'Such carnage and a ridiculous adventure' – Maddy Nutt finished second at Unbound XL after 27 hours of racing, and then went viral
The 28-year-old battled through thunderstorms and peanut butter mud to finish second in the ultra race
Maddy Nutt stumbles into the frame, body covered in dust, blue eyes hinged on something in the distance.
“How are you feeling?” comes the voice of a Fantasy Gravel anchor from behind the camera. “Pretty atrocious,” Nutt replies, voice croaking. “I definitely need to sit down.”
That video has clocked up over 25,000 views. In another finish line video with Feisty Collective, Nutt counts the amount of wees she did during the Unbound XL, with a grin that turns into a gentle burp as she stumbles off-camera, exhaustion kicking in.
“I had quite a few people commenting, just being like, I didn't know anything about the gravel cycle thing, but I'm absolutely here for this,” Nutt says disbelieving – and still croaky – down the phone to Cycling Weekly.
The last 48 hours has been a battle of endurance in more ways than one for Nutt. After finishing Unbound XL in a time of 27 hours, 46 minutes, 13 seconds (just 34 minutes short of Svenja Betz’s winning time), she went straight to the doctors with saddle sores before enduring a five hour phone-less layover in Charlotte, US on her trip back to London (“I actually think that was more difficult than the race”).
After winning the Traka 560 last month - and setting a new race-record in the process - Nutt has developed a taste for ultra-endurance riding. Initially signed up to race Unbound 200 for the third time, she made a last minute swap to the gruelling 356 miles of Unbound XL.
“They were very, very different races," she explains. "I was worried Unbound was going to be a bit monotonous, having such long straits and tight turns. But it actually ended up being such carnage and such a ridiculous adventure.”
The start of Unbound XL was hectic. Unlike Unbound 200, drafting is allowed in the ultra, and with the men's and women's riders leaving en-masse, it felt to Nutt more like a 100 mile race than a 300 mile one: “For the first hour, I averaged over 230 watts, which is just not what you want to do for 27 hour races.”
Once the pace had calmed, the day opened up. Instead of clock watching, Nutt's race was interrupted only by the occasional wee, rain showers, thunderstorms and - of course - the infamous mud.
Nutt was up on the time of the ultimate race winner before hitting the mud. She’d never seen anything like it, “except for the last two times I’d raced Unbound,” she quickly corrects. Nutt had put wider tyres on her bike to protect against punctures, but the small space between the top of the tyre and the frame soon clogged with the concrete-like mud. And she’d just thrown away the mud stick that was jabbing into the back of her neck.
“Why did I do that?!” she laughs down the line.
“When I hit the mud, I was still feeling pretty optimistic,” she continues. “Someone had caught me and said that Svenny was ages behind me, and they were like, ;Oh, it's fine, she's got tiny legs, there's no way she'll catch you in the mud.'
“Anyways, turns out she was so much better in the mud, despite her legs being shorter,” Nutt continues. It comes up a lot during our call, the places your mind goes to in race-mode; comparing leg lengths for a possible performance edge; the ability to push on despite the odds.
While Nutt slogged through the sticky mud, stones in her shoes bruising her feet, Betz picked up her bike and carried it on her back. It seemed to Nutt, who at this point was four hours into a five hour mud bath, effortless.
“I did not have fun for most of the day because of the mud,” she remembers. “But those first 10 hours were great. It was just the proceeding five that were awful. And then also after walking for so many hours - my body's not used to doing a five hour hike in mud and then riding a bike.
“When it's so many hours, you just have to keep staying positive and moving forward, and, like, remembering that actually you do love riding a bike.”
But no matter how sludgy and impassable the mud got, it never jeopardised her safety - that came later.
The 'biblical weather' promised ahead of Unbound 2026 arrived with a clap of thunder. Black skies filled with blasts of hot white light, jabbing the earth around Nutt and the pack of riders she’d decided to ride with for safety.
“I was like looking up at the sky, and the lightning strikes were so close, and it got to the point where the thunder was so loud, I was just like, actually, this is not a question of are we going to get struck by lightning, it's a question of who's going to get struck by lightning in this race.”
Other riders had taken refuge in ditches by the roadside, but Nutt opted for safety in numbers. The only woman in a group of taller men, she figured the lightning would zap them first. Anyway, her mind was on winning the race.
“I do think it's such a funny one, because you have such a weird mindset in those situations, and you don't necessarily think about how actually your life is more important, especially when you're winning a race, and it's a big race to be winning,” she says. “But yeah, I do think in retrospect I do value my life.”
We both laugh at the absurdity of the statement, but looking back, Nutt shares a genuine concern about the collective danger their exposure to the elements left them in, while conscious of the logistical operation it would be to pull a few hundred riders off-course in the middle of a storm.
In Nutt’s head, she was there to win, and there were other stakes on the line: her partner, comedian Courtney Buchner, had agreed that if Nutt was to win Unbound XL, she could get a border terrier puppy. The pressure was on.
In the end, the 28-year-old will have to wait for a puppy. Nutt finished just 34 minutes behind Betz and into the waiting press throng. Two viral post-race chats later, and Nutt’s unexpected fame has taken her a little by surprise; before leaving the states, she was spotted by a cashier at Walmart, her first brush with fame beyond her gravel bubble.
“Those people came up to me and said, like, oh, you're the reason I bought a gravel bike,” she says of an earlier event she'd gone to chat to riders at, chuffed, “like, I saw a YouTube video at this race, and then it inspired me, or you've got my girlfriend into gravel.”
A Traka champion and Unbound XL second-place finisher, Nutt can add social media influencer to her growing list of accolades. But for now, she’s taking a well-earned seven weeks off before her next race in Iceland – petition to get a dog pending.
