100 Miles of Nowhere – Where the wind comes sweeping down the plains division

06.21.2013 | 2:21 pm

I decided to do 100 Miles of Nowhere on a whim. I’ve always enjoyed killing time reading the race reports, and seeing the insanity and inanity in the ideas from Fatty’s audience. I loved it, and I wanted to be a part of it – especially since it was also for such a great cause. I signed up, and the reality of the challenge at hand set in almost immediately.

I faced a couple of problems in deciding exactly how to tackle my little part of the 100 Miles of Nowhere movement. I hadn’t ridden my bike in months and had no idea where I could bike outside in my relatively new hometown of Oklahoma City. I am also lacking the creativity and the insane ability to withstand the repetitiveness required for a “real” 100 Miles of Nowhere experience (trainer, unicycle, driveway laps, etc.). Regardless, I bravely signed up and started plotting my ride.

I ended up with a 9-ish mile loop around the most heavily populated biking trail in all of Oklahoma City: The Lake Hefner bike path. Not the thrilling tedium most look for in 100-MoN, but it would have to suffice.

Given that it wasn’t exactly an exciting ride, I decided to spice it up a bit by making it my first outdoor ride in about 7 months. Here is my little girl helping me get ready for the big ride, jaw agape at the awesomeness of my plan.

I am not good at training. To wit, I was in the midst of “not-really-training” for a half-marathon when I signed up for 100 MoN. My longest training run before that race turned out to be only 6 miles. I paid for it dearly in that race, but apparently never learned my lesson. My longest training ride before 100 MoN, was a casual one hour-ish ride on my trainer watching some old West Wing episodes. Basically, I was going to pay the price again for my rabid indifference to seriously preparing for big events like this.

The day of the big event, I got started relatively early knowing it was going to be a long day. Here I am ready to rock before starting. Judging by those jowls, you can tell I am a very serious athlete. Judging by those aero bars, it’s also probably safe to assume I am poor bike handler with no sense of bike maintenance (triathlete).

I read about the trail in advance, so I knew a little about it. But not enough to do it right the first time. My first “lap” ended up being about 13 miles because I got lost. On a big circle. This was not a good sign.

I doubled back to the car, and eventually figured out the whole route by traveling it in the opposite direction. I just didn’t realize that a portion of it went onto the road, but I figured it out eventually and was back on track to nowhere.

There really isn’t much to write about the tedious middle parts of my journey. I saw a skunk carrying something in its mouth at one point. Later I smelled what I assume was the same skunk in the wooded area I deemed “skunk forest”. I also begin to recognize a handful of other riders who were also on long rides in the opposite direction. A couple of reciprocated head nods seemed to suggest they recognized me and my suffering as well. This is the pure excitement of the West side of Lake Hefner.

They really don’t lie in the famous song about Oklahoma (OOOOOOOOk…Lahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plains). The couple of weeks of scary, devastating and tragic severe tornadic weather we saw this spring aside, even your average, everyday breeze seems just a little stiffer in my new home state. June 2, the day I did my 100 MoN, was seemingly the least windy day in months in Oklahoma, but it was still pretty gusty for about half of the loop. That light 10-15 MPH northerly wind absolutely destroyed me, and my morale. To make it worse, even though it was busy on the path, I could not find someone going a similar speed and direction to latch onto and share the work.

I tweeted after the race that the last 80 miles are the worst part of a century. This wasn’t far from the truth. I went to a dark place after about mile 35. I had a couple of PBJ sandwiches, three or four Gu’s, lots of water and Gatorade, and nearly a full bag of those delicious sugar coated “orange slices”. I once read somewhere that calories cannot replace fitness. I had no shortage of calories, but I suffered massively for much of the day. This was particularly true when for some reason my Ipod spit out Rebecca Black’s “Friday”. I added it to the playlist the night before thinking it would be kind of funny. It wasn’t. It was awful. And predictably got stuck in my head for far longer than I would have preferred.

Here is what I looked like at about mile 95, heading into the wind.

I should mention that shortly after this was taken I downed my swag Honey Stinger Waffle. Fatty wasn’t lying. Those things are solid. Unfortunately for me, it was too little, too late, and was mostly just serving as comfort food at that point.

I limped in to the finish, narrowly avoiding two collisions with large groups of completely oblivious people congregating in the middle of heavily trafficked bike path. Finally, I was done.

I cannot tell you how hard it was for me to take this picture. All I wanted to do was fall over. Maybe die. Not sure at that point.

At the end of the day though (after 5 or 6 beers anyway) I felt much better. And even during the most difficult moments on the ride, I felt great about taking part in 100 MoN! It was all for a great cause, a cool T-shirt, a water bottle and a delicious comfort waffle. Thanks Fatty!