First, here's three race reports:
Kinder Cross, 10.30.11, Cat 3/4:
First race back after the birth of Hudson. About 2 weeks off the bike and the entire week going into that race I rode indoors on the trainer. The first time I rode outside was from the parking spot to the reg table to get my number. Got a good start despite being on the 6th or 7th row and went into the first bottle neck in the top 15 or so. Fought my way up to about 5th and then starting making mistakes from not having actually ridden my bike in a while. I ended up dabbing a lot more than usual which forced me to chase harder than needed which caused more dabbing. I finished 9th out of 40 something starters. Not bad for the first race back.
VCU CX, 11.05.11, Cat 3:
This was a smaller race with only about 20 guys on the start line. The course was awesome and had a bunch of really cool features. It was also short so we rode 10 or so laps for the 45 minutes instead of just 4-5. Moved into the top 5 by the end of the first lap then into 3rd by the end of the 3rd or 4th. I got caught by a guy somewhere around the 5th or 6th lap and I tried to recovery a bit while keeping him in striking distance. He was cornering better than me but I was riding faster through the pedaling sections so I figured I just needed to come to the pavement with him and I'd beat him. That's what happened and I out sprinted him for 3rd.
Ed Sander CX, 11.06.11, Cat 3/4:
At the MABRA races the staging takes place based on the order in which you register. The only good thing about this policy is that at least it's transparent and everybody knows it. The bad thing about this policy is that it's dumb but I'll get to that in my rant in a second.
I started 89th, third from last row. I couldn't even see the helmets of the guys in the first 5 rows. I liked half of this course but the section through the Lily Ponds I didn't really find very useful. It wasn't hard as it was just a series of 90 degree corners through the ponds, but it was almost impossible to ride fast because it was turn, pedal twice, turn, pedal twice, turn. I think you get the idea. The other half of the course actually required some fitness, some bike handling skills and concentration. That part of the course was much better.
I ended up in a group of guys and had almost nothing left on the last lap. I was hoping I could hold them off but I gave up a few spots late. I finished 26th on the day, which, in retrospect isn't terrible considering I started 89th. On the results sheets they had a column marked kills, which, in theory is the number of guys you beat based on where you started. I had the 2nd most on the day. The guy with the most started on my row and ended up on the podium. I have no idea how he got through traffic to get all the way up there. Hats off to that guy! http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
And, my rant.
Staging is supposed to act as a means of pre-ranking the riders based on their achieved results that year. At UCI races you are staged based on your UCI points and so the person with the most points it's 1st and it goes from there. At these local races each race assigns series points. And I think that's a good system and those people should get call ups and priority staging. But, after that, staging should be done based on a scoring system that ranks every single rider in the field against one another. But, you may ask yourself, how would the race promoter know how to rank people in that fashion? Easy, crossresults.com already does this work for every single race promoter who uses bikereg, which, all of ours do. All you have to do is copy/paste the url for the confirmed riders into to the race predictor tool and it automatically spits out a list of registered riders based on their crossresults score. In theory, and obviously this wouldn't be absolutely perfect, but you'd get a much more accurate staging line up based on riders previous results. This wouldn't even be any extra work for the race promoter because you're already using an excel sheet to assign race numbers, all you'd have to do is copy/paste the race prediction into an excel sheet and carry on like you previously did. This, would make for a much more accurate race and would still encourage online registration, because you could revert to the old system for anybody registering day of by making those people start in the back, first come, first served.
Obviously this rant is based on the fact that in races where I don't start 3rd row from the back I have all top 10 results and 2 podiums. When I have to fight through rows and rows of people I'm faster than I'm just out of the top 25. Again, I'm not suggesting extra work for race promoters to do a better job with staging at these larger races, but this solution would fix the problem and create a much more accurate race. I just don't like that people get rewarded for sitting at their computer and trolling for registration to open instead of out training. You shouldn't be penalized for pre-registering even if it's 1 minute before online registration closes.
