Bikes.
People.
Community.
This all started with a simple premise: get some friends together, ride the gravel roads of southern Minnesota, and see what happens. What happened was the Almanzo 100, one of the first gravel road races in the country, launched in 2007 out of Rochester, Minnesota, by somebody who just wanted to ride bikes with his friends.
Nobody called it "gravel cycling" yet. There were no timing chips, no finishing hugs, no couches placed in the middle of the road. There were paper cue sheets, chalk-drawn start lines, and the kind of self-reliance that comes naturally when you're hours from anything resembling a feed zone. The race grew slowly, then all at once, eventually drawing over 1,400 riders and helping establish the template for an entire genre of cycling that now spans the globe.
Chris, the man behind the movement, stepped away from the Almanzo 100 in 2014. What didn't go anywhere was the spirit behind it: the belief that riding bikes with other people is one of the better things you can do with your time, and that it doesn't require much more than a route and a willingness to show up.
That's what Almanzo C.C. is.
We're a loosely organized cycling club curating rides across Minnesota, Wisconsin, the Dakotas, and wherever else seems worth going. Road, gravel, MTB - mostly informal, always open. We ride to explore, to stay connected to communities we care about, and to keep the thing that made the original Almanzo worth doing alive in a smaller, quieter form.
No entry fees. No podium. No FOMO content strategy.
Bikes + People = Community