Discussion on Team Points Cap and Non-regional Teams

[El Swift]

@AlanA 189043 wrote:

I was going to start a discussion on this, but decided not to…. I live where most people don’t ride anyway. And I’m never up early enough to do a coffee ride (I also don’t drink coffee). In the past, I’ve tried to participate in at least one of the group rides, but this year didn’t work out since I was on the road a lot.

I also realize that this game is meant to have fun, and maybe do some things you normally wouldn’t do. Like stop at 10 coffee places in one day and get wired! Or do a ride at 3:00 am! I also enjoy seeing what crazy weather people will ride in. That always amuses me. I’ve also met some nice people, so that’s also a plus.

I guess the bottom line is that I don’t really care. I’m certainly not going be able to retire off my winnings from Freezing Saddles! I would most likely play along no matter what the rules are. It keeps me amused during winter.

I was following until the part that mentions you don’t drink coffee and you lost me.

[LhasaCM]

For fun, I created 4 different random team assignments based on this year’s scoring (so with the weekly mileage cap and 10 riders per team).

In one of those 4 simulations, the final team score between first and second place was 5 points. Exciting! But 3rd place was 900 points back, so it was only slightly more interesting than where we ended up. The other 3 simulations were the same or even less competitive at the top than what we ended up with here.

Now – what if we went with larger random teams? Not surprisingly, things get a little bit more interesting, and more often the race for the win is relatively close. The overall standings get a bit tighter as well, but it still usually becomes a 2-team race.

The benefit to the random approach is that expectations are set up front that there’ll be no rhyme or reason to how things end up – not that it would actually be expected to change things

[awitt]

My $0.02.

I think Steve O and Chuxtr are right that there isn’t a way to create teams in December and have close results at the end. Here are some alternatives.

1. Do away with having an overall team winner and go with categories: most days, most miles, most trips, most group rides (with different minimum numbers of team members), etc.

2. Do a two-stage season. In the first half the teams are location based to promote team activities and establish everyone’s riding habits. In the second half the teams are recreated based on the data from the first half.

[Bob James]

For me, I was saddened we lost the weather related stats mid-FEB. I was more focused on maximizing freeze points than miles. Going out when it was the coldest, not the warmest part of day. Freeze points seems to best capture the spirit of winter riding, and does not require huge miles, just daily riding in coldest weather.

The 100 mile team cap did not influence my personal riding behavior, but when my team was in 15th and below all year and I couldn’t even try to move my team up a position it was discouraging. Competition does not have to be for 1st place, but can be between 15th and 16th place teams, etc.

As to retired riders, in the winter I think daily commuters might have a little advantage . They don’t need motivation/incentive to go out in the cold, as they need to get to work. That said, retired and nontraditional workers have more flexibility when they ride, e,g, wait for warmest, non-rainiest part of day. Freeze points would help take away that flexibility advantage.

So I favor random team selections, no team point caps and freeze points versus mileage points (for teams). Of course, only if possible to capture weather data again. Temperature is most consistent attribute, unlike snow, rain, etc. And for snow, riders who can spend more on “snow enabled ” bikes would have too much advantage.

While I didn’t have any team competition to capture my attention this year, I have to give a shout out to Dave (FFG) and Joan B. I truly enjoyed following their challenging each other through any and all weather conditions. I say challenge, not competition, as I don’t think they were trying to beat each other, just encouraged to match each others mileage, as evidenced by finishing at a coordinated tie.

[jrenaut]

@Bob James 189176 wrote:

For me, I was saddened we lost the weather related stats mid-FEB.

The BAFS web team was pretty disappointed about this, too. It’s a fair bit of work to replace the weather API we lost, and no one had the time to do it. It’s definitely high on the list for next year, as it definitely adds to the competition, whether or not official points depend on it.

[chuxtr]

We could create an algorithm so that points are a function of:

– Miles
– Temperature
– Elevation

[Steve O]

@chuxtr 189215 wrote:

We could create an algorithm so that points are a function of:

– Miles
– Temperature
– Elevation

I’ve sometimes thought that time instead of miles is more in the spirit of FS. An hour outside in the cold rain is just as hard and miserable for a slow rider as a fast one. Maybe worse, since they don’t generate as much internal heat.

[Steve O]

@jrenaut 189177 wrote:

The BAFS web team was pretty disappointed about this, too. It’s a fair bit of work to replace the weather API we lost, and no one had the time to do it. It’s definitely high on the list for next year, as it definitely adds to the competition, whether or not official points depend on it.

