This might be the best gravel race of the season. Manageable distances, a hard-but-not-impossible course with plenty of short, punchy climbing, and a genuinely raucous after-party — the Gravel Rave — that closes out the season in style.
Big Sugar closes out the Life Time Grand Prix season, and Life Time built genuine drama into that positioning: it's the mandatory tiebreaker race, meaning any rider still in overall contention has to show up and race it out on Ozark gravel rather than settling the series on paper. The course runs through the canopy-covered, rarely-maintained gravel roads of northwest Arkansas and southern Missouri — rockier and more technical than the flat prairie gravel of Unbound, with 7,000–9,000 feet of accumulated climbing across constant small rollers rather than one big signature ascent.
A two-day expo at The Momentary — Bentonville's contemporary art space and event venue — rounds out the weekend and makes it genuinely fun for the whole family; for athletes traveling with kids, this is the race to bring them to.
Bentonville has built an entire economy around mountain bike and gravel riding, and Big Sugar is the event that puts that infrastructure on its biggest annual display, with a week-long festival wrapped around the race itself.
The 100-mile is the marquee distance and the one that carries Life Time Grand Prix scoring weight and mandatory-tiebreaker status for the overall series.
Registration opens through the Life Time Events site in February; the 100-mile distance sells out quickly, though a waitlist often opens up later in the summer.