One ball, one dude, one bike, and a 10,000-mile journey to every NFL stadium

Somewhere along the California coast is a 22-year-old riding a purple bicycle bound for Seattle. He’s equipped with a change of clothes, charging cords, toothbrush, toothpaste, a bike-fixing tool kit, water bottles and his companion, Duke.

Bond Almand has been riding in the sun for so long that the hair on his arms is turning gray. He’s fighting a cavity on at least one tooth, probably more. Duke, though, is in “tatters” and “bleached by the sun” a couple weeks into their journey. They started in Miami, and have spent days upon days riding across the country together, through the humidity of the south and the dry heat of the southwest. There were days of rain and a few thunderstorms. It’s all hit Duke pretty hard. Still, they trek on.

Almand and Duke need to get to Seattle by Sept. 9, where the NFL season will kick off at Lumen Field, the Seattle Seahawks hosting the New England Patriots in a Super Bowl rematch. And that is why Almand has his companion. Duke is a football, an official NFL football — given to Almand by the NFL to deliver for kickoff. Together, they’ve ridden across the United States on Almand’s custom Trek bicycle, with a custom-designed holder for Duke, while stopping at each of the 30 NFL stadiums along the way.

When Almand first spoke to The Athletic on July 17, he was riding through Waco, Texas, from the Texans stadium in Houston some 270 miles northwest to the Dallas Cowboys’ home in Arlington. The World Cup was still taking place and nobody was thinking about football just yet.

Now training camps are over, the season is near and Almand and Duke are on their way up through California after first stopping at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. They’ll hit Levi’s Stadium, the 49ers’ home in Santa Clara, then make way for the Pacific Northwest.

It has been an arduous journey through Americana, with a lot of time spent alone on the open road, just Almand and Duke. He’s averaging around 165 miles per day. There are few breaks other than to sleep, to eat, to hydrate or to get his bike fixed.

The daily routine is ultimately simple: He wakes up. He rides. He goes to sleep.

He’s had tires pop a dozen times or more. He almost got hit by a car a few times. He’s sweating two liters per hour, or around 50 pounds of water weight per day. When he drove out of New Orleans toward Texas, he passed an alumina plant where bauxite dust — which, as he points out, is “highly toxic” — was blowing into the surroundings and onto him. On his way from Texas through Oklahoma, he hit winds ranging from 50 to 75 miles per hour. During one stretch of his trip, it rained for 19 of 20 days. His phone died for 36 hours. There are intense calluses and splits all over his hands, feet and “every other contact point I have on the bike,” he said. “I’ll leave it at that.” Then, there’s the loneliness of it all.

“Sometimes,” Almand said, “my own thoughts aren’t enough company to keep my mind happy and healthy.”

It all might sound like a lot. For Almand, it’s a dream.

To understand how this NFL stadium journey came together and why Almand is doing it, go back to the beginning of his story. Born in his journey’s final destination, Seattle, Almand grew up in Maryville, Tenn., close to the Smokey Mountains, about 30 minutes outside of Knoxville. Growing up, his father, Bond Sr., would partake in marathons and triathlons and Ironman competitions. He never really exposed Almand to football even though that’s life in the Volunteer country of East Tennessee — at least not until Almand implored his father to teach him the basics of football so he could hold a conversation with his classmates. Together, they’d go on a lot of hikes. The longer they went, the better he felt.

“I wanted to be exactly like my dad,” he said.

His parents got divorced in middle school and that forced him to find his independence. He explored it on his bicycle. “I could just go in between my parents’ houses on my bike before I could drive. And then, like, my mom wouldn’t know where I was, and she’d think I’m at my dad’s house, and I would actually be out camping.”

When Almand was 10, he told his father he wanted to bike 100 miles with him. When they got to mile 100, he said he wanted to keep going to 112 miles — because that was the distance of the Ironman competition his dad was training for. That was his first foray into distance cycling.

“That desire to get out there and just go for hours and hours and suffer was there from an early age,” his father says.

