Here's what nobody tells you about racing in the mud: the strongest rider usually doesn't win. The smartest one does.
We watched it happen at the 2026 Unbound Gravel 200. Two hundred miles across the Flint Hills of Kansas, except this year it rained on ground that was already soaked, and the course turned to the stuff riders out there were calling peanut butter — mud thick enough to pack into a frame and stop a wheel dead. Flooded underpasses. Creek crossings you had to wade. Wind on top of all of it. One of the worst editions in the race's history.
And Mads Würtz Schmidt won it alone. He attacked once, on a climb coming out of a flooded crossing about 78 km from the line, opened around 90 seconds, and time-trialled the rest of the way into Emporia while the field came apart behind him. Matt Beers second, Tobias Kongstad third. Nine hours and fourteen minutes of holding it together when most people couldn't.
I've been picking apart how he did it, because the lessons scale all the way down to your local sloppy autumn gran fondo. You're not going to race Unbound this weekend. But you will, at some point, line up on a day where the sky opens and the course goes to ruin, and when that happens the riders who finish well are the ones who got four unglamorous things right. Let me break them down.
Pace it like a time trial, not a road race
This is the big one, and it's the one most people get backwards. When conditions get hard, the instinct is to race harder — cover every move, fight for every wheel, treat it like a bunch sprint that happens to be 200 miles long. That instinct will cook you.
Mud raises the cost of everything. Every acceleration, every surge out of a corner, every effort to close a gap costs you two or three times what it would on dry, fast gravel. So the rider who surges all day is spending energy at a rate they can't sustain, and somewhere in the back third they hollow out.
Schmidt rode the opposite way. The power read on his ride afterwards was basically metronomic — steady, repeatable watts held for the whole distance, not spiky efforts. He let the conditions thin the field for him, made one decisive move when it counted, and otherwise just kept turning the same number over and over. That's not a road racer's mindset. That's a time triallist's, which makes sense given he's a former U23 world time-trial champion. He treats a long gravel race as exactly what it is: a very long effort against the clock with other people in the way.
For you, that means starting steadier than feels right. The riders who blow past you in the first hour of a wet race are the ones you'll ride past, parked on the verge, in the fourth. Protect your late-race power like it's the only thing that matters, because on a bad day it is.
Set the bike up to finish, not to win an argument
There's an endless online row about gravel tyres — width, tread, pressure, rolling resistance, aero. On a dry, fast course you can have that argument. In the mud, throw it out. The only question that matters is: will this setup get me to the finish upright and un-flatted?
Schmidt's long-standing view, which he's said on the podcast more than once, is that the real reason to fuss over your tyres isn't shaving watts. It's avoiding the flat or the slide that ends your race. In the dry you might chase a marginal rolling-resistance gain. In the wet you want grip on slick climbs, a tread that clears mud instead of clogging, and enough frame clearance that you don't seize up the first time the course turns to glue.
Three things to get right before a muddy race:
Run a grippier tyre than you'd choose for the dry, and check it actually sheds mud rather than packing it. Drop your pressures a touch for traction, but not so far that you're pinging rims off hidden rocks — test it on similar ground first, never guess on the start line. And make sure you've got mud clearance; a tyre that fits fine in the dry can lock solid once it's caked, and that's a race-ender you can see coming.
None of that is exciting. None of it is a marginal gain you can post about. It's just the difference between finishing and standing in a field at mile 90 watching everyone ride past.
Fuel when it's miserable
This is the one I'd tattoo on people if I could. The single most common reason amateurs fall apart late in a long wet race isn't fitness. It's that they stopped eating and didn't notice.
Here's the mechanism. When you're cold and soaked and suffering, your appetite vanishes and your hands go numb, so reaching for food becomes a small ordeal you keep putting off. Five minutes becomes twenty becomes an hour, and now you're running on empty with no way to claw it back. Your power doesn't drop because your legs gave out. It drops because the tank's dry.
The target is the same as any long race — somewhere around 80 to 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour for a rider who's trained their gut to handle it. But the number isn't the hard part in the wet. The discipline is. Set a timer. Keep your food somewhere you can reach with frozen fingers. Lean on drink mix and gels when chewing a bar feels like too much. And treat fuelling as a thing you do on schedule, not a thing you do when you fancy it.
Schmidt kept eating to plan when the weather fell apart and most of the field quietly backed off. That's the whole story of the last two hours of a mud race, right there.
Stay upright, and let the day come to you
The fourth piece is skills, and it's the one you can't fake on race morning — but you can ride within your limits.
Deep mud punishes sharp inputs. Hard braking, sudden steering, a big lunge out of the saddle — any of them can break traction and put you down. So you stay smooth. You look well ahead and pick the firmest line you can find rather than reacting to what's under your wheel right now. You stay seated and balanced where the surface is loose, and you accept, genuinely accept, that you are going to be slower than you want to be.
That last part is mental as much as physical. A muddy race will try to bait you into fighting it, and fighting it is how you end up in a ditch. The riders who do well make a kind of peace with the conditions early — they stop racing the clock in their head and start racing the riders around them, who are suffering just as much. Schmidt's win was decided by patience as much as power. He waited, he stayed out of trouble, and when the moment came on that climb, he took it once and didn't look back.
And sometimes the day comes down to a bit of luck and a teammate. He had a late mechanical that should have ended things, and his Specialized Off-Road teammate Keegan Swenson handed over a wheel to keep him rolling. Even a solo win in modern gravel can hinge on someone else's split-second call. You can't plan for that — but you can make sure you're still in a position to benefit from it by not having wasted yourself in the first three hours.
Putting it together
Mud doesn't reward the biggest engine. It rewards control, preparation, and the discipline to keep doing the boring things right when everyone around you is falling apart. Pace it like a time trial. Set the bike up to finish. Fuel when it's grim. Stay smooth and let the day come to you. That's how you win the worst days — or, more likely for most of us, how you turn a day that could have ended in a ditch at mile 90 into one of the rides you're proudest of.
If you're putting in the work but your long-ride power keeps fading in the final third — wet or dry — the limiter usually isn't your kit. It's somewhere in your pacing, your fuelling, or how you've built your endurance base. That's exactly what the Plateau Diagnostic is built to find. Three minutes, free, and it looks at the whole system instead of one symptom.
And if you want to swap mud stories and setups with people who actually race this stuff, that's what the Roadman community is for. Come and find your people.
