really deep sleep deprivation and just can’t really understand what’s happening to my body and start having crazy hallucinations.
And so I have these stress fractures in my tibia that are getting worse and worse with every step I take, but I don’t really register how bad it’s getting because I’m just completely out of it. And then around 4:30 a.m. as the sun is coming up, around mile 86 or so, I hear a snap in one of my tibias. The stress fracture had gotten so bad that it split, and I had a pretty clean stress fracture.
I passed out on the side of the trail and woke up as the first rays of sun started hitting me about 45 minutes later. I couldn’t really walk at that time, since I’d passed out from the pain. Everything had gotten really tight, so on the downhills, I had to kind of crawl.
I was 14 miles from the nearest trailhead. I kind of broke my leg in the worst possible spot. So since both legs were messed up, since I had a stress fracture in one and a fracture in the other, I couldn’t really walk that well. But yeah, I was obsessed with it. So I healed up and tried it again a couple of months later, and I got a stress fracture again and bailed again. Each time I made it 104 miles. It’s still elusive. The 144-mile Double SCAR is still to be conquered. Hopefully, the third time’s the charm.