I still believe that how many people are riding their bikes on a particular day is a better proxy for weather than most actual weather metrics (it’s very hard to capture the gnarliness of precipitation/wind and pinpoint it to when people are riding).
Formerly, using ourselves as the baseline worked, but now that such a large percentage of FS participants sleaze even on the lousy days, it’s lost its effectiveness as our baseline. It might be possible to switch from Median Riders per Day to Median Miles per Day and see if that is a better proxy. People tend to take longer rides on nicer days.

I think capturing the number of riders per day at the Bikeometer in Rosslyn (or other counters) and using that as a proxy for riding conditions would work really well. It would require some messing with, because there’s a clear weekday/weekend difference at that counter that would need to be taken into account.

There’s a certain philosophical appeal, though, to using ourselves as the baseline to measure ourselves against. I.e., if you are riding when other FS participants are not, that’s worth more.

[historygeek]

I really, really missed having a regional team. BAFS is how I met most of the people I ride with regularly, and living in PG county I’m unlikely to ever ride regularly with a lot of Virginians. I met a few new people, but I don’t think I met anyone who I’ll now ride with regularly. Our team did manage to meet up, but didn’t ever go for a real group ride. It took a 20-mile ride just to meet! I liked the mileage cap, mostly because it took the pressure off to ride a lot on the weekends (I’m a commuter, and 4 days a week gets me 100 miles, so for me it meant I was more likely to ride *all the way to work* on bad-weather days, more likely to take the long way in on weeks when I had a day off, and forced me to find new routes when my trails were icy). Since balancing the teams doesn’t seem to work, perhaps our efforts are best spent trying to put together regional teams (maybe slicing the area like a pie so that teams with DC folks also contain suburban riders). I think, however, we just need three really large teams: cat lovers, dog lovers, and people who don’t like pets. Then we’d have some real trash-talk.

[jrenaut]

@Steve O 189216 wrote:

I’ve sometimes thought that time instead of miles is more in the spirit of FS. An hour outside in the cold rain is just as hard and miserable for a slow rider as a fast one. Maybe worse, since they don’t generate as much internal heat.

Agree in principle, but this may be technically difficult based on how people save their rides. I know some people ride to work, turn off the gps, then turn it on to ride home. Does this give them 8 hours in the saddle? I’m not sure, but it might throw things off enough that we can’t use this for scoring.

But even if we don’t use it for scoring, I really liked seeing the weather for when I rode. The plan is definitely to have a replacement for next year, regardless of how it’s used.

[Hancockbs]

@jrenaut 189229 wrote:

I know some people ride to work, turn off the gps, then turn it on to ride home. Does this give them 8 hours in the saddle?

I’m fairly certain all devices differentiate between active riding (moving) and stopped time. I know Strava shows it that way.

[jrenaut]

@Hancockbs 189230 wrote:

I’m fairly certain all devices differentiate between active riding (moving) and stopped time. I know Strava shows it that way.

Devices do but not sure it’s reported consistently through the API. I haven’t researched this, though

Sent from my XT1650 using Tapatalk

[Steve O]

@jrenaut 189229 wrote:

Agree in principle, but this may be technically difficult based on how people save their rides. I know some people ride to work, turn off the gps, then turn it on to ride home. Does this give them 8 hours in the saddle? I’m not sure, but it might throw things off enough that we can’t use this for scoring.

But even if we don’t use it for scoring, I really liked seeing the weather for when I rode. The plan is definitely to have a replacement for next year, regardless of how it’s used.

If we use riding time rather than elapsed time, it doesn’t capture that time you are standing in the rain at the red light, but it generally gives slower and urban riders more time than faster, suburban riders over the same distance.
I’m almost positive it’s not the device that does this, but Strava.

[jrenaut]

I guess my broader point is that bringing weather into the official scoring is going to be a lot more technically difficult than the current system. We small group of volunteers struggle to maintain the site as is. We’d run a very real risk of the scoring system going down for days at a time.

[AlanA]

@jrenaut 189235 wrote:

I guess my broader point is that bringing weather into the official scoring is going to be a lot more technically difficult than the current system. We small group of volunteers struggle to maintain the site as is. We’d run a very real risk of the scoring system going down for days at a time.

I’m sure the technology is there. Maybe every rider could get one of those personal weather reporting stations mounted on each bike that they ride. And then we could just upload that to a database. It seems like an easy fix to me! :rolleyes:

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