2014 100 Miles of Nowhere: Winners of the Alpine, UT Men and Women’s Divisions

10.13.2014 | 8:52 am

A Note from Fatty: Did you want to do the 100 Miles of Nowhere…but found that you missed the registration? And now you’re finding that the jerseys are maybe the coolest-looking things you’ve ever seen? And you happen to wear a size Large in Men’s? Well, Felix Cohen actually ordered three Hundred Miles of Nowhere kits — and is now finding that he and his friends aren’t going to be able to do the ride. If you’d like to buy one of these never-used, never-worn, actually-still-at-Twin-Six jerseys from him, he’s selling them for $70 each. Email him at felix@felixcohen.co.uk, and he’ll arrange to have the jersey sent out to you.

Note that this gets you just the jersey — not the 100 MoN swag box, and no donation to Camp Kesem. So I strongly recommend that in order to make your jersey legit, you go over and make a donation on your own. I’ll leave it up to you how much it should be (but $25 – $50 feels about right).

For the past several years, The Hammer and I have one-upped our annual 100 Miles of Nowhere effort. One year, we rode up and down Suncrest, over and over. Another year, we rode up and down the Alpine Loop, over and over. And last year we rode our mountain bikes up and down the Bearclaw-Poppy trail, over and over. After which, I said:

As for next year, I’m thinking somewhere flat.

And smooth.

And cool. 

Now, it would have been easy to ignore this warning from the past. To — with the pain of the event from the previous year safely behind us — go ahead and pick out a brutally steep route.

But we didn’t. We kept our word to ourselves. We went back to the basics: to what The 100 Miles of Nowhere is really all about.

• We made the course short. Just a hair short of four miles long, in fact.
• We kept the course close to home. In fact, we were probably never more than a mile from home, the entire day.
• We made the day silly and fun. Considering the fact that the 100 Miles of Nowhere is a fundraiser for Camp Kesem — which I think the twins have nicely shown is incredibly silly and fun — I think that making this event be silly and fun needs to be an absolute top priority.

Here, Let Me Show You

To be honest, I’m a little bit amazed at how much story I could tell about our 100 Miles of Nowhere (which we held a week early because The Hammer has a 50K Trail Run race on 10/18, and I’ll be busy being in charge of the twins’ birthday), in spite of the fact that it was just a four-mile loop . And, unable to help myself, I probably will tell a fair amount of story — with quite a few photos — about the day. 

But first, how about if I show you a complete lap, sped up 12x courtesy of Instagram’s Hyperlapse:

I should note here that it is no easy thing to sit upright while riding a Time Trial Bike (yes, for all but a few laps, we rode our Shivs…and we wore our Prevail aero helmets), riding one-handed and holding a phone in one position for the fifteen-minute duration of the lap.

About the Course

The Hammer and I started and ended our 100 Miles of Nowhere at home, at 8am on Saturday morning. For 23 of the 26 loops we did, we rode around the big four-mile loop you see below: 

As you can see, there’s a line that bisects the loop — we took that shorter loop whenever we wanted to drop by our house to shed clothing, get a drink, or pick up some riders to join us for a lap. 

There are a couple other oddities about this loop — like the little jut out in the bottom left corner. 

I will explain these in good time. 

For now, I just want to draw your attention to how ridiculous the fully-zoomed Strava of a small section of the ride looks. 

Please, let me assure you: I did not ever swing a corner out as wide as the Strava track would suggest. For that to happen, I’d have to have been flying at an irresponsible rate of speed and blowing through a stop sign in order to get a really high number to flash on the radar speed limit sign just after that corner.

Which would be really fun, but that — as I mentioned before — would not be something I would ever do even once, much less sprinting to see if I could get that radar speed limit sign to flash above the speed limit (i.e., 25mph) each of the 26 times I passed it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

Posed Photos

The weather was cold when the day started, and so the below photo is in fact not us at the beginning of the day. 

No, we were each actually wearing a lot more at the beginning of the ride. We didn’t get down to the short sleeves and shorts ’til we were forty miles (about 2.5 hours) into the day. 

