Woofie

I commute alot. & I agree with the statements from Lance Burger. Robots, if I am turning left (alongside of traffic) I will slow down and slip into the traffic. It is far safer for me as I can then get ahead of the cars trying to turn the corner. People corner terribly and if I have to contend for the 10 cm of tarmat around the bend I am going to come short. Crossing an intersection however is a totally different story. If I can see for miles that no car is coming I sometimes, after stopping will edge my way across slowly to once again get away from the trucks etc. But if there is any uncertainty I just wait it out. Each stop street is unique. Certain of them in parklands / table view cars dont even seem to know they exist, if I am crossing one of these (with the flow of the traffic) I will proceed carefully if I am being supported by a 2 ton escort. If the cars are stopping. I stop. So the way I see it is. Traffic lights, turning left. Proceed with caution. Traffic lights, going straight or right work with the system. Stop streets, turning left, slip in as possible. Going straight at a 3 way, follow the behaviour of the cars. 4 way is dodgy because you can get a jumper from the other direction, cutting straight across you, so rather slow down totally.

haha. I know the feeling. So you have done pretty well then despite your weight. That means that you could be pushing as much as 460 watts if your p/w ratio is correct.

Luke - How much do you weigh?

Yep. I have my doubts about this bicycle track along there. Looks like people walking would also be on it. And they are a freaking nightmare. & now they are busy doing roadworks on plattekloof road between koeberg rd and the n7. The road was narrow enough as it is. Now my morning commute across there is quite nerve racked. I use that section to practice my "sprinting" in front of the cars because it is just not wide enough for the both of us. Why didnt they finish the parklands - n7 link before doing roadworks over here as well. Oh well.

But then races would be boring! Oh, just by the way, if you do have ppa gripes, please post some comments over here. https://www.bikehub.co.za/forum_posts.asp?TID=84286&PN=1Woofie2010-05-19 01:57:28

It also depends on the test that you have done. Not all tests are the same. My elite bud has a p/w ratio of around 5.8. That is good enough for some top finishes in elite. I can push the same power as him, but the extra 15kg kills me. I am only pushing a mere 4.8 or so at my weight. I can ride with G group, but H is more manageable when it comes to hills. Big big hills, rather drop me to Z haha!

? ? Hahahah. Ok - you got me Haha! That is exactly what I was thinking as well! And you didnt catch up to her to her to give her a piece of your mind, but rather to tail her again!

I always thought I was a good actor. Na. I will always cycle as I commute everywhere. Day and Night. Haha. It does sound like a movie script! Maybe you should write a autobiography David and if you are lucky some hollywood producer will do something with it oneday.

Speaking about Lance. I found a letter that he wrote to promote commuting. It is good and has a lot of things that I have always wished for. Obviously this letter is "addressed" to government and in reality cyclists would have to stand together and make some major noise to see some of these things come to pass. But take a read it is pretty interesting. http://www.pedalpower.co.za/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=3ccLLD6BHew%3D&tabid=140&mid=639

Naas. Dont be hard on David for sounding a bit rough in his comments. There is very few people that do as much as he does for the community. As you have been told, he has been at the meetings etc but he has now had enough that certain issues been looked at. Yes I do agree spot on with getting someone onto the EXCO to represent us properly. And ultimately this is probably going to be the only way to ensure that our issues are even looked at in time to come. (File 13 is most probably the dustbin, because complaints and suggestions have never really gone anywhere) But I dont know how much use having 50 disgruntled members at a AGM will be either. Might even end in an argument and a split in the meeting. You mentioned Lance Burger throwing David out. Well, I dont think that would happen because David is not a hostile person. But if anything like that did ever happen then I think that would be the start of a new cycling company. But with that been said. The ppa still does alot behind the scenes that we dont see. And it doesnt really make sense to start a whole new organisation to address only a handful of issues. Naas, You seem to be quite well informed. Do you have any guidelines or ideas how we could elect somebody onto the body?

I see that David has updated his first post on this thread. Maybe it would be better to post a new reply because I dont think anyone has seen the alterations. When are you going to start compiling one complete list with the issues. Lets maybe list everything and then we can decide as a group what must stay and what must go.