When Almand was 15, he didn’t have any plans during spring break and said that he wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail by himself for a week. He mapped it out, asked his dad to drop him off in Georgia and said he’d hike home to the Smokies. The way his dad saw it, Almand was “more likely to get hurt driving on the highway around here then he would on the Appalachian Trail.” So his father rented a satellite phone for him, and Bond and his dog hiked it, all alone, clearing almost 30 miles per day.

During COVID, Almand spent a lot of time away from school riding his bicycle long distances. When he got to Dartmouth, he’d ride out on slushy roads, through rainy conditions and cold temperatures and up to Montreal or Toronto and back. When he was a junior, he set out to break a world record and ride the entire Pan-American Highway, from the top of Alaska to the bottom of South America. The journey was arduous and dangerous. He’d sleep on the side of the road in a tent and ride from 5 a.m. until 10 p.m. During that journey, he suffered injuries, had his clothes ripped off him, got run off the road and ran into a parked truck, but none of it stopped him. “He still got back on his bike and kept going,” his father said.

At the end of a long journey, he broke the Pan Am record for cycling by nine days. The finish was anticlimactic.

“You build up in your mind what it’s going to look like in the end,” Almand said. “It’s usually never as grand as you think it’s gonna be.”

He had visions of a welcoming committee chanting his name. Instead it was just his father waiting for him in Patagonia.

As for the journey he’s on now, adulation awaits him — it’s greeted him along the way.

The first thing an unassuming Almand told Norman Rice, a Dartmouth alum, about himself when they met through a mutual friend on campus was that he planned to spend the next semester riding his bike from the tip of Alaska to the bottom of South America.

“I said: Well geez, Bond, that’s pretty stupid,” Rice said.

Almand told him his plan, laying it out with a day-by-day agenda. Rice wound up helping sponsor the trip for Almand to make it possible. In the ensuing years, Rice would run into Almand anytime he returned to campus, the last time after he took a trip to Uganda where he rode his bike all over the country. Graduation was coming soon and Almand didn’t have a plan other than to ride. A light bulb went off in Rice’s head.

Rice is the chief commercial officer for Extreme Networks, a networking company that’s worked closely with the NFL in the areas of Wi-Fi, internet connectivity and analytics for the last decade and a half. He’d been looking for another way to partner with the league when he ran into Almand. An idea was born.

At that point, the only thing Rice knew about the NFL schedule is that the season would open in Seattle. Rice suggested the morsel of an idea that turned into Almand’s journey: What if he started in Miami and ended in Seattle for the kickoff? Rice had a vision in his head of Almand riding his bicycle onto the field with the football and handing it off to commissioner Roger Goodell in front of a sellout crowd, and to the millions of people at home watching.

“He said, ‘Uh, I can probably do that,’” Rice said.

Almand mapped it out. The pitch: 10,000 miles, one ball, one dude, one bike.

He’d start after graduating from Dartmouth in May. Rice called the NFL’s sponsorship team, which, he said, rejects ideas “99.9 percent” of the time. They liked this one. Rice called the Seahawks, one of Extreme’s team partners, and they agreed, too. Rice is still working with the NFL to figure out exactly how it’s going to look, but Almand will be involved, in some fashion, on Opening Night. While the ride was born in part out of corporate sponsorship, there is also a charity aspect. Almand’s bike will be auctioned off, with the proceeds going to the NFL Foundation to support the league’s youth fitness and health & wellness initiatives, including Play 60 and GENYOUth.

Before the journey started in Miami, Rice asked Almand: “What kind of support do you need? A van driving behind you?” Rice said. “He said, ‘No, I can sleep on the side of the road.’ I said, ‘We cannot let you do that.’” Instead, he’s stayed at hotels.

The way Almand sees it, that has made the journey much easier. Rice and Almand worked with various companies to optimize the journey, including a custom-made bicycle from Trek Bikes with a custom paint job — the purple matches Extreme’s logo — with a holder for the football. Along the way, Rice helped to schedule events in various NFL cities, including ride-alongs with locals and tours around stadiums. During Almand’s trek through the desert, his girlfriend and a photographer rode alongside him to make sure he was hydrated during a stretch without anywhere to stop for supplies. Otherwise, it was a solo, simple journey.