But you have to admit, we make an adorable couple. And I’ve got to say that these 100 Miles of Nowhere jerseys look incredible this year. 

And I have another confession: While we put our race numbers on our road bikes and had every good intention of riding our road bikes, we started on our Shivs, and wound up staying on them for about 92 of the 100 miles. 

Hey, the course was flattish (about 240 feet of climbing per loop…which does add up by the time you’ve done 26 laps) and we just weren’t inclined to swap out bikes.

Even so, we did go out of our way to get photos taken of us on our road bikes, with number plates attached and everything.

The Hammer’s looking good, as always:

And I really like this photo of me, for a couple of reasons. First, because it makes me look like I’m going faster than I actually am. And, more importantly, because because the way my arm naturally obscures my early-mid-October paunch.

 

That’s not an easy thing to do. And as autumn progresses, it’ll become less and less easy. Trust me on this.

Highlights from the Day

There’s something meditative about riding the same loop, over and over, through the course of a seven hour day (six hours of actual riding). You get to know the road better than you’d ever have believed possible, for one thing. As The Hammer and I rode one particularly bad section of pavement — it started out as chip seal and has been patched numerous times in numerous places — we slowly figured out a line that didn’t rattle our brains out or suck us into a pothole.

Likewise, we noticed the progress of the neighborhood, seeing people on different parts of their walks or runs. Anytime we saw a person a third (and definitely a fourth) time, we’d get a big grin from them. They knew we were up to something strange; no doubt they had fun trying to figure out what it was.

As we rode by one of the city parks (Alpine, UT has no grocery store, but it has three city parks), we saw people inflating giant person-sized spheres. 

On the next lap, we saw kids playing in them. A birthday party, probably.

By the time we came by a couple more times, the kids had moved on.

“Let’s see if we can try them out,” The Hammer said. So we rolled up to the guys who were standing by them, and asked if we could see what these things were like.

“Sure,” they replied, and even agreed to film us. I’m the one in the red:

During the climb for each lap, we’d see this sign:

This is no idle sign, either:

“I bet I can get that camel to kiss me,” The Hammer said during one of the laps. 

So she held some tall grass through the fence and sure enough it came over to take it — and The Hammer leaned in.

This is as close as she ever got. Which is fine with me. No, on second thought, I’m not even sure I wanted her to get that close.

Sprint for the Speed Limit

As we rounded the third corner of the loop about two laps in, The Hammer asked me, “Did you see what I just did?”

I had to admit that I had not seen it.

“There’s a speed limit sign we just passed, with a radar pointing at us and showing what our speed is,” she said. 

And so for the next 24 laps, as soon as we came around that corner, we’d take turns sprinting toward that speed limit sign:

The Hammer’s best — as far as the sign was concerned — was 26. The best I could ever get it to show was a 29. 

And then I looked down at my GPS as I went by…and discovered it was reporting me as two miles per hour faster than the radar detector did.

“That thing is ripping us off,” I complained. “Robbing us of at least two miles per hour.”

Which, you have to admit, would be a very odd thing to say to a police officer if you were pulled over for going faster than the speed limit.

Second Sprint

Amazingly — and perhaps because they had noticed we were enjoying their other radar sign so much — halfway through the day, the police erected a second radar speed limit sign on our loop.

And this one was midway through our downhill straightaway, on the best pavement of the entire course.

Now, I don’t want to give anything away or confess to any crimes, but if you’re curious what my top speed was reported by that sign, you could probably check my top speed on my Strava report for the day. 

Tragedy

The pictures, video and text in this post have already made it abundantly clear I’m sure but let’s get explicit: Alpine, Utah is a very small town. And I love that. I chose that. 

And when you live in a small town, a new store opening is a big deal.

And a donut store opening is a huge deal.

And a donut store that already has a cult following throughout the rest of Utah, due to its general awesomeness is an incredibly huge deal.

