A Newton
County Epic

An unforgettable day out for Johnny Purvis and his team. 

By Bryce Ward

It’s a cool, cloudy Sunday early in March, the final day of a four-day training camp for a domestic elite cycling team based out of Indiana. Over the past three days, the eight-man crew explored the hilly roads along and around Fayetteville. An easy spin on day one, 84 miles on day two (briefly interrupted by a torpedoing dog with devastating effect), and 70 miles on day three.

Today, the group packs their cramped team van and prepares to head east toward Newton County, home to one of the most demanding terrains in all of Arkansas and well beyond it.

The quiet roads, mountainous grades, eye-watering descents and awe-inspiring views of this isolated region have made it a popular destination among cyclists. But a few decades ago, there was only one person riding there, a young kid from Parthenon by the name of Johnny Purvis.

Aboard a junior-sized mountain bike that his older brother gifted him, Johnny, around 11 years old, explores the steep dirt roads leading to and from his home.

No nutrition. No bike computer. No cell phone. Just a kid, his bicycle, and a recurring reminder from his father, Gary, to return home before nightfall behind the tree-covered mountains.

After a few years, Gary begins driving his son to faraway cities so he can ride with and race against others. The regular trips to Fayetteville and Fort Smith are long, around two hours each way. Most nights, they sleep in their car before heading back home at dawn. But none of this can deter a father’s unwavering support for his son.

Year after year, Johnny participates in as many bike races as possible, traveling as far away from home as Durango, Colorado, until his senior year of high school comes, and with it a running scholarship.

For the next eight years, Johnny directs his attention away from the bike and toward the track. He spends two years at a community college and three at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. After graduating, he ventures into the world of semi-professional running and moves to Sweden for two years, a chapter of his life that abruptly ends with the fractured head of his tibia.

No longer able to run, Johnny returns home and rides.

Equipped with a cyclocross bike and his old junior mountain bike, Johnny begins training on the steep roads intersecting with his home in Jasper. After recovering from his injury, he begins racing again and exhausts the entirety of the Arkansas cyclocross calendar, winning his third race back.

A year later, Johnny sets his eyes on a different cycling discipline. Although he enjoys racing along trails and hopping hurdles, the discipline with the most support and the best opportunity to race with a team, is road.

In 2015, he moves to Fayetteville, the town he and Gary used to drive to during the week for Tuesday Night Worlds, a long-running race-simulation group ride that has since accumulated an almost mythological quality. After settling in, Johnny joins the Fayetteville Wheelmen, a local club team, and quickly rides his way up the classifications, progressing to increasingly harder races and stronger teams until, in 2020, he joins a domestic elite cycling team out of Indiana by the name of First Internet Bank.

The team unpacks their van in Kingston, a small town in Madison County just west of Newton. Waiting for them in the distance are 105 miles of tarmac and 11,500 grueling feet of elevation.

Food stuffed into their jerseys, bike computers beeping, smartphones in their back pockets (though they’re not of much use out here), the riders push off toward the east and follow their teammate down roads only familiar to him and a local man who volunteered to drive a SAG car behind them for the full duration of their six-hour odyssey.

Two hours in, during a hard effort up a coveted climb, one rider unknowingly pedals over a broken piece of road that crashes against his front wheel. Broken wheel in hand, he walks back to the SAG car, hops in, and the rest of the group continues the ride.

Three hours in, and 6,200 feet of climbing later, two of the riders, kits damp with sweat, begin to develop borderline hypothermia from the numerous bone-chilling descents. Unable to bear the harsh wind any longer, they walk to the SAG car and hop inside to the warmth.

What’s left of the cold and dwindling crew resumes the three-hour ride back to Kingston, away from the tree-covered mountains of Newton County, while the SAG car driver peers through his windshield with paternal concentration.