Thanks Tarmac! Great to get some league feedback! Awesome points. Good to see that my seeding complaints are not unfounded as we can see from what you are saying about the argus. Also agree totally with the wp champs. I would love to give them a go one day, but in the middle of the off season? ? ? ? huh? And cycling is still a "team" sport you definitely need some colours for at least the top 10 or something.

I had a chat to another cyclist here at work earlier. We both feel (and I am sure the rest of you will as well) that once we have submitted our requests we need to put some muscle behind our demands. We have often emailed them and we get the petty replies but what good will it do. We would have now spent the last two weeks putting thoughts together and when it finally goes to them it is most probably just going to be "another complaint email" I am sorry to be so serious about this, but if we dont do something big like 1000 of us not renewing our membership or something then all of this would have gone to waste. And then next year we are still going to be sitting here unhappy with the way that things are being run. I also know that there are alot of unhappy cyclists that are not on the hub and we also have to somehow get in contact with them as well. It also amazes me how many people there are on the hub that I have seen moaning about the ppa previously are totally quiet now. Come on guys. Get some balls. If you dont stand up for what you want in life then what is the point. David, thanks for putting all the info together for us. I am just scared that they are going to bulldoze all over you if you go in there by yourself. But if you have lank people supporting you, you will most definitely make a impact. If all of that fails then its time to get a new road race company on the go. Ditch all of the current stuff and start afresh.

Thanks man

Ok. Are you going to put our comments together for them? Man.... Wouldnt it just be easier if they were on the hub so that we could have a open forum with them?

BANG...... It would be nice for the ppa to add in some longer distances. The kind of race that Malcolm is asking for over that distance, only a handful of our pros would be able to ride it at the required pace. But with that being said, maybe they should experiment with taking the cream off the top of the league bunches and offer them a even longer route on funride days. (Maybe they do the loop twice or something) But also along with that, If Malcolm goes ahead and wins a 240KM race, he is not really going to be happy with the 1K that he is probably going to get from the ppa anyway. Oh well. I still think that Lance's exposure to SA was good. But now we need him to come back and ride the Giro or something before we start to get momentum going.

Thats a good idea. & if they dont have enough correct seeding numbers they can give you a temp one and just write the seeding onto it, like we often see.

Ok, I finally posted my "letter" on the other thread https://www.bikehub.co.za/forum_posts.asp?TID=84286&PID=1171400#1171400

