A Conversation with Tycho Wagner
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I arranged to speak with Tycho at length about his recent self-supported Katy Trail fastest-known-time. We had met before, on a gravel road, at a group ride, at the start of a race,
yet still hadn’t really met.
I shook his hand as he arrived on the coffee shop patio, and asked him,
“How much have you already talked about this effort?”
He hadn’t much. He explained that because of the athletic altitude of a 239-mile bike ride, most of his daily social circle couldn’t relate to the demand or the story of it. And so, with that, I replied,
“Well, my intent here is to document the details of the ride itself— but also—how you experienced it, and who you are as an ultra-athlete.”
He didn’t twitch. At a point in the middle of this interview, he described himself as having “a ridiculous amount of self-confidence.” Everything before and after that remark was exactly level with real self-possession—no inflation despite ultra disappointment earlier in the season.
I asked for this interview also seeking permission to observe how another person who had built their life around a bike thought.
This is what I learned.
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1. Base Camp
There seems to be a theme of those who gravitate toward ultra-distances walking right up to the eye of something that could maim them, and just… shrugging.
I couldn’t hear much preservation instinct as Tycho described a solo, through-the-night ride to Hermann and back (approx. 130 miles) when he was a teenager, on nothing but water and gas station snacks at the halfway point. He described another trip from Clinton to St. Charles (225) on 25mm road tires in 18 hours and 29 minutes, in his senior year of high school, after quitting organized sports and entering a period of personal crisis. He had grown up riding, lifting, and running, and the bike became the independent proving ground for a person oriented forward.
After describing his lifelong athletic resumé and one prior failed attempt at an end-to-end Katy trip, he said,
“And those were my biggest rides at the time. There aren’t that many opportunities to ride over 225 miles,”
and then, “I don’t even remember what question you asked me.”
He had also forgotten to mention he was the youngest person to complete the full trail in one day at the time.
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2. Gas Money
The Central MO Circuit is a 340-mile, mixed-surface ultra race that had its inaugural running out of Columbia this year.
Just as I had, Tycho went into this race expecting to push straight through the night. He and eventual third-place finisher, Josh Cowley, were riding together until the halfway mark in St. James. There, Josh checked into a hotel and Tycho forged into the dark solo.
He explained early that his strategy was simple—continue to move forward while most of the field was opting to sleep, positioning himself squarely in the event either of the two riders ahead stalled.
He then described that around midnight, the course routed through a wide, unrideable creekbed. He hesitated in his decision to cross rather than find a detour as the temperature dropped into the low 50s, but ultimately decided to stay on the official course and walk through.
The last step dropped Tycho into waist-deep water.
After exiting, he hiked through brush for 15 minutes into a backyard before finding the road again, and riding into Gerald at roughly mile 210. With temperatures now dropping into the 40s, he squatted at a gas station for an extended period, shivering in wet bibs. Around 3:00 in the morning, he rolled out again. Roughly 20 miles later, he reached down for a bottle of carbohydrate mix, his primary fuel source for the race, to realize both of them were absent. They were still sitting on the gas station countertop.
“Up until I reach down and don’t have those bottles, I am racing.”
He then told me that his one rule going into this event was that no matter what happened, he was not going to drop out at night.
“The decision you make at 4:00 a.m. is not really the decision. The person that is making the decision is physically, emotionally, and after leaving those bottles behind, borderline spiritually drained.”
He made the call instead to set up his bivy in a field, and crawl into it with an emergency blanket, which he described as quickly becoming a ‘trash bag full of water’. He rested for a couple of hours, dejected and pushing back against thoughts of,
“What did I do to deserve this?”
45 miles after daylight, without a dry item on him, he arrived in Hermann to “wither at another gas station.”
[Description of severe saddle sores—using zinc sunscreen as anti-chafe cream—redacted]
The roads on the way out of Hermann had an unforgiving climbing profile. Tycho stated that to modulate the pain he was in, he had to continuously shift his position on the bike under torrential load, compounding the ache already present in his knees—from the distance, and hip—from trying to sleep on the bare ground.
At mile 270, he retired from the race.
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Tycho expressed how positive the response was to his 270-mile DNF, and this was the moment where I found we had met the same ghost.
The one that breathes bitter air into your lungs while onlookers drape you in roses.
And then the more experienced part of the circle enters the room with,
“Good job, but-“
He spoke at length about the feedback he received for going out too hard, as several had put it. For being bold, and capable—but just not being quite there yet.
One side tells you to feel accomplished;
the other signals not to.
And there you are, in purgatory.
“The story of me at the Central MO Circuit is not the story of me as an athlete.”
