Somewhere in West Texas last September, Bond Almand IV ’26 lapped water from a cow trough. The cyclist was out of water, and the next town was 20 miles away. He sweltered under 106 degree heat as a forest of oil rigs stretched out before him.
That episode wasn’t even the most unusual part of Almand’s fall term. On Nov. 15, 2024, the student broke the world record for the Pan-American cycling route — which runs from Alaska to the tip of Argentina — by eight days. The Dartmouth junior finished the 14,000 mile journey in just 76 days.
Almand completed the trip as a fundraiser for The Honnold Foundation, which supports the installation of solar panels in marginalized communities. According to Almand, he cycled the route entirely self-supported, meaning he did not meet any friends or family members along the route until he reached Ushuaia, Argentina. Most nights, he camped somewhere alongside the road or found a hostel to stay in. He ate at gas stations and had the frame of his bike replaced once. He was hit by a car twice.
Although the trip was harrowing at times, Almand never considered giving up. He said the mountains of the Yukon, northern Mexico and Colombia invigorated him with their natural beauty.
“I can’t even imagine boarding a plane and quitting halfway through,” he said. “It just wasn’t going to happen.”
During the trip, Almand’s hair and nails stopped growing from stress. Beyond physical changes, though, he said the most difficult part of the ride was the mental aspect. In the final two weeks of his journey, when Almand was biking through the plains of Argentina, strong headwinds demoralized him completely. He said he stopped taking pictures and could hardly write entries for his blog — where he had been posting almost daily to document his journey — because he felt so much “despair.”
“I was so far removed from reality,” he said. “I felt so alienated from the space around me. I just wanted to be done, but I had so much farther to go.”
Almand’s father, Bond Almand III, is an endurance athlete who competes in marathons and Iron Man races. However, he said he never “pushed” Almand to follow in his footsteps.
Almand’s drive to achieve athletically goes back to his childhood, Almand III told The Dartmouth. When the College junior was 10, he asked his father if they could go on a 100-mile cycling trip together. Almand III said yes, and at the end of the day, the two realized they had actually cycled 112 miles — the distance of the Iron Man bicycle ride.
When Almand was 15, he told his father that he wanted to hike a portion of the Appalachian Trail alone for a week.
“So, I drove him down to Georgia and dropped him off with his beloved dog, and they hiked home to the Smokies, doing about 30 miles a day,” Almand III said.
It came to Almand naturally, his father added.
“He had the screw loose, so to speak,” Almand III said. “For racing or endurance sports, you have got to like to suffer a little bit.”
Almand said he had a particularly difficult time while biking through Peru. As drivers threw bottles full of urine at him, he struggled with food poisoning, vertigo and hallucinations, he told The Dartmouth. Nonetheless, he needed to beat the setting sun and ride 30 miles to the town where he was sleeping.
“So I just had to throw up, while I was riding, like straight ahead,” he said. “I just threw up all over myself, like over and over again. I lost complete control over my body.”
Almand was training for the trip intensely last winter, according to his friend Divik Verma ’26, who is also a cyclist. The two lived together with a group of bikers, who would all set up their stationary bikes in the living room to ride together.
“When I woke up, he would be on the trainer,” Verma said. “I would come back from breakfast, do a three or four hour ride, get off — he’d still be riding. I’d go get lunch, come back — he’d still be riding.”
A prolific writer, Almand published blog entries on his website that were often hundreds of words long, all typed on his cell phone along the route.
“I just wanted to capture it, for myself more than anything,” he said. “It’s also very helpful to write out my thoughts, and it’s really interesting to go back and see where my mind was.”
Up to 1,000 people were reading Almand’s blog while he was riding, he said. Since the trip, he has received a significant amount of media attention, with articles about him in “Sports Illustrated” and “Outside Magazine.” Almand is of two minds about the publicity.
“I just don’t really like the attention,” he said. “It’s so pure when I can just pick up my bike and go on a weekend trip … and no one ever knows about it. At the same time, I aspire to be a professional cyclist and do this as a job — and so I need the attention.”
He said some of his friends on the Dartmouth cycling team helped run his Instagram account after he completed the trip because he was unenthusiastic about maintaining his online presence.
On the route, Almand spoke to his friends, his father and his girlfriend Jadin Scott ’26 every couple days, often sending them long voice messages with updates.
“One morning I woke up to a little voice memo that was like, ‘I got ran off the road and got hit by a semi-truck, but I’m fine, don’t worry,’” Scott said.
In the days immediately after finishing the ride, Almand said he returned to Hanover to see his friends. At the time, he was already thinking about his next trip. He said he might try to ride the “Cape to Cape” race from Norway to Cape Town, South Africa. Or, he might complete the “Around the World” route, for 18,000 miles, going west.
But he said he still needs time to process what he’s learned. Writing a book about his experience might be the next chapter.
“It’s hard to explicate off the cuff,” he said. “I still haven’t processed the ride. All the thoughts I came to on the ride, I need to revisit and concretely cement them in my mind.”
Charlotte Hampton is a reporter from New York, N.Y., studying government and philosophy. She likes writing about politics and art in the Upper Valley. Outside of The D, she likes reading Clarice Lispector, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Annie Dillard and one sentimental copy of “A Coney Island of the Mind.”
