Pointless Prize: Slowest Mile

[Bort McFly]

Riding fast can be hard, but riding slow can be hard, too. To make your sleaze rides more interesting, I’m sponsoring a Pointless Prize for the person who records the slowest average speed for rides between 1 and 2 miles.

The SlowMile requires technical skill to ride slowly without stopping. Examples of the discipline include:

• Creeping up a giant hill (and having an excuse to suck at climbing)
• Tooling around town on your mountain bike and hopping over animate or inanimate objects
• Riding with your basset hound, who must smell every blade of grass
• Track-standing around your street, which gives your neighbors even more surveillance that you’re a bike weirdo

Besides bike-handling skills, you’ll need speed calibration skills. You need to ride fast enough to prevent your GPS from auto-pausing or recording no movement, but slowly enough to win the prize. Or you need the tech skills to turn off the auto-pause. Or just reverse whatever people use for Strava-doping. I dunno.

The wizard who runs the leaderboard should be able to code this using Strava data alone. Just in case, bedazzle your ride with #SlowMile.

The prize will be a $20 gift card to Proteus Brews, the scrumtrulescent new coffee shop at Proteus Bicycles in College Park. You will also receive the Foghat ditty, “Slow Ride, Take It Easy,” from iTunes.

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Finally, you will receive upgrade points when USA Cycling inevitably decides to extract rents from the exciting new discipline of slow-speed bicycle racing.

Have fun!

Topic

[drevil]

This sounds ridiculous and fun. I’m a decent trackstander, so I’m in.

However, what prevents someone from walking or just leaving their bike, cooking potatoes, eating them, then coming back and finishing off their 1 mile?

I propose video or it didn’t happen… or better yet you have to do it in the Proteus parking lot while people throw spikey sweetgum balls at ya [emoji23]

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

[jrenaut]

Yeah, technically this is going to be a little complicated. I like the video idea.

For example, a lot of us in the dense parts of the city often do rides of less than 2 miles with a grocery store stop in the middle. If you don’t turn Strava off, you can get a ridiculously slow time. I guess it’s honor system like everything else here, but the videos would be fun. I want to watch drevil almost fall over try to trackstand every six inches up some giant hill, and I’m sure everyone else does too.

[josh]

My minimal bike polo experience is going to come in handy for this one — tripod here I come. But I’d be down to lose to drevil in a trackstand competition. Also, thank you for the helpful thread tags.

[Bort McFly]

Yeah, it would be easy to cheat, but you can cheat the rest of the game, too, like taking a slow drive with your GPS.

Posting a video or coming to a qualifying sweetgum ball rodeo sounds fun. Or maybe just trust people, but use the hashtag to filter out grocery store jaunts and take a close look at the data.

[drevil]

@Bort McFly 203367 wrote:

Yeah, it would be easy to cheat, but you can cheat the rest of the game, too, like taking a slow drive with your GPS.

Posting a video or coming to a qualifying sweetgum ball rodeo sounds fun. Or maybe just trust people, but use the hashtag to filter out grocery store jaunts and take a close look at the data.

Yeah, just kidding. Who wants to watch a 15 minute video of someone riding super slow anyways? Sweetgum ball pelting on the other hand…

[bigredboiler]

If the rules require you to ride the 1-2mi without stopping, then Strava will tell you if the rider stopped.

On the desktop version (don’t think mobile does this), you can see both “ride time” and “total time.” If they don’t match, then there is stopped time.

I love the prize of Foghat’s song…..great idea!

[Catedrew]

I have a trike, so I go super-slow up hills anyway! Hmmm, I might have to try for this prize!

[Bort McFly]

@Catedrew 204679 wrote:

I have a trike, so I go super-slow up hills anyway! Hmmm, I might have to try for this prize!

Yes! These are exactly the kind of shenanigans I had in mind. We could do a bicycle vs. tricycle slow race up a hill.

[Author]

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