On the 30th of May, in Emporia, Kansas, four riders rolled out into UNBOUND, and it did everything it could to send them home — rain, thick mud, thunder over the prairie, lightning cracking overhead. Plenty of seasoned riders walked their bikes or called it a day, but these four kept going. By the time they returned to Emporia, the hard part was long behind them. Not the miles... The years.
Adventure For All brought four athletes with exceptionalities to UNBOUND Gravel, one of the most recognized endurance cycling events in the world. Together, they represented more than miles ridden. They represented years of courage, growth, family support, and the belief that human potential is far greater than most people imagine. Here before you are the athletes of AFA's Death to Doubt team:
Christian Loafman led the team. Before UNBOUND, before the Boston Marathon, before he became an Ironman, he spent eighteen years in casts and braces. Days after he finished the 100-mile course caked head to toe in Kansas mud, he went in for the first surgery in a craniofacial reconstruction that's been years in the making. At mile 54, soaked, with conditions falling apart around him, someone asked if he was still having fun. "Oh yeah, for sure."
Nick and Jackson Reed rode the 25 together — Jackson, who is three, on the back of his dad's bike with a front-row seat and a snack supply. When Jackson was born, the Reeds got a Down syndrome diagnosis they hadn't planned for. What came with it, Nick says, was a lesson in slowing down. Somewhere out on course Nick glanced back, caught his son grinning, and found the next pedal stroke. "That's what dad needed to keep pedaling hard."
Phoebe Andersen is twelve, the youngest rider and the only girl on the team, and she took on fifty miles specifically so some other girl might watch and think, I want to do that. Her mantra, borrowed from a small blue fish, was "just keep swimming." She swam through nearly five hours of rain and mud. Asked about it afterward, she said she wishes she could tell you she hated it. And she did. She also loved hating it, and can't wait to do it again. If that doesn't sound like every last one of you who's ever finished an RPI stage, we don't know what does.
Lukas Coon learned to ride a bike at an Adventure For All camp in 2023. Three years later he was on the start line of one of the most iconic gravel races on earth. As the forecast turned ugly, he traded his old mantra — "never give up" — for a new one: "I am in control." His day ended at mile 23. He spent the rest of it cheering his teammates across the line. For Adventure For All, that isn't a consolation. That's the whole point.
The Crux
Here's the thing we keep coming back to. We tend to celebrate the finish — the photo, the medal, the time on the results page. But the real distance gets covered earlier, quietly, before anyone's holding up a sign. Adventure For All exists to tell that part of the story. They call it Death to Doubt — less about proving anyone wrong, more about clearing room for self-belief to take root. We think that's about the best use of a bike race we've ever heard of.
It's also familiar. If you've ridden Rebecca's Private Idaho, you've stood in a version of it. Be Good has always been pointed at the same idea — that the right opportunity, handed to the right person at the right moment, can change the direction of a life.
This September, AFA athletes are coming to Idaho. The Death to Doubt team will line up at Rebecca's Private Idaho — collaboratively supported in part by the Be Good Foundation and King Ridge Foundation — to test themselves on our roads, our dust, and our particular brand of high-altitude suffering. They started long before Emporia, and they're not done yet.
We'd love for you to know them before they get here. Read their stories. Look closer at what Adventure For All is building. And if you've ever been on the receiving end of someone believing in you before you'd quite earned it — and most of us have — you'll understand exactly why we're so glad to have them on the start line with us.
RPI returns September 9–12
Registration is open — and consider bringing along someone who needs a starting line of their own.
See you in Ketchum!
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