Grown men (and women too!) riding around in circles

This post might be good. The thoughts are here, although I've got a hectic day of telecommuting ahead of me and the effort to get this all down might be lacking, but here goes. The inspiration for this post comes from a few new links, fallout from the NegaCoach blip on the traffic charts. Actually, these two linker/linkees are only indirectly related to Negacoach, their discovery owing to my traffic logs becoming interesting enough to actually look at.

Cycling Automaton belongs to a guy I've known for years, sort of. Well, I sort of knew him years ago, didn't know him for about twenty years, and now I sort of know him now. Back in the olden days, the Automaton (I have no idea what that means) raced among the juniors in my first club, the Boston Road Club, aka the Purple People Eaters. If you don't know what that means, then you haven't been around long enough to remember the distinctive old purple and yellow BRC kit. That explains the purple, the people eaters part came from this group being about 90% novice racers whose main talent was taking out half the field at races like Myles Standish and the Bay State Games.

Anyhow, back then, apart from a half dozen or so riders who'd made it to Cat 2, most BRC members were Cat 3 and Cat 4 guys in our twenties, you know, guys who somehow stumbled upon the sport and decided to give it a try. Truth be told, most of the sport was that way then, and still is now, although now many of those entering the sport are even older, in their thirties and forties. Like it or not, that is where the bulk of the USCF membership comes from. Of course, there always seems to be a vocal minority of "leaders" who insist "juniors are the future of our sport" and seek to divert a disproportionate amount of club and federation resources to junior programs. I really don't know why this is, but then and now I consider(ed) it my duty to resist this and keep the focus on making bike racing better for the people who actually do it, not the ones we'd like to do it.

What's this got to do with the Automaton? Well, he was a junior back then, recruited by an amusing but untalented teammate of ours who had volunteered (actually, insisted is more like it) to head up the BRC Junior program. I laughed at him then, but lo and behold, the Automaton didn't really give up the sport after a year or two, and he is still here now, a Master racer, one of the handful who started out as a junior. At least one of his teammates is also still racing, as read over on Gewilli's blog the mystery rider is returning to east coast soil (hopefully not literally) at Battenkill-Roubaix next month. Yet one more of this group, Robbie Dapice, even went on to win collegiate nationals one year, although I don't know if he's still racing. So could I have been wrong about this? No, not possible. Nonetheless, Cycling Automaton is a good blog, and you should go read it. The future is now.

If we really care about the future of the sport, we'll do something for the promoters. It is that simple really. Athlete-focused programs do not grow the sport. If we have more races, then we'll have a bigger base of fans and athlete recruits, and everything else will take care of itself. Do we even want to make cycling mainstream? Don't you like it that way that it is? People take this way too seriously already.

Next up we have kette rechts or chain to the right or something like that. Not sure who this is but maybe I've raced against him at Wompatuck. Looks like he made a bundle last year delaying his upgrade out of Cat 4. He's a teammate of CTodd and apparently somewhat of a disciple of the power meter religion, so this should give Gewilli another imaginary friend to talk to. Maybe Ge can get all serious about his training too, after all, we are talking about grown men and women riding bicycles around in circles at vacant office parks. What could possibly deserve a more serious approach than this? Thanks for reading.