Time to start riding!
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Today is the first day of Freezing Saddles. Time to start riding! All miles starting today will count.
Starting today, you get 10 points for each day you ride at least a mile, plus one point for each mile you ride.* That means there is a premium for riding every day, even if it is only a little bit. For example, suppose you ride one mile on each of days 1 and 2. You get a total of 11 points for each day, or 22 points total. By contrast, if you ride no miles on day 1, and 10 miles on day 2, you get only 21 points, even though you’ve ridden much farther. So riding every day, starting today, will put you ahead of the game.
chuxtr has posted a list of all the people who have been assigned to teams (other than two whose forum names are the same as their e-mail addresses, who are not included for privacy reasons) at this link. Even if you are on that list, you won’t know what team you are on until the January 10 happy hour. If you can’t attend the happy hour, the lists of who is on what team will be posted on the Washington Area Bike Forum the next day. Regardless, all miles starting today will be credited to your team as soon as you know which one you are on.
Note that you will need to determine which team you are on, and sign up for that team’s Strava club, promptly after the happy hour. Also, if you have not previously authorized Freezing Saddles to read your Strava miles, or if you authorized it only to read your public miles and have not gone back to reauthorize, you will need to do that. (Details on what you need to authorize are here.) If you have not joined your team’s Strava club and authorized Freezing Saddles to read your Strava miles within a couple of days after the team announcements, you will be dropped from the team.
If you are not on chuxtr’s list, you are on the wait list. We always have some people who notify us before happy hour that they have to drop out. And as discussed in the preceding paragraph, anyone who fails to sign up for the Strava club for their teams promptly on or after January 11 will be dropped from the team. That’s where the wait list comes in. People who are dropped from the team are replaced by people on the wait list, in the order in which they registered. In addition, the wait list is used to fill any vacancies caused by people who get injured during the competition. Regardless of when you get assigned to a team, all miles starting today will be counted if you are ever assigned to a team this year. For example, suppose that someone gets injured on February 15, and you are assigned to their team as a replacement. All your miles back to January 1 will count, even though you didn’t join the team until February 15.
What if you are never assigned to a team? You’re still eligible for all sorts of Freezing Saddles fun! There will be two happy hours you are welcome to attend: the one on January 10 which has already been announced, and one after the end of Freezing Saddles. You can compete for Pointless Prizes. People often announce team get-togethers and group rides on the forum, and you are welcome to crash those. (If teams don’t want crashers, they will announce them secretly somewhere other than the forum, so if you see one on the forum, you are welcome to crash it.) Steve O maintains a calendar of events, and you’re welcome at those. He also runs the Freezing Saddles Last Night Hains Point Party 2019 (FSLNHPP) on March 19 (the last day of Freezing Saddles), in which people gather to bike laps around Hains Point and mark the end of the competition at midnight.
If you don’t make it onto a team this year, you may want to start earlier next year. (Registration always closes December 24.) But we’re not going to exclude you from the fun just because you’re not on a team.
* Only the first 100 miles per week count for your team, but all miles count for individual standings.
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