Freezing Saddles: Winter Bike Challenge (sign up open)

[rcannon100]

Freezing Saddles: Winter Bike Challenge
Never Give an ELITE Cyclist an Even Break

Official Frozen Scoreboard

NOTE: Excluded activities: If you post an activity to Strava during the competition period which is not an outdoor bike ride, then it should have the string “#NoBAFS” in the activity name.

Freezing Saddles! The Epic Adventure of a band of ELITE Cyclists, facing the challenges of the wild wild wild bike paths. Confronting the darkest of evenings, the coldest of mornings, and the stupidest of Ninjas – these brave cyclists challenge each other because, if they didnt, they might have to actually do some work during the day.

The saga runs January 1 until the last day of Winter, March 20. It will conclude with a March Madness Playoff that someone will probably design. There will be a Happy Hour at the end with many pointless trophies.

Tribes (teams):

• Composed of ~5 riders or less
• For riders from the #bikedc, Washington DC Bike Forum general community (Washington DC greater metropolitan area)
• Volunteer Captains (captains will address any data problems, negotiate or cause confusion, and provide motivational seminars);
• This is a ten-gallon hat tournament. Riders will be randomly assigned to tribes based on self declared average weekly mileage and days cycled. Tribes will be created so that each tribes’s average weekly point score is roughly equal to everyone else’s. To achieve this, tribes may be composed of differing numbers of riders.
• No late sign ups.
• Interested cyclists must sign up by December 25 Midnight – Tribes will be announced within a couple days.

Scoring: Riders will receive 10 points for each day and 1 point for each mile ridden. Minimum ride is 1 mile. The tribe’s score will be the sum of the tribe members (indoor trainers do not count- you must be freezing in the saddle outside).

Backend: STRAVA (please sign up for an account, and join the “Bike Arlington” club on STRAVA – you should be able to enter data manually or automatically. Additional information will be posted here on the forum.)

This is a self organized group activity based on consensus. No one is in charge or running this thing. Participation is voluntary and entirely at your own risk.

Be Brave. Be Bold. Be…. questful! In the words of Hedley Lamarr:

Men, you are about to embark on a great crusade to stamp out runaway decency on the bike paths. Now you men will only be risking your lives, whilst I will be risking an almost certain Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Here are the teams with the new subs

Team one
http://app.strava.com/athletes/126281
Matthew Whatley
Shawn Dread
443749
John Fisher – 608636

Team Two
Pete DeNitto – 768183
Steve Appel
James Hoofnagle
Jason Kyzer
Mega Beth – http://app.strava.com/athletes/136523
Joe Birkenstock – 1154396

Team Three
Trish Newberg
randy napiza 313677
Mark Blacknell
essigmw
obenlandk@gmail.com – http://www.strava.com/athletes/1564295

Team Four
EKR
Kel Moore
Chris Shue
Crystal Bae
Elizabeth MacGregor

Team Five
http://app.strava.com/athletes/benbhsu
307483 (Mark Williams)
Christopher Niebylski
vvill
Kevin Ulrich – http://www.strava.com/athletes/kevin_ulrich

Team Six
Arlingtonrider
sjclaeys
ejwillis@yahoo.com
http://app.strava.com/athletes/302448
feomike@gmail.com – http://www.strava.com/athletes/feomike

Team Seven
Henning Schulzrinne
klizotte
Brad Hancock
Ron Alford
Chris Randall

Team Eight
Ken Buja (1224809)
Kevin Williams, Strava # 580756, BA “GuyContinental”
Lena Varuolo
Hans Lellelid

Team Nine
Steve O
jopamora
Justin Antos (Strava 1473093)
http://app.strava.com/athletes/488016

Team Ten
certifried
strava name Karen Smith (forum poster acl)
Cyndi Janetzko
Rod Smith

Team Eleven (Freezing Saddles Team Mongo (11) on Strava)
Greg Ba
cptjohnc
rcannon100
mdevoll
Sarah Dots
Sean Chisham

Team Twelve
Calpike
BonzaiBuckaroo
Daniel Alexander
ochsendorf@gmail.com

Topic

[Sarah Dots]

@Arlingtonrider 45564 wrote:

Wasn’t me – I can only dream of getting myself out riding out that early!

I’d have nightmares about riding that early!

[rcannon100]

I jacked the leaderboard to emphasize this point

Freezing Saddles is under the honor system. We already knew this. We did not need anyone to emphasize the point. Everyone here is a volunteer. The work product is that of volunteers. Can you manipulate the leaderboard if you want to – of course you can. This is a surprise to no one and did not need to be emphasized. And we dont need people creating extra work for the volunteers.

Freezing Saddles is a collaborative effort of a lot of people who have put many hours in, and money, and pulled off some incredible stuff. You can show your appreciation by playing nice.

Since I guess “Play Nice” needs to be an emphasized point, I will reiterate – in terms of the First Place prize, if you dont Play Nice, you will DQ your team. If I cant determine who won First Place on Wednesday at 9.30 pm, then I will determine who wins the First Place Prizes at a later time – and the award will not be given out Thursday evening – or the award may not be given out at all.

Instead of “ha ha ha, that was funny, we manipulated the results,” could you all play nice, and Thank Ron, and ACL, and Kathy, and Tim, and the captains, and all the others who have put in hours to make this happen?

[DismalScientist]

@rcannon100 46689 wrote:

Freezing Saddles is under the honor system. We already knew this. We did not need anyone to emphasize the point. Everyone here is a volunteer. The work product is that of volunteers. Can you manipulate the leaderboard if you want to – of course you can. This is a surprise to no one and did not need to be emphasized. And we dont need people creating extra work for the volunteers.

