Editor's Note: For the next week, Lee Benson's office is his bicycle as he travels the byways and backways of northern Utah, looking for columns.

LOGAN — One fine spring day in 1983, when Reagan was in the White House and "Star Wars" was in its first incarnation at the box office, Jeff Keller looked out of the same bicycle shop window he's still looking through today when a friend and frequent customer walked through the front door of Sunrise Cyclery.

"We need something to get us in shape," said Dave Bern, a student at Utah State University, "How about we ride our bikes to Jackson?"

Thus the 206-mile, one-day Logan to Jackson — that's Lotoja in shorthand — bicycle race was born.

The event that a mere 27 years later has become, as far as Jeff is concerned, "The No. 1 reason people are on a bicycle in Utah."

You might interpret such a comment as bragging, hyperbole or both — considering it's coming from a guy who helped found the race.

But then you haven't met Jeff.

The man who said "Yeah, let's do it" to Dave Bern that spring day in 1983, who from the beginning threw the support of his fledgling bike shop behind the project, is into self-promotion about as much as an Inuit.

He may have come up with the idea — or at least been the first to second the motion — but he will be the first to assure you that the reason Lotoja has become a phenomenon brimming with 2,000 entrants every year and long waiting lists isn't because of him.

"Brent Chambers took it over 10 years ago and it's through his polishing that the event has become what it is," says Jeff. "He improved on everything, colors, logos, graphics, you name it. He gave it style. In the old days you could say you rode it and maybe have a tacky T-shirt to show for it. Now you can have a nice jersey and put a sticker in your car. People literally give their lives over to it."

But not Jeff.

He's largely unchanged from the 24-year-old in 1983 who gave the Logan to Jackson event his support but hardly all his attention. As much as he loves bicycles and bicycling, he loves tinkering and inventing and dreaming just as much. No one has ever accused him of being one-dimensional.

He got so busy doing other things he didn't even complete the first Lotoja. He rode with the dozen or so riders who started the race but bid them adieu at the Idaho border. (Bobby VanSlyke led the way into the town square in Jackson, Wyo., that year in just a little over nine hours).