Life Behind Bars: Tour de Nowhere Origin Story
In January of 2020 a good friend came to visit me from St. Paul, Minnesota to do some photography and get out of town for a bit. During his visit he told me at length about his new Wahoo trainer and this software called Zwift. I completely ignored him and thought to myself.. “I have spin class, I don’t need some stupid trainer I’ll never use”. Then in March 2020 the same day as my REI dividend notification (with 20% off any full priced item) arrived, everything shutdown because of COVID-19. The REI dividend thing was staring at me and so I looked online. Was that trainer available from REI? It was. I pondered it for the rest of the day. I heard my friend’s voice in my head. He said to me, “I figured I’d order it and I would have a year to return it when I found I didn’t like it”. So I ordered the trainer. It was March and it said it would be here in May but it arrived in early April. I then had to order a cluster for it (it replaces your real bicycle wheel) because my bicycle did not have an 11 speed cluster. That came and on April 11th I started my 7-day trial of Zwift.
Surprisingly it didn’t suck and I found that I could ride a couple of hours without losing my mind. I have the zwift on our TV and it does feel like I am riding through the countryside.
Then Spring came and I was more than ready to ride outside. I rode outside when I could and inside when it was yucky outside. One day while I was riding up around Jenny Lake I pondered all my riding. I thought if I was riding this much I should be raising money for something like I do when I ride cross country. When the summer was up I was certain I would have ridden cross country mileage after all. Pondering more I thought to myself, “what would I call such a ride?”. Then it came to me. I thought.. I am riding nowhere. Everyone is going nowhere right now. I’ll call it the Tour de Nowhere. Like the Tour de France but instead it’s nowhere. Usually the things I ponder on my rides are mostly forgotten by the time I get home. This time I walked in the door and immediately looked to see if tourdenowhere.com was taken. It wasn’t. I got it. Then of course my friend who had visited worked with me and we made a website. This will be my first blog post on Tour de Nowhere.
My hope is that next summer, 2021, there will be a bunch of us, touring nowhere, blogging and raising money for various charities. Meanwhile I will be writing posts about my summer of riding and I hope you enjoy them. There will also be an occasional Crash Test Dummy update as well!
Hugs to you all! Hope you are all healthy and safe out there!!
—–Cathy