Durand Road Race

[bob_schwartz]

Yes, that's right. A road race.

April 22nd, http://www.cvccbike.com/node/61

I'm plugging the race here because every year mountain bikers get the jones to race in April and the MtB season hasn't started yet. So they show up in Durand. I just wanted to make people aware of a couple of things.

Each of the past few years we've been caught by surprise by the number of unlicensed (in the USCF sense) riders that have shown up. This has led to some last minute scrambling to allow everyone to race without blowing out our field sizes. This is something we'd like to avoid. So this year we are sticking it to day of race registrations. At the same time we are using very, very generous pre-registration deadlines. The goal is not to stick it to the day of race registrants. The goal is to have as much of the race registration sorted out in advance as possible. I believe it is in everybody's best interest to do this.

The online pre-reg deadline is midnight Thursday for a Saturday race. That gives us a day to pull things together and give people some idea of just how tight the field limits are before they leave for the race. If you just can't decide about going to the race until Saturday morning it'll cost you. But our hope is that you won't let it go until then.

We will also have a finish line camera this year, which should greatly improve our reporting of results. This is a very complicated event, analogous to conducting a track meet by running all events simultaneously with wave starts. It is not an easy race to score. But it should go better than in the past.

Hope to see some of you there.

[bob_schwartz]

Last call. Pre-registration for Durand ends tonight at midnight, Pacific time.

I'd like to say a word about the field limits. Those of you that have been there in the past know that there are many blind spots on the course where visibility up the road is limited. Centerline issues are a problem in general, but especially so in situations like that. Our entrant demographics are different than the typical MCF race for a couple of reasons, and we get way more than typical amounts of citizen racers. What we did in response to this was to cap field sizes and offer additional races with a lot of category overlap. That way people in the most popular races would have other options, and people could still race if not in the field of their first choice.

That is also why we are pushing pre-registration so hard. It is in everybody's best interest to have this sorted out as much as possible before people get in their cars to drive here.

The 4/5/Citizen race has filled. As I type this there are 17 spots left in the Cat 5/Citizen race. If you are one of the many citizen racers we get and are not yet registered, I'd advise taking care of that. Of course, the age graded races are open and unlikely to fill.

As a final thought I like to ask everyone to remember this weekend and every weekend that it is not uncommon at all for drivers to travel rural roads at high speed. The odds that someone is coming the other way at 70mph as you are cresting a rise are small, but not zero. You really don't want to be riding someplace where you are a candidate to make the lead story in the next day's newspaper in this case.

Thanks, and I hope that everyone has a great race on Saturday.