BAFS 2019 General Info Sticky

[Henry]

Update 11/21/18:

****PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS THREAD. **** This is a post to provide a single spot for information regarding Bike Arlington Freezing Saddles (BAFS). I will update this post as needed to keep information current. If you have a question, or think that something needs to be added or changed in this post, PM me please.

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What is Freezing Saddles, (or BAFS “Bike Arlington Freezing Saddles”)?

Freezing Saddles is a winter riding competition for bike riders in the general DC area, organized by random people who talk to each other on the Washington Area/ Bike Arlington Bike Forum. While we organize ourselves on the BikeArlington forum, and Bike Arlington has generously donated some sort of prizes in the past, we are not run by BikeArlington. As described by a forum member, BAFS organization

Originally Posted by Steve O:

probably most closely resembles organizing a game of freeze tag on the grade-school playground.

How it works, keeping in mind things can and do change year-to-year during the planning stage:

Freezing Saddles runs from January 1 through the last full day of winter (1 second before midnight, March 19). We divide people into teams of 10 or so people, striving for competitive parity. Each team is a mix of riders who typically ride enough to qualify as insane, people who ride regularly but like sane people, people who ride occasionally, and people who have never ridden through a winter before. An attempt is made to keep the mix roughly comparable for all the teams so they are approximately evenly matched and everyone has a fair shot at being on a winning team. This is usually botched, but we ask people to fill out a registration form to the best of their ability before each year’s game to create a list of players and your expected or typical mileage. A volunteer for the year then divvies everyone up into teams using combinations of predicted miles, random selection, and sometimes preferences for regional team groupings.

Usually sometime around Halloween, planning threads pop up on the forum (in the Freezing Saddles subforum; if you’re reading this, you’re already here), where we argue about things like e-bikes, and whether 10 points per day is the right number and other rules minutia. Past rules are subject to change in the yearly planning process. Sometime around Thanksgiving someone usually puts up the registration information. Registration typically closes on Christmas Eve, and/or when we have reached the participation limit. In recent years, we capped the number of players at 250 to try to keep the game and the data collection manageable.

We use Strava for data collection and team organization, which means that to play, you will need a Strava account and after teams are created, you will need to join your team’s Strava group. You will also need some sort of GPS device or smartphone to track your rides. We no longer count manually entered rides (not because we don’t trust you, they just tended to cause too much data corrective work for the leaderboard techie gurus).

We use a leaderboard application http://freezingsaddles.com/ developed and maintained by awesome forum member hozn (but being taken on by obscurerichard this year) to report on team and individual points and all kinds of other cool riding metrics with team/individual standings. Plus pictures. Players need to authorize this app to read your Strava data, or Strava rightly will not give us access to it.

People also offer up “Pointless Prizes”, prizes for whatever kind of random things strikes the fancy of the person offering the prize. These are generally announced on postings in the Freezing Saddles subforum of the BikeArlington Forum.

We generally have a happy hour near the start of the game to formally announce teams and after the end of the game to hand out prizes. These are fun, but attendance is not mandatory.

And if you want to promote any of this nonsense on the Twitters or other social mediums, use the hashbrown #BAFS2019.

Some links to get you started:

Registration form, and description of the steps to register here.
Whom to contact for various functions: http://bikearlingtonforum.com/showthread.php?13903-2019-Freezing-Saddles-Volunteers

2019 Rules:

1) Scoring: Some slight changes were made to try to tighten up the Team Competition. These, of course, are again subject to change in future years!!!

• 10 points for each day of 1 mile+ (same as before)
• 1 point per mile (same as before)
• Team contribution per individual capped at 100 miles per week. A week is Monday-Sunday. Partial weeks at beginning and end also have 100 miles cap on team contribution.
• Individual rankings remain the same with no cap on the individual mileage on scoreboard.
So the max someone can contribute to their team is 170 points per week. If they miss a day but still ride 100 miles, they get 160 points.

