Lakin, KS to Lamar, CO — 80.1 mi, 1487 ft
When I type out that we woke up at 8:30am in our hotel bedrooms and then went to eat our continental breakfast, I feel like we lose a lot of credibility when claiming that we are on a “difficult” bike trip. We are certainly very spoiled.
We must’ve decided to not include the “get fed in bed” and “have your bags and minivan packed for you” options in our luxury vacation package because we had to do all that ourselves after eating – life sure is hard 
Some people take the shampoo and soap bottles from hotels, not us. On the way out, we made sure to drain all the water from the water dispenser in the hotel lobby to fill our water bottles and water jugs, and all the ice in the ice machine to fill our cooler.
Having milked the hotel of all water-based substances, we headed off for our ~80 mile ride at 9:30am.
After biking a couple of miles setting the group’s pace at a leisurely 10mph pace, Drew informed me “I think we can go a bit faster”. Say less Drew, you never have to tell me twice.
I sped up to a 12mph pace and saw that everyone besides Drew immediately fell behind. No shade to them, we’re at the end of a 7-day stretch of straight biking days and have done a total of 1,155 miles with only two off days (one rest, one teaching) in the past 2.5 weeks. They’re certainly entitled to take the ride at their own pace, and taking it easy is definitely the logical strategy.
Drew and I are particularly singularly-minded when it comes to biking though, and we share a telepathic connection in times like these. Without saying a word to each other, we sped off.
The first leg of our route today, from the hotel to the Mountain Time Zone border line, was a bit hilly (by Western Kansas standards) – which was unfortunate for Drew. Drew is a very fast biker but, at the end of the day, he weighs ~20-30lb (of pure muscle 💪) more than me – meaning he has to put in a lot more work to climb.
It was a tough day to not be able to keep up because I was feeling incredibly inspired by a back to back bike + run Strava post by my friend from the previous day, and so I decided to not wait up so that I could keep pushing through the hills to the rest stop at mile 18.
This stuff is kinda crazy. He didn’t take any break while biking and then went immediately into the run without a break.
After arriving at the rest stop, the rest of the team trickled in individually every ~5 minutes or so until we were all seated around the picnic blanket eating snacks and comparing the automatically updated timezones on our phones.
Sitting at the border of the Central and Mountain Time Zones.
We sat around at the rest stop for ~45 minutes before heading out for a short 10 mile leg to a Dollar General.
Singularly minded as ever, Drew and I decided to utilize the light tailwind and lack of hills on this leg of the route to speed off to the next rest stop. When we got there, we both exclaimed to Nunu (today’s driver) about how great the wind was and how little work we had to do while biking.
We perused around the Dollar General for a good 30 minutes waiting for people to trickle in and bought some snacks and a small toy football in the meantime.
Shortly after everyone had made it into the rest stop, Drew and I once again headed off towards the Colorado border.
We sped towards the border without anything too eventful happening, just using a very generous tailwind to keep up a fast 21mph pace all the way to the border. The only notable thing was somehow some sort of bug flew directly up the thumb hole of my glove and stung/bit me three times. But speed waits for no one, and so we quickly got back up to pace and forged onwards.
We sped by the “Welcome to Colorful Colorado” sign as Nunu cheered us on from the side of the road, claiming first into Colorado, and then rolled back to the car where Nunu was waiting. The rest of the team was ~30 minutes behind us so we decided to kill some time by recreating a video of us crossing the border, and then waited in the car’s AC until the rest of the team rolled by. I found it interesting that every one of us biked past the car to cross into Colorado, and then proceeded to do an awkward turn on the highway shoulder to come back to the car.
We spent the next ~30 minutes taking various pictures at the Colorado sign, and then crossed over to the other side of the highway to take a picture with the Kansas sign since we didn’t get a chance to in Kansas City.
In order to take these pictures, Carmen and I spent a good couple of minutes precariously climbing the Colorado sign – I think partially because the 2025 team has an iconic picture with them standing on the sign, and we didn’t want to get shown up.
Getting down from the sign was much worse though, and Carmen certainly took a large aura loss1 in the process. Since there are no pictures proving otherwise, I got down gracefully and seamlessly 🙂
As we were heading out, a family stopped by to take a picture with the sign. Notably, the family had a white dog named Max, and I got a picture of Caroline petting Max. This felt significant or something, like a full circle moment arranged by the universe.
After a bit of talking with the family, we biked an extra 0.5 miles past the sign to get to a nearby rest stop along the highway for lunch.
It was here that we encountered our newest foes of the summer: flies.
When I say these flies were vicious and relentless, I mean it. These flies were not scared of a waving hand, they would land on food we were actively eating, and they came in full force. Worse of all, it seems that they weren’t only interested in eating our food because they started biting us! I know flies are detritivores (i.e. an important part of the ecosystem) and I’m all for well balanced ecosystems, but I don’t understand why if they’re supposed to eat rotting/dead things they feel the need to eat us (living). I think the fact that we’ve seen so much roadkill with flies around them also makes me hate the idea of them landing on our food even more.
After finishing our lunch, in which a few of us fled the picnic table to get away from the flies, we somehow all ended up laying in the grass.
