Some Thoughts

I saw over at the Almanzo site that Chris is looking to take a back seat for the race and bring in a new director. The amount of work that he puts into this race is enormous. I can't even begin to think about how to get an event to the point he has grown the race to, but I think therein lies the problem. Too much growth. There was a market two years ago and talks of a band playing in 2013 the night before. All of this is great for the participants, but for one man to take on, especially running on donations and personal money, has to bring on a ton of pressure. There is a reason that most races charge $50-$100. There are a lot of costs associated with putting on a race and the people who put these things together deserve some compensation for their efforts. I've raced the Almanzo for the past three years and the Gentleman's Ride once and can not express how much I love the race course and all the work that goes into it. Above and beyond that I am grateful for all the races that have sprung up inspired by Chris. Being unemployed for over a year it was about the only racing that I could afford, and it helped keep me inspired to get out and do things, rather than sulking about not having a job.

I am grateful for all that Chris has done and I wish only the best for him.


Other note:

I have been backing off of Strava quite a bit lately. I still post my rides there, but I rarely look to see what others are doing. My latest gripe is with elevation. I don't know all the ins and outs of it, but on a Garmin device you can choose to enable elevation correction or not. (The default is "enabled") So when you do a race and you get two VERY different elevation profiles you have to wonder why someone, more than likely, has disabled elevation correction to make it look as if there ride was more difficult than it actually was.
At this years Almanzo there were people who posted elevations around 7,600ft, while others were around 4,600ft. Where did they do 3,000  more feet of climbing? I've climbed 10,000ft in a day before, and I can tell that the Almanzo is not even close to that. Anyway, people use the site differently, I would just think that when you look back at a week, month, or years from now, you'd prefer accurate data so that you truly know what you are capable of.