This Canadian cyclist rode the entire alphabet on Strava

While there is no shortage of artistic cyclists, it’s often hard for these riders to find a way to combine creative and athletic hobbies. Toronto-based cyclist Noah Trotman was able to meld his two passions with a unique project: riding the letters of the alphabet and numbers 0-9 to create a Strava art-generated font.

The 23-year-old UX designer first heard of the 36 Days of Type project last year. The initiative invites designers, illustrators and graphic artists to “express their particular interpretation of the letters and numbers of the Latin alphabet.” Starting April 5, participants are challenged to design a letter or number each day for 36 consecutive days. “I found out the dates for this year I really wanted to participate,” says Trotman. “As an artist, I was trying to see what medium would stand out.” He had encountered some Strava art on his feed, and, feeling inspired by the creative routes, he decided he would take on the artistic challenge via bike.

Planning routes

“Before starting I did set some guidelines,” says Trotman. He mainly wanted to keep the rides in the Greater Toronto Area, and he didn’t want to ride the same area twice.

Finding the routes was where his creativity kicked in. “As crazy as it sounds, I just looked at a map for roughly 30 minutes to an hour each day and just saw the letters,” says Trotman. “I used Komoot as my main tool purely because of how it displays the level of streets (i.e. highways, major roadways, and streets) at different colours and thicknesses, [which] allowed my eyes to pick out certain characteristics that you find in a letter.”

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Going into the project, there were certain letters for which he had a vision. Planning these letters, he simply searched a map for the location and streets that would accommodate them. “For example, the ‘W’ I knew I wanted to do as an outline criss-cross, so I just had to find similar-sized city blocks to make it work,” he says. “For the ‘M’ and ‘V’, the only reason it works is because the cities of Erin and Mississauga lie on a North Eastern axis, so when it uploads it looks straight.”

After finding the routes in Komoot, Trotman used Garmin Connect to build them and sync them with his cycling computer. “Garmin Connect is also able to do straight lines which helped in certain cases,” he says.

Finding letters

Some letters were more difficult than others. “Sometimes I saw a letter, but I couldn’t figure it out so I would take a screenshot and bring it into Adobe Illustrator to then draw on it and iterate. Sometimes I would look at Google Earth because all the other mapping software just showed a patch of grass—but that can be so many things. I needed to see what was there and if I could cut through it or not. Schoolyard: yes. Golf courses: no.”

Trotman also got letter location tips from his family, his coworkers at Evolution Cycles and his Maple Runners running partners. “This was really helpful towards the end when my brain was fatigued and it was taking me longer to find the routes,” he says.

‘X’s and ‘O’s

Every route had anywhere from three to 10 iterations, but the letters ‘O’ and ‘X’ were particularly challenging. For ‘O’, Trotman uses a “stop/start method” to create the straight lines, pausing and unpausing to get a crisp point-to-point connection. “This gave me a headache while planning,” he says. “If you look at the neighbourhood east of the North York Civic Centre long enough you will see an isometric grid—every block is a rectangle and they are all the same size. It took a lot of iterations and I ended up drawing it in Adobe Illustrator to clearly see what I was doing. When I figured out the orientation of the letter, I then had to figure out the path to ride (ideally the least travelled path.)” To compound the challenge, Trotman attempted the ‘O’ on the day the Rogers network went down in Toronto, so he couldn’t use his phone.

Connecting the 25 points of the letter, he numbered the intersections on an “old school paper map”, starting and stopping his computer to connect the dots. Even though he spent so much time planning the ‘O’, “I was surprised how well it turn out and shouted with joy when I saw it upload to my phone,” says Trotman.

The ‘X’ was difficult for a different reason: “it was very hard to find diagonal streets that ran [paralel to] each other and then another two that crossed those streets.”

Other challenges included letters like, ‘B’, ‘D’, ‘P’ and ‘Q’, which were complicated because of their “inner parts,” which required figuring out where to cut in along the route.

Riding the letter ‘R’, Trotman took a hard fall 3km from the finish, breaking his mountain bike and forcing him to hike-a-bike the rest of the route. From ‘S’ onwards he was restricted to his road bike.

‘C’, ‘H’ and Cool ‘S’

‘C’ and ‘H’ were Trotman’s favourite letters to ride. “The ‘C’ just worked while still looking beautiful,” he says. “I think because it was during a sunrise and I was able to see the jockeys practicing at Woodbine along my ride. Now, whenever I look at a map in that area all I can see is the letter.” He also highlights the letter ‘H’ because “it looks like a cowboy!”

Trotman says one of the best parts of his project is that every letter is stylistically different. “The ‘O’ is an isometric letter, the ‘U’ would be called ‘burbing’ and the ‘S’ is just something we would do all the time in school, drawing 6 lines and making an S out of it.” He likes that anyone else attempting the Strava alphabet would also have completely unique styles of letters.

The cyclist/artist says the project gave him a chance to explore new places and inner neighbourhoods he wouldn’t have rode through otherwise. “It’s a great way to explore a city and doing it on a bike makes you see it in a whole different way. I would [do it agian], however, I would choose a different city as every city would have its own set of possibilities and challenges.”