Freezing Saddles: Winter Bike Challenge (sign up open)

[Steve]

@ronwalf 39022 wrote:

Team 2, where are youuuuuuuu?

I have the teams for all the rest. Please join up with your team!

At some point in the next week, I’ll post a link to the scoreboard. Right now, I’m supposed to be prepping for my PhD proposal and preliminary exam…

I’m not the Team Captain, I don’t think, but I created a group. We might need to come up with a more fun name than “Team II”, Team two. Twowheels seems to have taken that name already. We’ll think of something…..

http://app.strava.com/clubs/19345

[culimerc]

@Steve 39025 wrote:

I’m not the Team Captain, I don’t think, but I created a group. We might need to come up with a more fun name than “Team II”, Team two. Twowheels seems to have taken that name already. We’ll think of something…..

http://app.strava.com/clubs/19345

Team 2; we take it to ll

[DCAKen]

Team Two: Two Tired

[culimerc]

Team 2: Squirrel!!

or simply;

“The Deuce”

[ronwalf]

Trial run: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ronwalf/2013/freezing-saddles/

That’s a mockup of the scoreboard (though that’s the url where they’ll eventually land). There’s still a bit of polishing to do.

These are faux-results, calculated as if the competition ran from November 1st through December 31st. They also don’t update automatically – I have to go press a button or two on my laptop.
Come January 2nd or 3rd, I plan to start calculating the real results, and updating the page every 15 minutes or half-hour or so.

[ronwalf]

I’m still missing Henning Schulzrinne and Brad Hancock from Team 7. Are they active on the forum?

[Mikey]

@TwoWheelsDC 39020 wrote:

Is that what kids are calling it these days? I’m just going to call Team 3 “US Postal”.

Hey, no member of team 3 has ever failed a winter-based bike challenge drug test. Not say in’ we’re not on epo for this, just admitting no failed drug test.

[Arlingtonrider]

Should there be basic ground rules with regard to a few things – e.g., one mile minimum, and no credit for milege on indoor trainers or with electric assist?

[ronwalf]

@Arlingtonrider 39045 wrote:

Should there be basic ground rules with regard to a few things – e.g., one mile minimum, and no credit for milege on indoor trainers or with electric assist?

To get the 10 point daily bonus, you need to put in at least one mile that day.

I’d be happy to filter out indoor training rides. Strava doesn’t give me a way to automatically tell the difference, though. One way to do it would be for people to voluntarily put the word “Trainer” on their indoor training rides, and I could filter those rides out of the score.

Electric assist? That’s just crazy – it’s like turning the A/C on during the winter I’d only object if they have heated seats and handlebars.

[ronwalf]

The Freezing Saddles competition is nigh. Make sure you’re ready!

First, make sure you’re signed up for Strava, and that you’ve joined both the BikeArlington club and your team club. Here’s the list of people not signed up with their team, yet:

• Team 1: Greg Ba
• Team 2: BonzaiBuckaroo
• Team 3: Daniel Alexander
• Team 4: EKR
• Team 5: cptjohnc
• Team 6: Calpike
• Team 7: Brad Hancock
• Team 8: No one!
• Team 9: Steve O
• Team 10: No one! (Congrats on being the first full team!)

You can start entering your rides now! Just logon to Strava and hit the “Upload Activity” button in the top right. Then choose how you want to enter the activity (from Garmin, manual entry, etc), and submit! When doing manual entry, the only entries that need to be correct are the “Date” and “Distance” fields.

When you’re done, take a look at the score board. Your rides won’t show up immediately – you have to wait for me to update the page. Hopefully that wait will drastically shorten once January 2nd hits. Right now the scores are for the November 1st to December 31st period. Once January 1st rolls around, the scores will reset to 0, and the competition will begin in ernest.

The score board has links to all the teams and members. Feel free to click on your competitions’ teams and leave… appropriate comments. Certifried has!

[rcannon100]

@ronwalf 39038 wrote:

I’m still missing Henning Schulzrinne and Brad Hancock from Team 7. Are they active on the forum?

Henning works in my office. I am sending him a note.

As for the others, it is winter break – I think it is important to give people time to show up.

[rcannon100]

We had consensus on the game one month ago. I would ask that we not go backwards and challenge that. It makes it difficult to go forward. It also makes it difficult to do something like this again. Either we are able to come together and decide how games like this will work – or we arent and then we cant do things like this.

My own view (as a non-captain) is that that would put too much burden on the captains.

We havent put any burden on captains. People are captains because they volunteered to be captains (the person with the highest average score on the team who volunteered won the prize). Anyone could volunteer. Being a captain (not a coach) of a team is usually a mundane role of tending towards administrative tasks (back when I played ultimate frisbee, ‘captains’ largely told people where the game was and when to show up; and organized who would buy the beer!). In this case, the captains have been setting up the “clubs” in STRAVA and will likely help solve any data kerfluffles. In the best of all words, Captains will need to do very little.

If people want to participate in this, they should at least be willing to enter their own data.

Its a game. We came up with the rules a month ago. The way the game is set up is that each team starts with essentially the same handicap. To do that, every team had to be formed at the same time. That means anyone who wants to participate can – they just had to show up on time – they had a month to do so. Of course anyone can join STRAVA and anyone can join the Bike Arlington club. But for the Freezing Saddles game to work, the handicaps had to start as essentially the same.

For people who don’t wish to join Strava, maybe the captains could enter mileage manually for them? They could create a new piece of equipment and log miles against that under the non-Strava user. Or if someone is that worried about privacy, maybe they shouldn’t be doing the challenge.

This was discussed one month ago – and certain people advocated very strongly for STRAVA. We had consensus that we would use STRAVA. I do not think it would be appropriate to ask the captains to have to do this type of thing. The role of the captain was specifically designed to be minimal – just one POC per team to ensure that the game moves smoothly and irons out any kerfluffles. The goal was also to create one place – one backend – where the game could be played out. Looks like Ron is doing an excellent job of achieving this.

Should there be basic ground rules with regard to a few things

Here is the game that we had consensus on (assuming that the rules need exegesis, that is what the captains are for):

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.

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.

[Rod Smith]

You can enter your ride manually on Strava. They do ask for a start time and duration so you will still be revealing something about your whereabouts. You can fake the start time of your ride if you want, I don’t suppose anyone would object to that. I hope correct date would be entered and of course, correct distance.

If you haven’t yet joined Strava, you might consider using a fake name too. Or you can start a new account.

[Rod Smith]

Pete Beers is listed on the individual scoreboard but not on a team. By himself he would be in fifth place.

[rcannon100]

@Rod Smith 39051 wrote:

You can enter your ride manually on Strava. They do ask for a start time and duration so you will still be revealing something about your whereabouts. You can fake the start time of your ride if you want, I don’t suppose anyone would object to that. I hope correct date would be entered and of course, correct distance.

If you haven’t yet joined Strava, you might consider using a fake name too. Or you can start a new account.

As a privacy advocate, I am a major proponent of bunkum. You can (and should) fill the account with fake information. Better yet, create a fake profile and consistently use that fake profile. If you repeat the fake information enough times, the data miners will begin to believe you. If, for example, you use a fake DOB enough times, you will find that is what the data miners think is your DOB. While I provide no guidance one whether this might violate a TOS, I do think one of the the best solution to privacy is good old BS.

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