Almand traveled light, though not having to travel with a tent to sleep on the side of the road helped. He brought a change of clothes, but he doesn’t rotate through them often, typically washing what he’s wearing in the hotel bathroom or, if he feels like it, in a washing machine where he’s staying. He’s able to “relax” more on this journey than the Pan Am one since he doesn’t feel as rushed, and since he’s “only” averaging around 165 miles per day.

He usually wakes up around 6 or 7, eats a continental breakfast at the hotel and is on the road within 30 minutes to an hour of waking up. It then takes about four or five hours to “warm up,” he said. “It sounds crazy, but it’s just before you start feeling good on the bike. I usually feel pretty awful the first couple of hours just because my legs are pretty tired.”

In Florida, the heat index was 114 degrees for several days in a row; he stopped every hour or two to get more water since he can only carry about a gallon himself and “that goes pretty quickly.” To get his core temperature down, he’ll sometimes pop into the “beer cave” at a gas station to cool off until the owner tells him he’s sweating all over the product and asks him to leave. He tries to keep his stops under 20 minutes. He said, all in, his door-to-door time is around 12 to 14 hours from when he leaves his hotel.

Almand burns calories at such a significant rate that he has to compensate with how he eats. Including breakfast and dinner, Almand says he consumes more than 1,200 grams of carbs daily, and his main sources of nourishment come from maple syrup (he travels with dozens of packets), soda, ice cream, energy drinks, pastries and candy. Some days he combines a can of Monster Energy drink with a bottle of Mountain Dew for energy — he calls it “Tennessee Rocket Fuel.” (Hence why he’s had some issues with cavities, and why he brushes his teeth multiple times throughout the day.)

Almand has been chronicling his whole journey on Instagram, and there’s a tracker on Extreme’s website that allows people to follow his location. He often takes phone calls while riding — he says it helps to pass the time — and often multi-tasks while riding, eating or recording videos for his Instagram posts. He doesn’t relish his attempts at being an influencer, though he has accumulated more than 120,000 followers and his videos from this NFL journey have garnered a lot of attention.

“Duke,” in Almand’s custom-made carrier. (Courtesy of Extreme Networks)

There’s been a lot of NFL-related fun along the way too.

In Tampa, Almand rode around the Buccaneers stadium wielding a Bucs flag and got to visit their famed pirate ship. The Titans, his hometown team, gave him a jersey when he rode around their old stadium, and they gave him a tour of the new one being built. In Atlanta, he wore a Falcons helmet when he rode around their stadium, his favorite so far on the tour.

At Lions training camp, he posted up with his bike at practice and asked players as they walked off the field if they’d rather ride a bike for 200 miles in one day or get tackled by linebacker Jack Campbell. Most of them picked Campbell — who did his best to fit his 6-foot-5, 245-pound frame into Almand’s bike and ride it around for a moment.

Almand rode through the historic Lambeau Field in Green Bay and what he described as the “UFO-looking” stadium in Las Vegas.

When he got to the Cardinals’ stadium in Glendale, Ariz., they were playing a preseason game against the Cowboys. He watched through halftime before heading back to the hotel for bedtime.

Along the journey, he threw out the first pitch at a minor league baseball game in Indianapolis, appeared on a radio show in Chicago and rode through a completely abandoned town in Oklahoma.

“One of my objectives,” he said, “was to see the America you don’t see.”

Rice called it a story “we made up on the fly.”

“I mean, it’s inspiring, right?” Rice said. “He’s very understated. He’s not out there for commercialism. He’s just doing what he likes to do and he wants to see stuff. I think that’s remarkable. He’s a good role model. He’s a world record holder for a reason — there’s only one person in the world that could do it, otherwise everybody would do it. He’s incredibly capable. I see it as inspiration.”

On Sept. 10, the hope is that Almand will guide his bike into Lumen Field, with Duke along for the ride.

“It’s usually strangely anti-climactic,” Almand said. “I think this one has a pretty incredible climax.”