So now you know what this little detour in the loop is for:

Yep, at noon we headed over for our first big break, to get The Hammer an apple fritter (her favorite). As for me, well, I’d probably just get myself an assortment box.

Just look at that sign! 

So exciting!

But when we got to the door, there was just one problem: 

Sure, I suppose a donut shop has the right to be closed by noon on a Saturday. But — and I say this as someone who has wanted donuts at literally every hour of the day — is it wise?

So we took our custom elsewhere. Specifically, we went next door, to the Sub-Zero ice cream shop.

Yes, that’s right. Alpine doesn’t have a grocery store, but we have an ice cream shop next door to a donut shop (which, if signage is to believed, is also going to be an ice cream shop).

Mmmmm. Waffle cones:

This is my kind of town. 

This was the first time I had ever had Sub-Zero ice cream. The gimmick is clever: They mix the cream and your mix-ins in their liquid state, then use liquid nitrogen to flash-freeze it into ice cream, complete with awesome fog effects. (I apologize for not getting video; I was too busy being transfixed.)

The Hammer and I shared a mocha-almond ice cream in a waffle cone.

Clearly, we have both gone to our happy places. Also clearly, my happy place looks pretty darned dorky.

Stop. Hammer Time.

As the video at the beginning of this post clearly illustrates, our loop has four stop signs. Multiply that times 26 laps, and you’ve gotta lotta stoppage.

I say this, of course, by way of implying that we did in fact stop for all 104 stop signs. Because we did. Because we are both very law-abiding examples of law-abiding-ness to the rest of the world. Or at least to the half-dozen people who got this far in this race report (hi Mom!).

And besides — as further proof that we stopped at every single stop sign, as if that were even necessary — if we didn’t stop at every stop sign, how would I have gotten this picture of The Hammer at this stop sign?

More to the point, though, you might be wondering why I took this picture of The Hammer with this stop sign. 

Well, here’s why:

Yep, an MC Hammer reference graffiti’d onto the stop sign at Main and 100 South in Alpine, Utah. Who’d have expected that?

Furthermore, who’d have expected that anyone would still be making MC Hammer references in 2014 (or whenever these letters got affixed to the stop sign)?

Even more furthermore, is there a single city in the United States that does not have at least one stop sign similarly altered?

The mind boggles.

More Awesome

You should know that stop signs with nearly two-decade-old pop culture references are not the only peculiar and wonderful things we passed twenty-six times during our 100 Miles of Nowhere. 

We passed this tree, for example:

“Who would paint a tree that way?” you might wonder. “That would be terrible for the bark.”

And then I would have to correct you, because that tree isn’t painted. That is colorful twine (yarn? string?) wrapped around the trunk of the tree in someone’s front yard.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Also every lap, I was taunted by some hand-made benches someone had put out for sale:

“We’d be delightful to rest on,” they said. “Just for a few minutes,” they said.

“Wouldn’t you like to take a nap?” they said.

Refreshing.

Also, for the final two laps, we picked up The IT Guy, for his first exercise in about four months.

It’s not easy to get out when you’re both working and busy in school.

Also joining us was The Swimmer, stealing my helmet and her mom’s bike clothes: 

The Swimmer, too, is busy in school. So it was really awesome of both of them to come spin for a couple of laps with us on what had turned out to be a perfect Saturday for riding.

Around in a loop.

Over and over. And over.

Summing Up

Really, when you think about it, The 100 Miles of Nowhere is a terrible idea. Riding around on a tiny course sounds like a miserable way to spend a day.

But each year I’ve done it, I’ve loved it. I’ve loved how I notice details that I don’t see when I ride a road once. I love how the course fades into the background and the ride becomes just about riding. I love the expressions of people who saw us, over and over, as they wondered what we were up to.

I love figuring out what the course will be each year, and that — so far at least — we’ve done very different courses every year. 

I don’t know what we’ll do for our 100 Miles of Nowhere next year. But I’m looking forward to it.

And now, I’m looking forward to your own reports. 

PS: Here are our numbers, for those of you who are curious: