Freezing Saddles 2018

[dkel]

@dcv 168708 wrote:

I enjoy making fun of people a lot, but doing it anonymously hiding behind an online pseudonym is creepy af.

I agree with “dcv.”

[Boomer Cycles]

[deleted]

[Judd]

@Judd 168697 wrote:

Although I did once spell out “Shue Sucks” on a bike ride, this isn’t me.

https://www.strava.com/activities/700377633

I’ve been secretly practicing to a better version of this.

[Subby]

@subby_sux 168673 wrote:

Truth on the internet.

I have had a few days to think about this and I have come to the following conclusion:

Yes, I suck.

[rcannon100]

@Subby 168782 wrote:

I have had a few days to think about this and I have come to the following conclusion:

Yes, I suck.

Now Subby. Dont get down on yourself. It’s okay. Know that we all love you anyway. Here, everyone is a winner. Here….. here is an award just for you….

[jrenaut]

Someone at the kids’ school is ready for BAFS 2018!

IMG_20171128_154041961 by Jon, on Flickr

[cvcalhoun]

@jrenaut 168827 wrote:

Someone at the kids’ school is ready for BAFS 2018!

I’ve already got the Bar Mitts on the handlebars, two headlights and three tail lights for the winter dark, and an electrically heated jacket stuffed in the panniers. I think I win on the “ready for BAFS 2018” front.

[Steve O]

@Steve O 167837 wrote:

I propose the following scoring system based on the key goals of 1) encouraging people to ride their bikes even when the weather is bad and 2) building our community of bicycling friends.

– Days and Miles per MASS (Median Adjusted Scoring System*)
– 50 bonus points for each different FS rider you ride with (according to Strava)

This system combines the goals of FS and should be automatable (Strava reports who I ride with, so I assume the data is available).

Having heard support for augmenting our scoring to include a social factor, and there being much interest in adjusting scoring to account for gnarly weather, I formally propose changing the 2018 FS scoring system as proposed above. (see posts #119 and #120 in this thread for more info.)
@Judd 157755 wrote:

I think we should use Steve O’s Crazy Idea for the individual rankings this year.

@LhasaCM 157756 wrote:

I agree wholeheartedly!

MASS has already been developed: JonRenaut automated it last year (thanks!). MASS has little effect on everyday riders but it did scramble the leaderboard a bit in the top 20. It had a much larger effect in the middle of the leaderboard, though. I did not do the analysis on how it would have affected team standings (I still have the data, so I could do this I suppose).

One con is that rides taken outside the DC area will adjust based on weather here, not there. This is particularly key for the FS diaspora (boomer, consular, etc.).
A couple of solutions:

• Don’t sweat it (perfect being the enemy of good). Those rides represent a couple of percent of all the rides and won’t have any material effect. That said, out-of-area riders should be ineligible for prizes that are based on points (or coffee, if their name starts with B and rhymes with schloomer)
• Some sort of hashtag that scores out-of-town rides per the old system. I have no idea how hard this would be technically. If hard, then I defer back to the above bullet point.

[chuxtr]

Good article about appropriate winter riding fashion:

https://rouleur.cc/editorial/hard-fast-brian-holm-winter-fashion/

Of note ..

“You shouldn’t really be cold if you’re going fast enough.”

As Holm inimitably puts it, “tights are for ballet dancers”. Leg warmers, he concedes, are acceptable attire, but only as long as “you take [them] off after half an hour.”

Of course, even Holm concedes there comes a point when it’s so cold that the rules go out the window, you can wear whatever you like and “it doesn’t matter how you look as long as you’re warm.” What point is that, I inquire naively? “About minus fifteen degrees.”

[cvcalhoun]

@chuxtr 168845 wrote:

Good article about appropriate winter riding fashion:

https://rouleur.cc/editorial/hard-fast-brian-holm-winter-fashion/

Of note ..

“You shouldn’t really be cold if you’re going fast enough.”

As Holm inimitably puts it, “tights are for ballet dancers”. Leg warmers, he concedes, are acceptable attire, but only as long as “you take [them] off after half an hour.”

Of course, even Holm concedes there comes a point when it’s so cold that the rules go out the window, you can wear whatever you like and “it doesn’t matter how you look as long as you’re warm.” What point is that, I inquire naively? “About minus fifteen degrees.”

And I am as moved by that as I am by any other article on fashion. Which is to say, not one iota.