2) Game runs 00:00:01 January 1 through 23:59:59 March 19 (the last day of winter). All rides starting from January 1 on count, even though teams will not be assigned until the first happy hour (typically, a week or two after that). If you are planning to get a super-early start and be out riding your bike as the year changes, be aware that rides starting *before* midnight will not be counted by the leaderboard. You need to stop your recording device and restart a new ride after midnight for your miles on January 1 to count. Similarly, you will need to end your last ride by 23:59:59 March 19 for it to count.

3) Trainer rides don’t count. Mark your rides as such or include #NOBAFS in the title to exclude them. Take your bike outside and ride it some distance across the surface of the earth in order to earn points. Manual entries will also not be accepted. This is a change from previous years.

4) Rides made while travelling out of the area do count. On vacation somewhere warm? Lucky you! Find a bike and ride it for some points. Somewhere extra cold? So, so sorry. Find a bike and ride it for some points!

5) Rides made on E-assist (but not solely electric/motor powered) bikes do count, except that rides on an Elf do not. See here: Inane E-bike Debate.

6) Anyone can award a Pointless Prize for anything. Go check out the thread for what people are offering, and feel free to join in and award something yourself. These are typically small fun or cute or symbolic things, not high dollar prizes or anything. But whatever you want! No one will probably argue about you throwing money or new bikes at them if you so desire.)

Topic

[ShawnoftheDread]

@rcannon100 wrote:

As for the decision at issue, I will say – I think Subby is right.

Good god, man, don’t encourage him.

[hozn]

@ShawnoftheDread 183570 wrote:

Ah, by “encourages daily riding” you meant “encourages lots of sleaze rides.”

Sure, yes,daily sleaze rides. Emphasis shifts to riding every day as opposed to riding for any duration or distance. I assume the number was chosen due to being a median distance for the competitors, but I have no idea.

But are any of us discussing this even playing this game? . I’m certainly not, and would be surprised if Subby were to come back to this again.

[ShawnoftheDread]

@hozn 183573 wrote:

Sure, yes,daily sleaze rides. Emphasis shifts to riding every day as opposed to riding for any duration or distance. I assume the number was chosen due to being a median distance for the competitors, but I have no idea.

But are any of us discussing this even playing this game? . I’m certainly not, and would be surprised if Subby were to come back to this again.

I was planning on returning to it, which is why I saw this thread.

[AlanA]

@ShawnoftheDread 183570 wrote:

Ah, by “encourages daily riding” you meant “encourages lots of sleaze rides.”

Although I am fairly new to this dumb challenge (which I must admit, is very addictive), I seem to recall that the whole point of this challenge when it started was to promote daily commuters. Based upon this, it certainly seems to have gotten back to it’s original roots. Sadly, I don’t work, so this really doesn’t work for me. And you will certainly never find me awake before 7:00 am (unless I’m catching a flight to somewhere much warmer). And as per one other comment on this thread mentioned, there will be no benefit to doing a long team ride over the weekend.

But I still signed up because it’s fun to be participating in something and meeting other fellow cyclists. I’m pretty sure that past winners and winning teams have not been able to retire based upon their winnings from this challenge.

And one final note, I think the 1 mile sleaze ride is quite bogus. I’ve certainly done it in the past, but what does it really accomplish? A person riding one mile around their neighborhood in awful weather (or while they are sick) is not promoting anything of value.

[AliasXIII]

I’m really interested in and optimistic about the new system!

I was new to this last year, and am playing again this year. I don’t have the numbers, so I may be talking out of my butt — but, my impression as a newbie last year was that the team stuff felt like a race among the top three or maybe four members of each team, and what the bottom six or seven did didn’t seem to matter one way or the other. If your number #1 rider was worse than their #1 rider, that seemed to be more or less it. Again — maybe I’m wrong, but that’s what it felt like.

With the new system, I suspect that the top three riders on each team will max out every week — so the efforts of the 4th, 5th, and 6th riders on each team will matter a lot more, and the 7th through 10th will potentially make more of a difference. I think that having more people have more of a meaningful role in the team competition is a good thing.

