If you’ve grown up anywhere in or near Pittsburgh, you know one thing for certain about the city: whoever designed the roads was either drunk, mad, or some combination of the two. As a result, a multitude of streets in the city become unbelievably steep extremely quickly. It’s common to find quiet roads nestled between neighborhoods that pitch up above a 30% grade, and the cycling culture in the area has flocked to these hills for their alluring difficulty for decades. In fact, a local cyclist named Danny Chew, recently the victim of paralysis due to a car accident, created a race with some of his local friends containing 13 of the city’s steepest hills. This race, quasi-intuitively, was christened as the Dirty Dozen, and it’s one of the hardest annual races in the Eastern United States. The race is casual between hills, with most people riding slowly enough that they can comfortably talk to one another; however, once the whistle blows at the bottom of each hill, all hell breaks loose as dozens of enthusiasts clash in an all-out sprint up these behemoth climbs. Each hill in this race is its own kind of hard, with the shorter hills making up for their distance with much more intense grades: the shortest hill in the entire race is Canton Avenue, the steepest hill in the entire continental United States, and its 37% cobbled slope has been deemed insurmountable by anyone other than the most seasoned Pittsburgh riders.
Traditionally, this race has been held in late November, the Saturday after Thanksgiving; however, it has been moved to late October after a catastrophically bad snowstorm caused a majority of riders to drop out of the race last year. This is the first time the race date has ever been altered, and it’s becoming a massive controversy among the more experienced racers. While many welcome the good weather, some see the move as a weakener for the race itself. Bad weather has always been a part of the race, with the first installment in 1983 taking place in snow flurries, but some people see the decision as a healthy one due to the heavily increased potential for racers to sign up. After all, making it up Canton becomes exponentially more difficult when the cobbles get wet or icy. Ultimately, until race day comes and goes on October 26th, there’s no way of telling how it will impact the experience. It has the potential to bring life back to an antiquated event, which could allow the tradition of Pittsburgh’s dominance on the pain scale to remain cemented as formidable beyond reason.
(Watch closely in this video to see me fail miserably in 2017 – I’m in a blue Penn State uniform)
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