[LhasaCM]

@Steve O 168837 wrote:

I did not do the analysis on how it would have affected team standings (I still have the data, so I could do this I suppose).[/quote]

I still have that data saved in Excel from the earlier straw man exercises. There’s a slight shuffling in the top half (4th and 5th place swap; 10th place jumps up to 8th) but nothing too huge. And one would think the impact would be even less if this is the scoring that shows up on the main leaderboard (as opposed to being a “crazy idea” on the side).

@Steve O 168837 wrote:

One con is that rides taken outside the DC area will adjust based on weather here, not there. This is particularly key for the FS diaspora (boomer, consular, etc.).
A couple of solutions:

• Don’t sweat it (perfect being the enemy of good). Those rides represent a couple of percent of all the rides and won’t have any material effect. That said, out-of-area riders should be ineligible for prizes that are based on points (or coffee, if their name starts with B and rhymes with schloomer)
• Some sort of hashtag that scores out-of-town rides per the old system. I have no idea how hard this would be technically. If hard, then I defer back to the above bullet point.

I vote for “don’t sweat it.” I think it’d be (relatively speaking if not in absolute terms) a lot of work to adjust/capture for the non-local cases, and ignores the more prevalent “local area” weather issues that come with being in the DC area (i.e., often being somewhere in the snow/ice/rain transition zone for winter storms) where we can have wildly different weather conditions within the metro area on a given day. Too messy to actually solve, so let’s leave well enough alone.

One note about the social part of the proposed scoring system for the more technically inclined to figure out: as mentioned earlier in this thread (post #162) – accurately capturing the “50 point bonus for every FS rider you ride with” has the non-trivial asymmetry problem to address in the data with Strava’s “you rode with ____” algorithm. Or you encourage folks to report more rides (to force symmetry in Strava), which as we’ve more recently been reminded of, overloads the weather API.

[Bob Semandinger]

Thanks for setting this all up!!

[hozn]

@LhasaCM 168855 wrote:

One note about the social part of the proposed scoring system for the more technically inclined to figure out: as mentioned earlier in this thread (post #162) – accurately capturing the “50 point bonus for every FS rider you ride with” has the non-trivial asymmetry problem to address in the data with Strava’s “you rode with ____” algorithm. Or you encourage folks to report more rides (to force symmetry in Strava), which as we’ve more recently been reminded of, overloads the weather API.

I think we have a clear path to reducing strain on the weather API, so we shouldn’t discourage folks posting more rides to maximize the symmetry.

I’ll admit that I’ve lost track of these threads , but is proposal for official scoring system to also provide bonus points for “rode-with-others”? (I think it’s a nice idea, but there is some work needed to implement that, which is why I ask.)

Also, to throw a last-minute wrench question out there, should we consider making the points system logarithmic for distance? Personally, and having only actually played once, I think the competition would be a lot more fun if it weren’t just about riding ridiculous distances. Shaking up the points scoring system would probably make it something that someone competitive like Subby (or myself) would find appealing to play again.

[Judd]

@Steve O 168837 wrote:

Having heard support for augmenting our scoring to include a social factor, and there being much interest in adjusting scoring to account for gnarly weather, I formally propose changing the 2018 FS scoring system as proposed above. (see posts #119 and #120 in this thread for more info.)

My facetiousness should not have been construed as an endorsement. I’m a fan of keeping things simple.

[LhasaCM]

@hozn 168874 wrote:

I think we have a clear path to reducing strain on the weather API, so we shouldn’t discourage folks posting more rides to maximize the symmetry.

I’ll admit that I’ve lost track of these threads , but is proposal for official scoring system to also provide bonus points for “rode-with-others”? (I think it’s a nice idea, but there is some work needed to implement that, which is why I ask.)

Also, to throw a last-minute wrench question out there, should we consider making the points system logarithmic for distance? Personally, and having only actually played once, I think the competition would be a lot more fun if it weren’t just about riding ridiculous distances. Shaking up the points scoring system would probably make it something that someone competitive like Subby (or myself) would find appealing to play again.

My understanding (Steve can correct me if I’m wrong) is that the proposal on the table is for there to be a 50 point bonus for “rode-with-others” over the course of the competition (so you only get the bonus once per person, even if you ride with someone every day).

Honestly, (and this is coming from a relative newbie here so I don’t have a ton of experience to support it), I kind of like the idea of having the participation part (x points per day plus y points per FS person you rode with) be simple to understand with the mileage component (it being logarithmic so it’s not a simple point per mile and/or the MASS adjustment) be somewhat inscrutable, so that the easy to digest motivator is just getting out there with other people.

[Author]

Posts