[musclys]

I think the mile-cap rule is terrible — though it might be better for my mental-health this winter. But if this is about leveling the playing field and encouraging broader participation, why don’t we just do away with miles entirely. Or maybe count any outdoor activity miles. Can we start an e-scooter thread?

[secstate]

I think the mile-cap rule is a modest nod toward a long debate about how much team scores should benefit from having a few high-mileage riders. There’s no right or wrong answer here, and given the diverse (and it seems sometimes unhinged) psychologies that people bring to the competition, no scoring system will satisfy every need. It will be interesting to hear from teams and in particular members who are consistently below the cap about whether it motivated them to ride more, organize more team events, and so on.

It’s a worthwhile experiment. Kudos to this year’s active volunteers for making the change.

[Subby]

ok fine everyone starts each week with 50 miles as a way to mitigate the effect of people who sign up and never ride

[jrenaut]

This wasn’t a Bike Arlington decision – don’t kill the messenger. This was a decision based on the fact that we haven’t had competitive teams in years. One team has run away with it early ever since like year 2. And I would love to boot people who don’t keep up a decent weekly average, but that idea has never gained any real traction.

As a volunteer-run game, the people who consistently volunteer for the hard jobs get to make the rules. If the cap sucks this year, we can change it next year.

[dbehrend]

@jrenaut 183584 wrote:

If the cap sucks this year, we can change it next year.

It seems worth a try. Initially, I was a little disappointed. However, I think it may balance out the team competition a little and stills provides some incentive for big miles through the individual competition.

Honestly though, I’m curious how the cap will affect my motivation this year. I definitely rode more miles last year to support my team. I’ll hit the weekly cap with my commute.

[rcannon100]

@jrenaut 183584 wrote:

As a volunteer-run game, the people who consistently volunteer for the hard jobs get to make the rules.

Not true. Not the way Freezing Saddles was originally administered.

[TwoWheelsDC]

@AlanA 183575 wrote:

And one final note, I think the 1 mile sleaze ride is quite bogus. I’ve certainly done it in the past, but what does it really accomplish? A person riding one mile around their neighborhood in awful weather (or while they are sick) is not promoting anything of value.

Only if you assume no one would ride ~1 mile for anything, which is definitely not the case. The 1-mile rule incentivizes people to take a bike when they may not otherwise, like taking CaBi instead of Metro or a Lyft or whatever. While the 1-mile rule does enable the type of “sleaze” rides to which you are referring, I think you’d be surprised at the number of 1-ish mile rides in FS that are people using bikes to complete everyday tasks.

[huskerdont]

@TwoWheelsDC 183606 wrote:

Only if you assume no one would ride ~1 mile for anything, which is definitely not the case. The 1-mile rule incentivizes people to take a bike when they may not otherwise, like taking CaBi instead of Metro or a Lyft or whatever. While the 1-mile rule does enable the type of “sleaze” rides to which you are referring, I think you’d be surprised at the number of 1-ish mile rides in FS that are people using bikes to complete everyday tasks.

The ride to my liquor store and back is about 1 mile, for instance. I’ve logged quite a few of those rides.

[Henry]

@rcannon100 183509 wrote:

Damn. Give Henry a little bit of authority and he goes full Al Haig on us.

[IMG]https://consequenceofsound.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/henry-rollins-pissed-e1340822305474.jpeg?quality=80&w=336[/IMG]

Freezing Saddles corrupts, and Absolut Freezing Saddles corrupts Absolutly.

[musclys]

@TwoWheelsDC 183606 wrote:

Only if you assume no one would ride ~1 mile for anything, which is definitely not the case.

This is true. When their stations aren’t out of service — frustratingly frequent lately — I CaBi to the gym at lunch. It’s about half a mile, and a nice walk. But bike is quicker, and a there and back makes a perfect sleaze.

[Author]

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