Rochdale and Times

Hi.

Just a quick thanks to everyone who braved the cold weather this weekend and turned up to the Rochdale ride. After listening to the weather forecast, especially for Sunday, it was great to see a constant stream of cars turning into the carpark.

As it was, Saturday turned into a perfect cycling day for the off road ride, clear skies, little wind and reasonable temperature. It's a shame that we had to change our routes due to the drifts of snow on the hills, if we could have got you higher, the views would have been spectacular! As it was, the condition of the route was completely different from the previous day anyway. Keith said the crust on the snow was thicker on Saturday which meant it was more rideable, the big footsteps you might have seen were from him falling through, sometimes to his waist, whilst putting out the course on Friday!

Sunday started in the fog. I'd been out in the morning to check the course, and as you're aware, did a bit of re-routing. This was justified by two long black lines in the white frost, ending at a huge stone fence post, someone hadn't got off to a great start that morning. Anyway, whilst jumping in and out of the van in the dark and frost, removing and realigning signs, I missed one. This sent a few riders left and up a hill. I'm sorry about that, I think I parked the van in front of it when changing the other signs so didn't see it. The route took riders high into the countryside and depending on the time of day/how long you were out, the weather changed from thick fog to clear sunshine and fantastic views. The constant report from riders though was that it was cold!


Times.
Right, confession time. There were some problems with Pre-entries on both days this weekend, with many of you turning up and not being entered. That was totally my fault. I receive a spread sheet with all the entries on it sorted by the date you entered, which I then auto-sort it into which rides everyone is doing. At this point I failed to select rider names and thus randomly assigned everyone different day/ride lengths. I sat down last night, worked out what I've done and then looked at the spreadsheets. It's going to take some sorting out! I will work on this tonight and try and get these up tomorrow. All done, should be appearing soon/tomorrow.

Sorry about this. The good news is that this shouldn't happen in the near future as we're going electronic. We have a new timing system and are scratching our heads at the moment trying to plug things together and get in all working.

Cheers
Dean