Cranky Scott

The Dickie Scramble..

This last Sunday, May 5^th, Troy and I headed down to Elgin, Minnesota to ride the Dickie Scramble. The Dickie Scramble is a gravel road race with either 85 or 120 mile courses. We decided that since the race was on a Sunday and we drove down the morning that we would stick to the short course. Also with the way the spring weather has been I do not have the miles on for the year, I felt a bit under prepared.

The area was hit with a May snow storm that dropped around 13” of heavy wet snow just days before the ride. Drew did a great job of sending out updates on the area conditions and we never thought about backing out. I assume that a bunch of people thought that it would be a muddy mess and backed out as the starting field was only about 45 people.

At about 8:15 we rolled out of the Huddle in Elgin, the group did a slow roll out for the first few miles and then the group broke up in to smaller groups and some took off. I felt that we were doing a good pace, but we were toward the back, which was fine. We were treating this ride as training for the Almanzo 100. The ride was going well and no real issues other than a wrong turn which we quickly realized and corrected and Troy flatted at about mile 40. The course was full of hard pack gravel, tar roads and a few minimum maintenance roads. At about 1:15 we rolled in the check point at about mile 60. The MMR that we rode just before the check point was not much fun. It was snow covered and soft. My bike was spinning out and I ended up walk some of the climb. The real fun was after the check point, there was some climbing to do! There were a total of 7 category 4 climbs on the short route; I think that is the most climbing I have ever done.

We returned to the Huddle at about 3:25. It was a good day on the bike. We ended up with about 79 miles and about 3300 feet of climbing in 6 hours and 11 minutes of moving time. Not too bad for me.

The 2013 Dickie Scramble was in the books! It sound like there will be some course changes for next year and I’m going to change out my gearing to make the climbing a bit easier.