Right, and that’s why we’re here.
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3. Aperture
“So, just to rehash this season, not that it really matters,” he said, and then began to list results from a handful of regional gravel events in his second year racing, his first with the intent to be good: A second, a fifth, a twentieth, a DNS, and a DNF. He described these results as ‘pretty okay’ for their respective event sizes.
“I said I am going to do what it takes to be good this year. If it works, I’ll keep going. I’d say I passed that test,” he affirmed.
And then he added, “Someone would say that I didn’t win a race.”
Upon the cancellation of his next target 12-hour event, Tycho homed in on chasing the Katy record. He beat Roger Orth’s time by just under five minutes, in 13:32, elapsed. The details of the ride itself, in his own words, are as follows:
Hard to put a ride report together for such a long ride. It feels like so much and so little happened.
Main points:
-Hit a raccoon about 20 miles in, no clue how I held it up; it made pretty solid contact with the back of my front wheel.
-Rained hard from Sedalia to Boonville. In Sedalia it was a full-on storm, really dark sky, massive winds and driving rain. Visibility ended up being a huge issue. Glasses were fogging and obviously had water droplets; glasses off was spray and rain straight to the eyes. Ended up crashing really hard on a downed tree I couldn’t really see. Tried to pull a bunny hop and completely ate it.
-Rocheport to Jefferson City I was riding into the wind, and totally lost my mentality. I legitimately wanted to pull off and just go back home. I thought there was no way I could beat the 13:37 mark at the point. Hurting all the way down.
In Jeff City, I got a nice tailwind and it really pulled me back into it. At that point, I was still just thinking I’d be finishing the ride but there wouldn’t be anything at stake.
At mile 140 I started thinking I could do it. There was some kind of religious pilgrimage thing a school was doing with groups of 30 or so kids marching down the trail, which was bizarre.Fueling strategy:
In my opinion, self-supported isn’t a huge disadvantage over a fully supported ride. On flat ground, the extra weight doesn’t matter. I ran a 3L bladder in my backpack that I was using for drink mix, with two one-liter bottles of water. My whole plan today was to maximize my run rate. Hard to say how many grams/hour I ended up with because there’s still some mix in my pack. I started with 36 servings of Tailwind, one package of twin snakes, one package of Kroger blue raspberry ropes, two packages of fudge Pop Tarts, one sleeve of saltines, one cheese and mustard sandwich, six SIS gels, and a full pan of homemade rice crispy treats. Only thing left was the inches of mix left in the bladder and one Pop Tart.Tire choice was Enve Hex 44. No complaints.
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He shared how much he leaned on music during this ride to lock him into his rhythm. During the section of intense rain, he described his thought process was one of, “Why are you slowing down to see? You don’t need to see. You’re just riding straight.”
He lost his only Airpod after his collision with the downed tree, and faced both silence growing and the prospect of beating the record slipping away as the trail surface slowed.
I asked him what his go-to music was on rides like this, and he said,
“I have a little bit of everything, and I’m almost always deriving some kind of meaning from it. One of the songs that really stuck out to me during that ride was Paul Simon’s ‘Duncan.’
“One of the lines is like… he’s just laying under the stars, thanking the Lord for his fingers, because he’s just playing guitar. And in the moment that came on, I was like, re-shift your focus. You don’t have to be out here riding as hard as you can all day long. You get to be doing this. It is a privilege to suffer.”
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Something that had been eating at me since I had read Tycho’s initial description of the ride was this:
“How the hell did you carry an entire pan of rice crispy treats on you?”
And he proceeded to explain, like a true strategist, that he had molded them into a dense mass the shape of his top tube bag.
From here, he continued to answer many of my other questions well before I asked them. I realized how fortunate I was that the new record-holder was also a person that held nothing back. He admitted to me how unstructured his story felt because so much of the day was difficult to remember—like it was primal.
Memory comprised of just riding hard, and 13 hours of thought mostly erased except for the internal argument with the impulse to stop.
But there was one last thing I needed to know, and this one was a little bit selfish.
“Do you think, with the year that you’ve had, that any part of the FKT attempt was driven by a desire for redemption?”
And he said, “No.” Because he already knew what was in him despite the story the results of the season had told.
“It was Marthasville where I got my last resupply, and where I was like… if you don’t fuck up, this is yours. That realization in itself is scary, because that’s when the pressure starts. If anything happens, you lose it. I was looking at beating it by a second. But as I got closer, I could just feel it. I thought… I’m not letting off of this. At that point, I did realize it was just me versus me. The ghost I am chasing is behind me.“
I will the machine. 