1200 Miles & a Cup O' Dirt & a little Mississippi Mud!

Take the year long challenge of completing a dozen or half a dozen dirty centuries and join the fun in December! Everybody who completes this challenge will be rewarded with a custom hand-made stoneware mug as well as be in a drawing for other prizes. Read the FAQ for details, and welcome to the fun!

I've increased the fun to give some more folks a shot at the cup - a bit 'watered down' - We'll have the 1200 Mile Cup O' Dirt and a 600 Mile Cup O' Mississippi Mud and new in 2008 is the 1/2 Liter O' Dirt - earned by completing 12 metric centuries in the year! A special award will be presented to anyone completing either a dirty century or metric century in each month of the year.

Sunday, September 30, 2007

A Second Cup Awarded!

2 weeks - 200 miles - lots and lots of good ol' Iowa gravel!

GPickle earned his Cup O' Mississippi Mud on Saturday the 29th of September - on a beautiful sunny early Autumn day, when most folks were watching the Hawkeyes loose thier 3rd game of the year, or drinking themselves silly - GPickle was out on the gravel roads west of Iowa City - pedaling his way to the infamous Cup O' Dirt! Below is his story and a photo of his steed - single speed steed! Impressive!

"Yesterday (Sept. 29th) I rode another 100 miles, my sixth gravel century of the year! In order to keep things interesting I rode my single speed townie.


This is my Fuji Del Rey 1 SPEED. I got it at the bike library of course. The fork is not original equipment, it was purchased years ago in an attempt to turn my Bob Jackson into a cross bike. After the failure of that project it did nothing until last fall when I built up this bike. For the ride I swapped the pedals and the front wheel and added the computer. The rear tire is very old, it was also purchased for the aforementioned Bob Jackson cross experiment. I have long been anticipating its death and was hoping this ride would finally do it in so I brought along a spare tire which was not needed. I really hate that tire.

I left early yesterday and it was still cool and not yet windy. I rolled far to the east and south through the greater metro areas of Downey, West Liberty, Nichols and Conesville before heading back west. I passed by Lone Tree and finally took a stop in Riverside. I love Caseys! Back on the road then and I kept going south and west (strong wind out of the south now) and somewhere out past Kalona I was able to turn back towards home and enjoy the tailwind. I loved the single, my gear was 40X18 and at times I was wishing I had the 42 on but overall it worked well for me. Total mileage was 101 and some change with 84 on gravel. I took a photo of the computer total but it has gone missing. I can still get one and maybe I will.

I am enjoying the 1200 mile challenge very much. I have ridden lots of roads already that I never have before and with six centuries yet to do I look forward to more exploring. I am going to take a week or two off now and then get back to it, hopefully with my old Trans-Iowa companion Jim. He said he would like to ride six and I would love to have some company out there! Thanks for the challenge Dave, its been fun!"

ed: Steve, thanks for playing... now, I've just gotta get out there and log some miles!!! -Dave

1 comment:

john said...

What - don't tell me - someone is going for the 12 dirty 100's - shit!
I'm not going there - I'm not going there
Really, I'm having way too much fun riding and racing X.
Let's see how many weeks are there left in the year and how many weeks before it gets really cold. hmmmmm
John