National Bike Challenge 2015-Washington Area All-Stars

[Steve O]

How about this? One point apart:
[IMG]http://bikearlingtonforum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=9759&stc=1[/IMG]

Temporarily, though.

[Boomer Cycles]

@Steve O 125314 wrote:

How about this? One point apart:
[IMG]http://bikearlingtonforum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=9759&stc=1[/IMG]

Temporarily, though.

My money is on the guy in green.

[Rod Smith]

@personabuena 125300 wrote:

Had a feeling Gainesville was holding out on us and waiting until today to log miles. Lo and behold… But still, a valiant effort by WAAS–we’ll get them next year!

Welcome to the forum! Don’t be a stranger! When we expanded the team beyond the forum members one of the goals was to grow this group so that’s been a plus for the most part. I found this group during the first National Bike Challenge when I was on another team. I noticed high placed riders in Maryland and in a regional category they had that year were from BikeArlington teams so I Googled it!

Given GCC’s prominence in the NBC for the past three years and close finishes each year, do you really think there were a dozen riders in Gaineville at the 10,000+ points level who hadn’t joined until today? Thats a long time to hold so many aces up your sleeves. And not a single one of them happen to be on Strava? I’m not buying it. I’m not accusing of falsification, I just don’t believe it’s true. That’s all.

Congrats team on an awesome performance!

[dbb]

Congrats to the Gainesville team on their awesome performance. Gainesville is a comparatively small community and it is pretty neat the cyclists have a single organization to serve the cyclists. Given that we were the Washington Area All Stars, we weren’t nearly as good at penetrating the community of cyclists. Hell, if we had every cyclist that rode the MVT two weeks ago (on a weekday) we would have had 1200 members.

The NBC is in the fourth year (I think) and is just starting to mature. Now is the time to look at it to see how it can be positioned for success in the future. A number of good ideas were offered in the forum. I will develop my ideas and offer them to the NBC organizers.

Congrats to Gainesville and to everybody that rode during the past five months.

[Terpfan]

@dbb 125318 wrote:

Congrats to the Gainesville team on their awesome performance. Gainesville is a comparatively small community and it is pretty neat the cyclists have a single organization to serve the cyclists. Given that we were the Washington Area All Stars, we weren’t nearly as good at penetrating the community of cyclists. Hell, if we had every cyclist that rode the MVT two weeks ago (on a weekday) we would have had 1200 members.

The NBC is in the fourth year (I think) and is just starting to mature. Now is the time to look at it to see how it can be positioned for success in the future. A number of good ideas were offered in the forum. I will develop my ideas and offer them to the NBC organizers.

Congrats to Gainesville and to everybody that rode during the past five months.

Yep, if we just had 1/10th of the area riders in us, we win each time. But at least we give them a run for the money…and without mostly flat rides .

[Rod Smith]

They won on paper. Show me a single GCC rider who has GPS documentation to back up their claims. I can’t find one. The ones who do Strava have LOTS more miles on NBC than on Strava. We are almost all 100% verifiable. Call me a sore loser but I don’t believe we lost!

[Kitty]

@Rod Smith 125365 wrote:

They won on paper. Show me a single GCC rider who has GPS documentation to back up their claims. I can’t find one. The ones who do Strava have LOTS more miles on NBC than on Strava. We are almost all 100% verifiable. Call me a sore loser but I don’t believe we lost!

I don’t believe we lost, but for other reasons. I just spent some time looking over the final numbers, and there’s some stuff we can be proud of!

Before joining the WAAS part-way through the season, the big things on the leader board I’d watch was city and state. For cities over 200,000, Arlington finished 17 and DC 15 (high enough to be on the big board). Imagine how things would be different if the Virginia half of the ol’ District hadn’t wandered off!

In terms of state, in the end we were able to get all three: DC, Maryland, and Virginia on the board–I don’t think I’ve seen that yet!

Finally, as a Community Challenge, Bike Arlington… i.e. us if our jerseys are telling the truth, finished 9th!

