Originally Posted by
echappist
got it; good luck with whatever path you choose.
fwiw, TT bike is finicky. Ben may or may not have mentioned how I injured myself by raising the saddle on my TT bike by 1 cm. I've been dealing with the aftermath of that for the past 20 months and haven't really ridden my TT bike for an year. Whenever I do get to ride it, I will most likely be doing miles on my smart trainer though, for the exact reason you mentioned. It'll most likely be EMX stuff for me for most of next year, unless i have some significant breakthroughs with the knee issue.
while i agree with the bolded sections of your first paragraph, but if the "you" to which you refer is the cycling population at large, then much of what you wrote is irrelevant to what promoters could do. Btw, there is a very good reason why people tell you to make comments only after you promote a race. It's the old "don't judge others unless you've walked a mile in their shoes" principle. I mentioned before how my collegiate team once hosted a very lucrative crit in NYC. For a few years, the head organizer was a young lady. She was quite sympathetic to the demands of female racers before she needed to do the heavy lifting herself, but that changed when she took charge. This is what she wrote to two other female teammates of mine, when the latter (who just by coincidence didn't have that big a role in promoting the event) complained about scarcity of races; emphases added.
as a threshold matter, I find it somewhat disingenuous for you to reference to scheduling of track events in the conversation when discussing the issue of cost. The highest outlay for a road race promoter, by far, is the police presence and closure of roads. Of course they could add additional master's races at little additional cost at a velodrome, b/c the promoters just need to pay for another hour or two of rental, but this math simply doesn't carry over onto road racing.
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Lastly to Rob, thanks for all that you have done and contributed. You have given much to the community and should not feel obligated to stay another year to deal with the headaches.
I don’t think this is a problem for promoters to solve. They have a role to play for sure, read my original post in this thread again. Promoters don’t create racers. They create a venue. They can make it a good experience and there’s counterproductive things they can do like create illogical racing categories. Just getting a promoter to offer a race is insufficient, as important as it is.
And it is in no way disingenuous to bring up the track racing- if you think it is, you completely missed my point. Even when it doesn’t matter administratively or financially, men and women are often treated differently in how racing categories are organized. The point is: there’s ZERO reason to set it up to discourage women from racing in TTs and a lot of track events- it literally takes no extra money or work. But stil, women will be placed in much broader categories than men will be- why? Because, I guess. And then it becomes a non-race. It would actually be understandable if you needed extra expense of police presence etc.