Freezing Saddles 2014 Discussion Draft

@rcannon100 67817 wrote:

* This was really a community event of the forum. What made it fun was the banter in the cold of winter as we slogged our way through that 3 feet of snow last year. Recommendation: focus FS on the forum. Dont market it outside the forum. Assume participants are member participants.
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* Late sign ups did not really work. The end result was the creation of an 11th team that never really got off the ground. We can just assign late sign ups to an N+1 team if we want – but I have no expectation that that team will be able to compete.

As a freezing saddles participant last year who wasn’t on the forum at the time, sorry for being hard to get a hold of. That said, it was my introduction to the forum. So do you really want to discourage that?

I was also a late sign-up (I know, I really messed things up last year), and from my perspective it worked just fine. So my team wasn’t competitive, I did my commute in the cold and was actually ranked fairly high in the middle of January (before audit busy season got into full swing).

Recommendation for this year – As a daily commuter with a 10 mile commute I thought that 10 pts just for riding on a day was too high relative to the 1 pt per mile. I suggest bringing it down to 1-5 pts just for turning on your Strava app.

@GregBain 67820 wrote:

Recommendation for this year – As a daily commuter with a 10 mile commute I thought that 10 pts just for riding on a day was too high relative to the 1 pt per mile. I suggest bringing it down to 1-5 pts just for turning on your Strava app.

As someone who may have abused this last year, I completely agree that the points for ride verse miles needs to be better aligned.

As someone who rode every day of last year’s event, but did not do a single “sleeze” ride, I have no problem with the 10 points per day, after all, that’s half the points per day of the NBC. I like having an incentive to reward people just for getting out each day they can, not just the miles for us long haul truckers. We might set the minimum bar a little higher, maybe two miles instead of one which would mean more than just riding around the block a couple of times.

I wouldn’t change a whole lot. From a competitor’s standpoint, I thought last year worked almost perfectly.

@hozn 67828 wrote:

Larger teams might ease the pressure a little…

And make those of us with mandated international work travel in the Jan – March time frame feel a little less bad. That said, it is doubtful I would have ridden on three continents last winter without Freezing Saddles. Maybe pressure isn’t such a bad thing.

I second that the competition worked fabulously last year. I LOVED it and somehow haven’t managed to cut back my mileage since!

@ronwalf 67824 wrote:

The National Bike Challenge actually went the other way (20 pt rides)! The free ten points encouraged me to get out on the bike even when it was bitter cold. We could incentivize the same behavior via some other mechanism (i.e., weight miles inversely proportional to the temperature), but that’s more complicated to set up/program.

How about more points per more miles? 1-5 miles is 10 points for riding plus 1 point per miles, 6-10 gets 2 points per mile, 11-15 gets 3 points per mile, etc? I’m not suggesting these are the right numbers, just a concept.

Fair point; we already have a system of tracking miles, so making points match miles doesn’t make much sense. Since people will ride for points when they wouldn’t ride just for the miles then I’m fine with a points system that doesn’t closely match miles.

To the extent that this is a social thing on forum, how about points for photos? – you and your bike covered in snow, frozen water bottles, monuments in the snow, etc. These would be added at the end, rather than incorporated into the automated system (I assume it’s automated).