Bond Almand, delivering the game ball at Lumen Field ahead of the 2026 NFL season kickoff
Happy Wednesday,
This week Jake and I sat down with the guy who just spent 65 days biking to all 30 NFL stadiums. For context, that’s 11,112.1 miles, solo, averaging 175.12 miles a day, fueled by gas station candy and continental breakfast waffles.
His name is Bond Almand, and this was actually his second act: he already holds the unsupported world record for biking Alaska to Argentina.
But we wanted to know what it actually takes to build an entire sport and career from zero, with no team, no league, and absolutely no playbook to follow.
It funnels down to curiosity. I have a very deep curiosity about the world, about myself, and about my own personal limits.
How He Got Here
Early years: Bond started biking young and spent middle and high school racing, constantly setting bigger goals for himself. Riding 500 miles in a single day during his freshman year of college felt like a massive milestone at the time.
2024 (end of sophomore year): He bikes the Pan-American Highway, Alaska to Argentina, roughly 14,000 miles, and breaks the unsupported world record by nine days, putting him on the map (100K+ IG followers).
Since then: With no team and no league, Bond operates as what's called a "privateer," cobbling together sponsorships from eleven different contracts (Trek Bikes, Vittoria tires, and others) instead of signing one deal with one team. He's building his platform and the sport at the same time.
Spring 2026: Extreme Networks, a Wi-Fi provider for several NFL stadiums, pitches him on biking to all 30 NFL stadiums. The connection: their chief commercial officer went to the same business school Bond was finishing up (Dartmouth, ever heard of it?) and had been following his career since before the Pan-American ride. The NFL signs off within a week.
June 2026: Bond graduates from Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business.
July 7, 2026: He sets off on the NFL stadium ride — 65 days, 11,000-plus miles, averaging about 170 miles a day — and closes it out by delivering the game ball onto the field at the Seahawks' season opener in Seattle.
The twist: Despite pulling off one of the year's wildest athletic feats, Bond's follower count actually dropped slightly over the summer — from about 122,000 to 121,000 — even while he posted far more often than usual.
The Big Idea: It’s a short path to burnout
Bond's story is about as compelling as it gets on paper: an unsupported athlete biking 170 miles a day, alone, across the country, in service of a genuinely audacious goal. And yet the content around it flatlined.
Bond's own read is that he never solved the format problem. Every day looked roughly the same (hot road, gas station food, another 170 miles), and by his own admission, the videos felt forced because performing for the camera doesn't come naturally to him.
My pushback to him on the episode: look at someone like Mark Dowdle, an ultra-runner whose content is thriving because he's compressed the gap between having an idea and posting it: phone in hand, no editing, no voiceover, published in the moment.
Bond, by contrast, shot all day and then spent 30 minutes to an hour every night in a hotel room writing voiceover scripts and shipping instructions to editors. And he didn't just admit to us that he grew to resent this process; his turnaround time was so long that he could test and iterate far less than someone like Mark is, who often just opens up his camera and posts.
Low motivation + high barrier to create = burnout
High motivation + low barrier to create = shortened learning curve
5 Tactical Takeaways
An undeniable story still needs a content strategy. A wild real-life achievement doesn't guarantee growth on its own. You still have to actively solve for how you're telling it, not just that you're doing it. This (unfortunately) requires upfront strategizing and testing.
Compress the gap between idea and execution. The creators pulling ahead right now are the ones posting the raw, unedited moment as it happens, rather than batching everything into a polished recap after the fact. For athletes like Bond, their value proposition is speed to information, so just get it out!
Lean into the intersections, not just the headline activity. Bond's love of history and his running joke about waffles at every hotel breakfast were more compelling than another "I woke up and biked" video. The overlap between your personality and your sport is what will build a moat around your content.
Negotiate for organic integration over hard ad reads. Bond pushed back on Extreme Networks to ensure the sponsored content blended into his normal style rather than reading like an ad; his pitch was that authentic content gets more engagement, which benefits the brand too.
Avoid the middle. Content that isn't live and immediate, and isn't deep and evergreen, increasingly gets squeezed out. A next-day recap competes with both the live moment itself and the long-form breakdown that comes later, and often loses to both.
Why It Matters
Bond is proof that having an incredible story isn't the same as having a content strategy. The two are related, but one doesn't automatically produce the other.
For any creator sitting on something genuinely undeniable, the lesson isn't to find a better story; it’s to shorten the distance between the moment something interesting happens and the moment your audience sees it, and then lean into the weird, specific quirks in your own personality more than the format you “think” is supposed to work.
📩 And don’t forget: Bottom of the Ninth is back this Friday with the top three stories in sports and business from the week.
See you then,
Tyler & Jake