Riding Has Begun

We actually had two good days for riding. Not in a row, mind you, but in the same week. This may be the beginning of the end of a winter, the likes of which we haven't seen in decades. Teams are already racing in the Tidewater, while we are just beginning to see over snow drifts. I drove over the mountains the other day to Charlottesville and it was a whole other world. You could see green .... or at least brown .... some kind of ground anyway.

Saturday was the first ride for me in over a month. Visited Steve Hetherington at Just the Right Gear (our bike shop sponsor). He held the annual Hoodie Hoo ride. It is supposed to send winter away for the year. How did he do? Well, it was in the 50's on Saturday, 60's on Saturday and it rained on Monday. Today is supposed to be in the 50's again. I'd say he's onto something.

Racing begins on March 13/14 in Columbia, South Carolina if we can pull together a few riders. Not worth it unless we can get four of us. The hotel and gas are the same for one or four. In this age of scarcity, we have to watch every penny. The school has not increased our funds, despite a larger team and members are being squeezed by lost jobs, tight-fisted parents and sponsors who reneged on deals .... I won't name any, but I can say that my experience leads me to believe the honor code does not apply once you graduate from Washington and Lee.

We are sponsoring a race on September 26th in Beautiful Buena Vista. The criterium should be the last race of the year in Virginia. Hoping to make it a BAR (Best All-round Rider event) and that should get us some more attendees. Given we are out in the boondocks, it's a tough sell. More about that race in my next blog.

Update on the Blogger System Change

According to Blogger, on March 27th, they are pulling the plug on ftp blog publishing. I know, you are all saying "What?" Well, without going into absurd detail, it's the method we use to publish this blog. All you have to know is that we don't know yet whether we can convert it satisfactorily. There is supposed to be a conversion tool, that is supposed to make it effortless and still allow us to keep it looking the same.

This doesn't affect 99.5% of Blogger/blogspot blogs, just the ones that use ftp (file transfer protocol). Don't worry your blog isn't in the same category. You would have received an email from Google if it did. Obviously, the decision was made by youngsters who don't understand that takes time to turn a ship around, and one month is not enough notice. i'm sure Google is not hemorrhaging so much money that it can't keep it going for 6 months....but I digress.

I am sure there will be difficulties. If it becomes too difficult, our backup is to close this down and do our blogging on Facebook. It's a crappy choice, but this comes at a bad time, when we don't have the time to commit to major website modification. We've put our blogging on hold until this is resolved. We'll begin again at the beginning of March after we know the outcome. Thanks for your patience.

Shakedown Time and the 2010 Lineup

Other than the Holiday Season, this is the toughest time for the team to stay focused. The weather is dreadful (especially this year) and the days are short. We are stuck riding spin bikes in the gym and our schedule is pushed to the fringes of the morning to accommodate the maximum number of participants. Money is short and fundraising for the smaller pool of available cash is tough. Luckily, we have a couple of bakers on the team (Elliott and Dave), and everyone in the world has to eat and most people love chocolate.

Therefore we struck upon the idea of another fundraising scheme....The Bake Sale. We're selling Chocolate Espresso Kahlua Brownies for a dollar each. Tieing this in with our previous fundraiser ...the T-shirt sale. Buy a brownie for a dollar or get a free one with purchase of a t-shirt. If nothing else, the college kids are learning the basics of entrepreneurship. Money in and money out with some left over. They are going to have to prove their "Republican-pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps-and-stop-whining" stripes for once. I always like to see how they actually hold up.

Considering that I worked as a broker and cold-called 400 people a week, I am impervious to the word "No". I just keep pressing on, being a nuisance, until people leave or give me their money. If they can handle this they are one step closer to tolerating a 30-mile road race in freezing temperatures. To me, this is where they are learning something useful in college.....though don't tell the professors that.

The herd is thinning since November. One team member dropped out of college and moved back home, one is considering transferring and others have just disappeared and sadly one death, Evan McNeil who died in a motorcycle accident a week ago.

We started with two dozen people who said "Yes" and now we are down to ten (Dave Cobb, Elliott O'Brien, Dan Baur, Ryan Hartman, Lucian Grove, Brian Keegan, Judah Brownstein, Ken Hewett, Riley Kidwell and Alexandra Fernandez). Still, that is a far cry from the two riders we started with four years ago.