2nd ITT at Bangalore Amateur Racing: What colour is your pain?

Help us be punctual:

There were a few riders who turned up late, nearly 30mins after everyone else left. We let them start because we didn’t want to disappoint them. But that only resulted in the volunteers having to wait much after everyone has left.

We want to keep the races sustainable and that depends very much on volunteer time (I’m sure all of us have families who demand their share of weekend time). So we might keep a cut-off time like 7:30am to start and 8:30am to finish or something like that.

Since we start the registration process (which is essentially bib distribution) at 6:30 am and kick-off the first rider at 7:00am, with 30sec gaps we can get 60 riders going by 7:30am and still possibly get the results out by 8:30am so that everyone can go home and enjoy the rest of the Sunday with family or go for a longer ride.

Harsha Nagaraj, who completed Ironman Zurich last week, was at the race and did a fast recovery ride and shared his IM experience after the race! (Photo: Veloscope)

Comment on Handicap System:

As you know we are experimenting with a handicap system for this series at BAR. You can check this post for how we are implementing it. Like any system it won’t be perfect. There will be who will be sandbagging in a race. But for now we leave it to the rider to decide if he is cheating the system or cheating himself.

There are however riders who understand this and came to us asking us not to consider them for handicap system for the next race as they would get an unfair advantage in the next race having spent extra time on the road having missed the U-turn or some other reason.

We will be excluding them from the handicap system for the next race. That includes yours truly, as I wasn’t well and ended up not racing. So I know that any improvement from time from this race in the next won’t be indicating any actual performance improvements but will only show the fact that I raced.

With performance data that we are collecting in this series, we hopefully can come up with categories based on performance. Another easy to implement option is to have age categories. We’ll keep on listening, learning and refining what we do at BAR. So please keep the ideas coming.

What next?

Next weekend we get together at the same venue for a Team Time Trial. Minimum two riders and maximum three riders per team are allowed and the time of the second rider will be taken as the team time. So find a partner and form a team if you don’t already have one. Show up, race and have fun!

Event details here: Prologue TTT

Start: Emerald Isle Resort | U-Turn: Right after Confindent Amoon Resort | Finish: Opp Emerald Isle Resort

Distance: ~33km | Registration start: 6:30 am | Race Start: 7:00 am

We make it a point to start on time. Please help us to stay punctual.