Its a bummer to be edged out in the end, but there were a lot of positive icons on the big board at the end of the challenge.
(Plus, I was able to help pedal Michigan State to 5th–no match for the likes of Wisconsin, but better than UofM!)

[Vicegrip]

@Rod Smith 125365 wrote:

They won on paper. Show me a single GCC rider who has GPS documentation to back up their claims. I can’t find one. The ones who do Strava have LOTS more miles on NBC than on Strava. We are almost all 100% verifiable. Call me a sore loser but I don’t believe we lost!

Has this been brought up to NBC? A big gap in Strava to NBC miles is troubling. It is more effort to not simply link and have one entry point for all your rides. In large groups of individuals the simplest methods often tend to self present. I have a hard time coming up with reasons for the miles in both not to be the functionally the same.

Cheating is poor form and can at best only produce a hollow victory. For someone to cheat on a open to all for fun contest such as this one is sad.

[TwoWheelsDC]

@Vicegrip 125376 wrote:

Has this been brought up to NBC? A big gap in Strava to NBC miles is troubling. It is more effort to not simply link and have one entry point for all your rides. In large groups of individuals the simplest methods often tend to self present. I have a hard time coming up with reasons for the miles in both not to be the functionally the same.

Cheating is poor form and can at best only produce a hollow victory. For someone to cheat on a open to all for fun contest such as this one is sad.

Depending on how big the number gaps are, this could be chalked up to the NBC site being horrible. There were a few MTB rides that I did where I used my GPS watch for live tracking (so my wife would know where to find my body…) and then used by Edge 800 for directions. On these rides, I’d end up with duplicate rides going into Strava (due to auto-uploading), and then on to the NBC site. I deleted the duplicate ride from Strava, but even re-synching wouldn’t remove the miles from NBC and I could find no way to manually delete the miles. Once I noticed this happening, I changed the way I uploaded stuff, and it maybe happened all of 3 or 4 times and gave me maybe 50 extra miles. If people were tracking with their phones and with a Garmin, this could cause the same issue, and small variances in NBC vs. Strava mileage could be explained away by this. But if the variances are big, then that certainly seems sketchy.

[TwoWheelsDC]

@Vicegrip 125376 wrote:

Has this been brought up to NBC? A big gap in Strava to NBC miles is troubling. It is more effort to not simply link and have one entry point for all your rides. In large groups of individuals the simplest methods often tend to self present. I have a hard time coming up with reasons for the miles in both not to be the functionally the same.

Cheating is poor form and can at best only produce a hollow victory. For someone to cheat on a open to all for fun contest such as this one is sad.

Depending on how big the number gaps are, this could be chalked up to the NBC site being horrible. There were a few MTB rides that I did where I used my GPS watch for live tracking (so my wife would know where to find my body…) and then used by Edge 800 for directions. On these rides, I’d end up with duplicate rides going into Strava (due to auto-uploading), and then on to the NBC site. I deleted the duplicate ride from Strava, but even re-synching wouldn’t remove the miles from NBC and I could find no way to manually delete the miles. Once I noticed this happening, I changed the way I uploaded stuff, and it maybe happened all of 3 or 4 times and gave me maybe 50 extra miles. If people were tracking with their phones and with a Garmin, this could cause the same issue, and small variances in NBC vs. Strava mileage could be explained away by this. But if the variances are big, then that certainly seems sketchy.

[Sunyata]

@Vicegrip 125376 wrote:

Has this been brought up to NBC? A big gap in Strava to NBC miles is troubling. It is more effort to not simply link and have one entry point for all your rides. In large groups of individuals the simplest methods often tend to self present. I have a hard time coming up with reasons for the miles in both not to be the functionally the same.

Cheating is poor form and can at best only produce a hollow victory. For someone to cheat on a open to all for fun contest such as this one is sad.

This could also be chalked up to someone making a majority of their rides on Strava private. NBC does not sync private rides, so you have to enter those in manually. I did this a couple of times, and one of my higher mileage rides was made private, so I manually entered the miles on NBC.

