So Cyclopathon has run for month now. It’s all over for September. It’s gone pretty well and I’m quite pleased how things went overall. But there were a few things to learn from an organisational standpoint. So I’m going to cover those and what we’re changing for October. The October courses are decided but the races aren’t set up yet, so hold your horses. Hopefully race 1 will be set up within a couple of days.
Lesson 1: Pen Enforcement only checks at the time of race signup
This was something completely new to me. I asked James to create all the September races up-front which he kindly did. Several people signed up to them all at once. In an ideal world this would be fine and dandy. But the problem arises when someone increases their ZRS above the category threshold on week 1. There are no further checks, so if they signed up to races 2-4 before they got promoted, they can still race in the lower pen. This is not what I want and not what most of the racers want either. The only way I know to get round this is to only create the races week by week. So that’s what we’re going to try.
Change 1: Create Races week by week instead of all up-front
Lesson 2: Not enough support in USW
James advised me up-front that the USW time slot is not very popular, but I went ahead with it because I was asked to. Sadly the races were poorly attended with 6, 6, 1 and 2 riders for all five categories. So I’m afraid it’s getting axed. I can’t justify asking James to set up races if people aren’t going to show up. We gave it a chance.
Change 2: USW races will not continue in October
And I think that’s mostly what will change for October. The courses chosen have been published on the main Cyclopathon page and hopefully race 1 will be available for signup by the weekend.
Not a Change
The other change that isn’t really a change is that the category thresholds will all shift down 50 points for October as originally planned.
Results
You can see the League results here for Atlantic, here for EMEA and here for USW
I had a lot of fun in Atlantic. I hope you had fun too and thanks everyone for racing. See you next month.
I signed up to all four races but after I increased over the cat limit I took myself out of the next ones. It’s not fair to race if you know you are higher. Keep up the good work
Yeah that is the ideal thing people would have done or race up. But at least one person didn’t notice and took some abuse for it (in EMEA). I’d just prefer to do everything possible that I can to reduce the chances for these kinds of issues. The whole thing is a bit experimental so we all need to be a bit open-minded and tolerant.