Freezing Saddles is a collaborative effort of a lot of people who have put many hours in, and money, and pulled off some incredible stuff. You can show your appreciation by playing nice.

Since I guess “Play Nice” needs to be an emphasized point, I will reiterate – in terms of the First Place prize, if you dont Play Nice, you will DQ your team. If I cant determine who won First Place on Wednesday at 9.30 pm, then I will determine who wins the First Place Prizes at a later time – and the award will not be given out Thursday evening – or the award may not be given out at all.

Instead of “ha ha ha, that was funny, we manipulated the results,” could you all play nice, and Thank Ron, and ACL, and Kathy, and Tim, and the captains, and all the others who have put in hours to make this happen?

I think you may have misinterpreted my point. My point was not that the leaderboard can be jacked. It obviously can be through dishonesty. The point is that the cache needs to be cleared before the final cycle or else you may get misleading results due to entirely innocent circumstances where someone has a bad run due to GPS failure and manually uploads a corrected run and deletes the GPS-based run. This will lead to double counting because, if the cache is not clear, the Official Scoreboard is sensitive to deleted runs.

This has innocently happened before, although I cannot find the appropriate post. Then, the appropriate solution was to wait for the cache to clear. I only did this early and in an over-the-top way to emphasize this potential vulnerability to innocent mistakes.

[Bilsko]

@DismalScientist 46712 wrote:

This has innocently happened before, although I cannot find the appropriate post. Then, the appropriate solution was to wait for the cache to clear. I only did this early and in an over-the-top way to emphasize this potential vulnerability to innocent mistakes.

Dismal has an important point – and however unsettling his demonstration was, there was certainly nothing malicious about it. I think everyone recognizes that the success of this competition has relied entirely on:
a)the tremendous effort of those who have volunteered their time, skills, and energy to all of the organizational and mechanical pieces, and
b)the goodwill and enjoyment of everyone who’s been riding over the past 2.5 months – I’d be willing to bet my bike that no one competing has any intention of ruining the fun for the rest of us.

As for Dismal’s recollection about a previous case, it did happen to me a few weeks ago. I PM’d ronwalf directly about it:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bilsko
So, now, my total mileage (after a few other rides) is 200.9 (Wednesday night at 9:30PM), but it appears that the data on your site still tallies the manually entered ride that I deleted (it shows me at 219).

Ronwalf’s reply:

Quote:

Hi Bilsko,
Every night at 4:20am, the scoreboard flushes its cache and does the scoring from scratch, so it should reset itself by morning.

rcannon – you may have already sorted it with ronwalf–and if so, disregard the rest–, but his point about the time for the cache dump (4:20AM) is an indication that it may be worth waiting until Thursday morning to check the mileage numbers.

[DismalScientist]

Here’s my PM with ronwalf on 1/1/13:

ronwalf wrote:

DismalScientist wrote:

I’m having problems with the GPS in my phone and it is giving me unearned mileage. I have manually upload rides with the correct mileage and deleted the phone-generated rides with the incorrect mileage. However, it appears that the scoreboard count both the manually-uploaded and deleted rides. This probably needs to be fixed.

Hi Dismal,
As you noticed, the scoreboard program caches the rides it downloads every time it runs. Once a night (4:20am, to be exact), it dumps the cache and starts over again.
It would have fixed itself automatically tonight, but I went ahead and fixed it now.

I might have a better fix for this, but it isn’t high on my priorities.

A similar exchange was also made by a different forum member (I believe Rod Smith) in some of the earlier 70 pages of this thread.

[jopamora]

[ronwalf]

@DismalScientist 46712 wrote:

This will lead to double counting because, if the cache is not clear, the Official Scoreboard is sensitive to deleted runs.

I’ve already coded this in. The cache will be cleared at 9:30pm on March 20th, and the final results will be displayed (the title and intro text will reflect that). Be patient with your trigger finger, though. I think it takes 3-4 minutes or so to do a complete run.

[Tim Kelley]

So are people going to be riding with their mobile apps going and then do a last minute upload at 9:29?

[consularrider]

What mobile apps?

[ShawnoftheDread]

@Tim Kelley 46734 wrote:

So are crazy people going to be riding with their mobile apps going and then do a last minute upload at 9:29?

FTFY. And yes.

[KelOnWheels]

shawnofthedread;46737 wrote:

so are crazy people not going to be riding with their mobile apps going and then do a last minute upload at 9:29?

ftfy.

[DismalScientist]

@ronwalf 46733 wrote:

I’ve already coded this in. The cache will be cleared at 9:30pm on March 20th, and the final results will be displayed (the title and intro text will reflect that). Be patient with your trigger finger, though. I think it takes 3-4 minutes or so to do a complete run.

Thanks for all your hard work! I know we (me) are a thankless bunch at times.

[Tim Kelley]

@consularrider 46736 wrote:

What mobile apps?

http://www.strava.com/mobile

[consularrider]

@Tim Kelley 46741 wrote:

http://www.strava.com/mobile

Too bad it doesn’t work with my prehistoric cell phone or the Garmin Edge 500. Guess that means I have to stop riding and get home by 9 pm on Wednesday in order to get everything logged in. :p

[Justin Antos]

HUGE THANKS to Ron, ACL, Kathy, Tim, the captains, and all the others who have put in hours and hours to make this happen – including Bob!!!

[Author]

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