I think we all know where this is going.
We woke up 1.5 hours later.
I don’t even know why we decided to sleep here because the flies chased after us and were buzzing around + biting us (again, we’re not food). It was truly the most miserable nap I’ve ever taken… but we still took it…
In my attempt to hide from the flies, I ended up covering myself with one of our blankets and the picnic blanket we were sleeping on. While it looks insane, it actually wasn’t that hot and it was certainly much better than having the flies buzzing around biting all the time.
Assorted attempts at hiding from the flies.
The fact that we were in 95 degree heat and I was covered in blankets and didn’t feel that hot is a great demonstration of how great the dry heat we transitioned into is (as opposed to the humid heat from Missouri and eastward).
As the nappers groggily woke up and got ready to ride, Carmen and Drew (who didn’t sleep) decided they had been waiting long enough and left 5-10 minutes ahead of us.
With nothing better to do with myself and feeling in a speedy mood today, I decided that I needed to remind Carmen and Drew how things work around here by catching up and passing them. Queue “Burning Heart – Survivor”.
This ended up being pretty anticlimactic as I passed them somewhere around 10 miles into this leg of the route. I was hoping for some kind of reaction as I passed them but they kind of just stared at me…
So that was a waste of time, but I was too deep into it now and so I kept up the pace to the next rest stop. Along the way I passed a guy who looked like he was on a backpacking trip and stopped to talk to him. He’s currently walking from Austin to Montana, which is pretty cool.
I arrived at the last rest stop at mile 63 of 80, at the Amache National Historic Site, and waited for maybe 5-10 minutes before Carmen and Drew arrived, and then Nunu shortly after.
Nunu had bought us popsicles and lychees at a local store (how did she even find lychees in the middle of eastern Colorado???) as a surprise, which was great and we made quick work of our allotted 2 popsicles and 3 lychees.
Some of us worked a little more gracefully than others…
I think around now we really started to notice the shift in vegetation and climate. Even just this morning we had been biking in fairly green farmlands, but now we were surrounded by a super dry, arid, borderline desert-looking climate.
The left is Drew and I biking around mile 40 vs the landscape at mile 63.
After eating our snacks, we decided to take a look around the Amache site. Amache was a Japanese internment camp used by the US during WW2. The site itself didn’t have much remaining – there were only 4 buildings in the ~410 acre site (a guard tower, a recreation hall, a water tower, and a barrack) and they were all replicas. Nonetheless, I think it was still great to remind ourselves about a somewhat forgotten part of US history and better appreciate how bad the conditions were (tiny living areas with no furniture, climate control, or privacy). Seeing the site also sparked some discussion amongst the team after Tatiana asked if we “thought anything like this could happen again in the US”.
Amache rec hall on the left and barracks, water tower, and guard tower on the right.
After wrapping up our rest stop, we biked the last 17 miles to the church that was graciously housing us for the night: Lamar Christian Church. We once again were able to take advantage of a large tailwind, as Drew and I sped to the church hitting speeds of up to 29mph, prompting us to appreciate the fact that we made it across Kansas with more help than hurt from the wind.
We arrived at the church a bit earlier than they were expecting us, so we had some time to spare. My watch was showing the ride at 78.5 miles instead of 80, so I made a plan to bike an extra 1.5 miles in the meantime to get a nice number on my Strava post. Conveniently, Drew wanted to go to a McDonalds 1.5 miles away.
Drew, myself, and Carmen, who had arrived shortly after us, biked over to the McDonalds where they got some sodas. I didn’t get anything, I just appreciated the nice round number on my watch. Somehow, Caroline got roped into biking over to McDonalds, and she arrived just as we were biking back to meet Tatiana and Aarushi for dinner. I don’t think she appreciated the extra 3 miles that got added to her route.
We biked back to the church and then biked a couple of blocks over to Lucy’s Tacos, who had kindly offered to donate the team 7 delicious burritos for dinner.
They gave us 3 beef, 2 adobada, and 2 chicken burritos and obviously everyone wanted the beef ones. We ended up generating random numbers to assign who would get the beef burritos, and then did the same with the adobada burritos. I got stuck with the chicken burrito, but it ended up being a fan favorite, so I really can’t complain. It was also free food, so I REALLY can’t complain. Seriously, that was a great burrito.
There wasn’t really much reason to do this though since we proceeded to be very on brand and pass all the burritos between each other in what I can only describe as a fully connected graph.
You’d think this blog was already long enough, and I agree, but Aarushi doesn’t.
As we were biking out of the restaurant to head back to be let into the church, Aarushi somehow got our bike lock cable wrapped up and knotted in her front tire axle. We deemed there was no way for us to get it out and so we left resolving this as an issue for after our learning festival tomorrow.
In the meantime, we all unpacked, showered, and did some blogging. The rest of the team decided to watch Superbad on one of the big TVs in the church, but I was SuperTired and went to bed as fast as I could.
– Nate
1 I’m too old to be describing this, and if you’re reading this looking for a definition you’re probably too old to be using this vocabulary anyways.
MIT Spokes 2026 
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