The 2015 Night Ride thread
- Thread starter srw
- Start date
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I'm in if it fits with work
I'll plan an overnight ride somewhere around south Yorkshire / east coast. It will be around 100 miles ish and will involve breakfast. I'll post the route and rough timings.
If others fancy riding along or (more likely) feel I might need support then they'll be very welcome.
Dogtrousers
Kilometre nibbler
Interesting. When I'm in the area I'm based in Driffield (family there).
mmmmartin
Random geezer
I'm in.
Deffo.
BUT I have a lot on next year and will be away in all of January and February. Shall we fix a date now and just do it?
mmmmartin
Random geezer
Sorry to be so brutal and short. I'm aware I should have written a thousand words of introspection but I'm a bit of a thicko.
StuAff
Silencing his legs regularly
- Location
- Portsmouth
FNRttK might be that weekend- @swarm_catcher ran both the previous ones then.
w00hoo_kent
One of the 64K
- Location
- Maidstone or Greenwich
I'll throw in here. As a newcomer part of what made the FNRttC's seem like something I could do was that they came with a solid level of expectation. From reading previous reports there were things that I could just presume, the route planning, not being dropped, the pace, the Organisation, food would be eaten. Those could be taken for granted because the whole thing was being run by a benign dictatorship and time had been spent refining everything to make it as good as it could be at that point.
2015 is a bit of a test year, @dellzeqq is taking a well deserved break from being the shoulders that everything else rests on and people are stepping up to make sure that the experience doesn't disappear too. This is good.
While part of the joy of it all is a sense of anarchic madness, there's some smoke and mirrors there that make it so. In a year where the waters are being tested it might be worth accepting that some of that illusion might best be dropped. So a schedule makes sense (in fact, for insurance purposes is necessary). I'd also suggest that a brief set of statements identifying the ride also makes sense, so that people can tell how close to their expectations the ride is going to be. After my first FNRttC we tried a group ride out with one of our local shops. They'd met us a number of times, we've bought a few bikes from them, we've made no secret of how we ride and our fitness levels. They were welcoming, comforting, absolutely definite that they never dropped a rider, positive we'd love their slow group. We lasted around half a kilometre. They got to the first incline, obviously didn't consider it a hill, raced up it while one of our number slowed down somewhat (they plod hills and make up time on the flat) and we never saw them again. Currently their website is advertising their next outing, it happily states they never drop a rider...
So, I'd suggest you need to state distance, midway stop quality, destination type (is it the coast for those geographically challenged!) pace (or maybe expected ride time to first stop and last stop), TEC's present, Waymarker present, the number of riders you're working on. Some sort of quantifiable hilliness rating. First timer friendly. That sort of thing. The rides that are replicating existing FNRttC routes should be easy to write up and based on that new routes could be written up.
This isn't about arguing over what is or isn't a ride. That way lies divisive madness. To help the people you want along, and to prove you've thought things through for this year at least, I think it would help if we showed our working a little.
redfalo
known as Olaf in real life
- Location
- Brexit Boomtown
Your're not alone, TNM. Another Friday's essential that has not been mentioned so far is lack of red tape and bureaucracy.
Forget all this and let those who know worry about it and get things moving. People who have put their names forward to lead and organise rides have been doing the FNR's for many years, they know how it works and knows what's what. The rides will be based on the usual FNR's and worked on the same way.
w00hoo_kent
One of the 64K
- Location
- Maidstone or Greenwich
I will, when I'm happy to go back in there. This was early August, partly I've had no reason to go back to the shop since, partly I'm still a bit angry at them, my biggest problem is that they took contact numbers for us, but made no attempt to check that we were OK, or make any kind of explanation for it. Even a simple text would have been something. I know it's being grumpy over good manners but having spent in excess of £4k with them over the last 18 months or so you'd have thought at least good customer relations would have come in to it somewhere.
Yeah, I know, sorry to be a downer and all and I'll not be surprised if I'm ignored. I just know how easy it is to slip in to being unintentionally isolationist when you have a small hobby primarily enjoyed by a single group of people. I guess it all depends on which bit of the experience is the most important. The point of my ramble about my other experience is that it's very easy to think that you're ticking all the boxes and miss the fact that you aren't.
That is a good point. It's very easy for the regulars (or anyone reading the threads here) to think that the whole shebang is an all round wonderful experience for absolutely everybody concerned, when it might not be. And if the overwhelming tide here is that everything is wonderful, it does make it harder for anyone with a negative tale to pipe up.
Conscious that I might be stepping into murky waters here (which might be construed as accusatory or something, which is not my intention), but given that I think Simon has something like a 1000 people on his mailing list, how is it that 1000 people don't turn up for every ride if they are as wonderful as I find them to be.
And there we have the answer. We're all different. (<Python>"I'm not"). Some give it a go and decide it's not for them, or perhaps not more than once in a while. Others thrive and find a spiritual home. Unsurprisingly it is the people who enjoy it who become the regulars, and it is their collective 'spirit' (I can't think of a better word though I am sure there is one, possibly a German one) which pervades the rides. It seems to be a spirit which does attract others though.
Again, I don't know where I'm going ...
swansonj
Guru
Is not part of the genius of Simon that he does in fact have all those things in place, but with the rest of us being hardly aware of it? "Hypnocracy" as you rightly say. The Fridays would not attract (some) newcomers if those things were not in place; the Fridays would not be as attractive to regulars if those things were obtrusive.