That being said, I am pretty certain that the Gainesville team cheated, since it just seems odd that SO many of their higher points members seem to have anomalies in their data.

[cvcalhoun]

@TwoWheelsDC 125380 wrote:

Depending on how big the number gaps are, this could be chalked up to the NBC site being horrible. There were a few MTB rides that I did where I used my GPS watch for live tracking (so my wife would know where to find my body…) and then used by Edge 800 for directions. On these rides, I’d end up with duplicate rides going into Strava (due to auto-uploading), and then on to the NBC site. I deleted the duplicate ride from Strava, but even re-synching wouldn’t remove the miles from NBC and I could find no way to manually delete the miles. Once I noticed this happening, I changed the way I uploaded stuff, and it maybe happened all of 3 or 4 times and gave me maybe 50 extra miles. If people were tracking with their phones and with a Garmin, this could cause the same issue, and small variances in NBC vs. Strava mileage could be explained away by this. But if the variances are big, then that certainly seems sketchy.

Actually, there is a way to correct duplicate miles. You just put in a manual entry which is a negative number, equal to the duplicate entry.

That being said, if there is a big gap between Strava miles and NBC miles, accidental duplicate miles are clearly not the issue. Accidental duplicate miles would increase both Strava and NBC totals. And the number of miles would typically not be significant.

If people cheated on this one, I honestly don’t know what to do about it. Next year, they could require syncing and disallow manual entries. But we all know you can still cheat with Strava. Just run your Garmin on long car trips and you can rack up a lot of miles.

If this happened, it strikes me as a sort of vandalism. It doesn’t really help Gainesville. There are no prizes for the team that wins–all they get is glory. The glory is hollow even for them if they know they cheated to get it. So all they would have done is to take away the fun for others, without actually benefiting themselves.

I really hope there turns out to be some other explanation besides cheating.

[Mikey]

I look at this like I look at my kid’s indoor soccer matches. The winner is rarely the one with the most points at the end, The scoreboard operator sometimes give the points to the wrong team. If life is about the journey not the destination, then our team is about the bonds we have made by being on the team together, not how many points our team had at the end. That said I know in my heart if teams were limited to say 50 people, and we named all of our teams “WAAS” the WAAS would have taken the top 6 spots.

We will get them next year, We will acquire 2 million points, and they will respond back by uploading 2.1M points at 11:59pm. I refuse to judge our success that way. Also on a brighter note we gained a few great entries for the forum dictionary

[Steve O]

Something else they need to fix for next year is the prizes. In 2014 there were all these announced at the beginning (and I think they added more) – almost 700 prizes. I understand some people even won twice!

• A Year’s Supply of Toilet Paper (x5) – courtesy of Scott Naturals
• 4-day North America Trek Travel Trip – courtesy of Trek Travel
• Jerseys, Camelbaks, Water Bottles – courtesy of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company
• Bottle Openers (x25) – courtesy of Resource Revival
• Bike Shorts (x50) – courtesy of AeroTech Designs
• Bike Lights (x200) – courtesy of Planet Bike
• Box of Luna Bars (x25) – courtesy of Luna Bar
• Bike Gloves (x50) – courtesy of Bellwether
• Safety Sunglasses (x200) – courtesy of 3M
• Ear Covers/Strap Wraps (x100) – courtesy of Cat-Ears
• One-Year Membership (x15) – courtesy of League of American Bicyclists
• National Bike Challenge Socks (x15) – courtesy of League of American Bicyclists

This year there were only 86 prizes awarded among 93,000 riders.

[Steve O]

@Terpfan 125358 wrote:

Yep, if we just had 1/10th of the area riders in us, we win each time. But at least we give them a run for the money…and without mostly flat rides .

Something else that is interesting is that they don’t seem to have anything about NBC online. Their website doesn’t mention it at all and neither does their Facebook page. Perhaps it’s all word of mouth, but I would think they would have some sort of electronic communication system. Maybe they have an email list.

[Author]

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