I totally agree with seperating road and MTB seeding. This is my idea of some changes that they could give a try for the seeding structure (for road events) I first started to type a letter how there is a bottleneck at groups F through to I. But I then decided to rather look at most of the PPA road races for the last season to make sure that I am getting my facts straight. I didnt use the burger or other races that use a different seeding to the ppa one. I also only looked at the long routes of races. I went through 10 races from this last season for this. I used 6 league and 4 normal funrides (10 in total). (I have this in a excel spreadsheet now, PM me your email address if you want to see it) What I did is I pulled the number of people who started in each group. EL, SV, MS, WL, SS, A, B, etc. I didnt use tandems as the field could be split up to much and the numbers are very low as well. If there was more than one group that started together I split the numbers up. If the numbers didnt split evenly I would make a guesstimate on how to split the numbers as you cant have a half a person starting in a group. For the league sections I would split their numbers into the groups where they most probably are indexed at. I know that this was not totally acurate as people do often start in lower groups to where they are seeded and also I dont know everybodies seeding from league. But it will give us a pretty good understanding of what the group sizes are, especially if you look at the trend over a few races. And this is what I have found. (Biggest to smallest) Overall sizings (Average of league and normal funrides) B A N K I D H P M L J C G O F E Q R S W T U X V Z Y League B A D K I N H C G F L E M J P O Q R S W T X U V Z Y Funrides N P K M I Q O J H L R B G F S C V U A T D W X Y Z E Remember for the normal funrides, a lot of people that ride league will not attend the normal rides. Looking at those results it is pretty clear what ppa was trying to do with the pretty big adjustment of the seeding structure at the beginning of the last season. Groups A,B are very large still. The frustration that I am feeling back in group G when we meet up with another group and we have 100 riders fighting for the 3 meters of tarmat must be so much worse up in league as I can see that their starting group numbers can range from 70 to 90 people at the start of the race. NO WONDER people are getting disqualified at every league funride. How on earth can you expect to fit that many people into one small section of road? I dont know how it is to race league so we would need some feedback from other people that do ride it here on this topic. I dont know if it would be better to seperate it into two different EL groups or what. Maybe they need more age seperators in there. (well if they want to change how it works) The only thing that I can see from the numbers is that it may be good to join the MS with the WL as both have fairly low numbers (less than 20). They normally have fairly similar race times so I think that they could work well together. They could still race as two cats, but they should be allowed to help each other and it will also help freeing up 5 minutes on the start. From what I can see here, is they probably need to do even more splitting up and I would say that they should seed people all the way down to Y rather. So we can get a better spread. The can have Z1,2,3,4 or something as new cats. Rather have more, smaller starting groups. They currently have two base events that they use as 0 seeding events (unadjusted winning times for winners) That is the Argus and 94.7. They should as a minimum use all of the events on the Alpha Pharm Seeding Series as base events and if a person has completed more than one of these events then his index should be averaged across them. (All of these events are pro events and prize money etc, meaning that all the top pros ride all of these) We need to even take it a step further. Lets say that if an event has had 500+ finishers and if the winners of the race are in the "A+ group" of the averaged out seeding then surely no rider would have been able to have ridden a better race. Hense the winning time should not be adjusted. ie. You get Malcolm Lange winning the westcoast express, where there is 500+ riders and pro teams. No rider in the country would have made a better time over the distance so why change the time. If we go to a small race ie. The westcoast national park (Langebaan). It is unlikely that a pro teams would ride the race and normally at a small non-league event the numbers are going to be fairly low. You will then need to look at the winners and take a look at their averaged out seeding (which would probably only be a "lower grade A or B) and hense adjust the race time back to where you can see a A+ rider finishing it in correlation to the base seeding. In this kind of model we would most probably see that league events are not adjusted at all. Yes, this will have a knock on effect that most riders will have a slightly better seeding than they should. The bigger guys will benifit more from the rolling hills while the skinny boys will pick up their better times from the hard hill's. What will then be needed is to make all of the groups smaller. Even if it is cut back quite drastically, people will at least be able to move back into their correct seedings because there is no longer any (or much) adjusting happening. We do have another problem though. You get three kind of people riding races. 1. The kind that are moving up. 2. The kind that are just staying where they are 3. The kind that are unfit and should be moving down. As people can upgrade their seedings they will move into a group which better suites their speed. But there are also people in that group that preformed really well last or two seasons ago that are now not up to form and they are just there in the group taking up space. They will probably get dropped halfway in the race anyway. We need a system that can reseed the entire field maybe 4 times a year or something so that we dont get 10's of extra people squashing into a group where there are slackers that need to get moved down a few again. Each race from a two season's ago would get the normal 5% penalty. People will still be able to upgrade, but at least the slackers will get moved down quicker. How are we going to manage that? I dont know, maybe we need a membership structure where you only join for the season. They can chop the membership fees down then as well because it will be for 3 months or so at a time. It surely doesnt cost alot to print numbers, so this will be possible. (And we will be paying for it anyway) This is just a wack idea, but tell me what you guys think. There is always problems with running a league event and a funride event on the same course at the same time and treating it as the same event. It works better for the normal funrides where you have your A-Z cats only as it probably makes things simpler logistically. What if they had to do away with the league cats and make the long route of funrides the league race. Hense, the league rides have to start in the ABC's groups. Then, there will also be no late entries for the long routes. Everybody that wants to ride the long routes will need to enter league and you will then have your entry into the races for the season. Even if you are a P rider there must still be cats from A to Z. They can even give a big discount as having the people pre-entering will secure race and prize money for the different races. For the people that dont want to pre-enter ahead will need to ride the short routes or they will need to pay a prorata rate for the rest of the races in the season. Alot of riders ride most of the races in a season, so this could save them some money as well. Oh yes, before I forget. They must have a seeding system for the road and mtb. But lets say you only have the one (road) and you go do a mtb race, then you should get a 10% penalty on your mtb seeding until you do another mtb race to seed you correctly. It should also work like that the other way around as well. Anyway, thats a big chunk to set your teeth into. Post your comments guys!