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Ming the Merciless

There is no mercy
Location
Inside my skull
My partner Rachel made those.

Ordered a LFL T-shirt off the website 😄
 

Ian H

Ancient randonneur
One on the helpers' ride; others may have done it unofficially.

Ian McBride got to Dalkeith before the event was stopped, so rode back along the route after Floris had gone away.
Aidan Hedley completed a helper's ride in advance, but said he didn't want validation as it would be unfair.
 

Ajax Bay

Guru
Location
East Devon
Is this the Rainton stop? (From a road.cc article )

(Was their ride over? Or merely resting? Ceased to be, pushing up daisies, etc ... )
From an fb comment, 170 bikes were outside Rainton VH in a count made before early breakfast on Tuesday. (Edit: as ming has pointed out v v v , the 170 count was at Mickleton: up the Tees valley at the foot (effectively) of the long Yad Moss climb.) Rainton 100, then?
 
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Ajax Bay

Guru
Location
East Devon
Ian McBride got to Dalkeith before the event was stopped,
Interview with Ian McBride - recommended

View: https://www.youtube.com/live/4p53ivP0szE?si=JAGxo3orBg9yTJoi

Scroll to 14:15 for the best two minutes including a description of the conditions.
Edit (I've transcribed and edited a short section):
[Interviewer]: at one of the checkpoints during the ride, they recorded a wind gust of >100mph

That wouldn't surprise me. Look, it was the worst conditions I've ever ridden in; and I've been riding bikes since forever. I was blown off the road twice. I had to stop and put my foot down a number of times and wait until the gusts passed before carrying on. I had to walk two short sections because I couldn't ride my bike. But you can't stop in the middle of nowhere. So you've got to carry on.

I didn't want to ride anymore. No ‘get in the back’ van showed up. There were trees down on the road. The rain was going sideways. It ruined my light which I've had for five years: my big headlight for overnight riding. I had to ride on my emergency lights the next night and a half. I wouldn't choose to send anybody out in it and I didn't want to be out in it.

Even the next afternoon, 24 hours after the storm, I climbed over Yad Moss and I had to put every bit of item of clothing I had on. I was still being blown all over the road.

The last 400km was better: I was now catching up to people who had all turned south and I got to see people, to ride with some people and talk to people at the controls, which normally you don't get to do. Because routinely at a control and there's me and a few others and then we're gone. So it made it really interesting as well.

And from Fb:
“I was blown off the road twice just before Moffat. I had to walk two small parts as I couldn’t ride them. The end of the valley was a wind funnel. I was actually frightened on a few occasions. I was hoping every white van was an LEL van coming to pick me up saying it was all abandoned. I only carried on because I had no choice, there was nowhere to hide from it all. Trees were down on the road and small branches and stuff were flying all over the place. My return over Yad Moss 30 hours later went from sunny to very windy, some dangerous zigzagging all over the road, every stitch of clothing on again, and coming down to the bottom shaking cold and wringing wet. I think, sadly, the right choice was made.“
 
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Ming the Merciless

There is no mercy
Location
Inside my skull
From an fb comment, 170 bikes were outside Rainton VH in a count made before early breakfast on Tuesday.

This from our Richmond controller, it was Mickleton to north of Richmond.

I asked around to try to find out how many had stopped at Mickleton. Riders estimated anything from 70 to 200. When I spoke to the Village Hall later on Tuesday I asked them what they thought. They confidently said 170 so I asked them how they knew. Somebody had been around the site in the middle of the night and counted the bikes!
 

LondonEdinburghLondon

Active Member
Location
Thorne
Perhaps he had no alternative but this comes across as an utter train wreck - was there literally no contingency in place? Someone asked about a time extension and they got shut down rather decisively. I suspect Audax Club Parisienne would have had to agree a time extension and knowing the way the Audax organisations seem to operate, it'd be a mountain to move... People have invested a shoot ton of time and money to participate on this ride and to abort it without any transparent discussions seems pretty unfair. I feel sorry for all the volunteers and riders.

If you cannot cross Yad Moss because of a storm, there is no contingency. As it happens I discussed options with Westmorland and Furness Council on Sunday morning, as they were working with us to sweep Yad Moss (seriously) before you all arrived. We had diversion company ready and we had the ear of the council's Gold command all of that weekend. But there is no safe diversion, and all we would be doing is pushing riders into even worse weather.

When every route north is blocked, what contingency do you propose?
 

LondonEdinburghLondon

Active Member
Location
Thorne
My comment was not focused on the cancellation itself but more the the announcement, I felt it needed something like "after consultation with our volunteer team we concluded that we could not safely complete the event within a reasonable time extension". Whatever the words it would have shown the organisers worked on ideas as best they could (I'm sure they did).

Was this the "utter train wreck" you referred to earlier? Or did this refer to the lack of contingency and the inability to grant a time extension there and then?
We discussed time extensions extensively with AUK and LRM. Both the chair of AUK and the deputy of LRM, were taking part in the event. LRM offered a six-hour extension initially, but we decided not to take that up right away. An extension such as that would have cost about £60,000 to put into place, a 24 hour extension would have been completely impossible due to cost and logistics. I decided in the end (entirely my decision) to shut down any discussion of time extensions because I was totally focussed on rider safety. AUK and LRM both accepted my decision, recognising that it's not my job to decide on times and points, but on running the event itself.
 

LondonEdinburghLondon

Active Member
Location
Thorne
Posted by @srw over on YACF:
"It's absolutely the right decision to cancel. It's much easier to allow rider discretion to prevail if you're only offering barebones support. But with schools having to be handed over on Saturday, volunteers and riders (for many of whom this will have been their only experience of a typical British summer, let alone an atypical one) needing to get back to reality at the end of the week and the meeja, hungry lawyers and risk-averse insurance companies waiting to pounce if something goes catastrophically wrong even for one rider, the decision was made much less difficult.

It's actually easy to bounce back from reputational damage if you handle it well. A reasonably open lessons learned exercise, an admission of any mistakes made in handling and comms and an explanation of how you'll manage the next event differently will go a very long way to restoring confidence. So far I haven't seen a bum move."

I'm not sure the event's reputation has been harmed by this year's edition. The private feedback from riders is better than it was in 2022.

Notwithstanding that - we made mistakes. Mostly the sort of mistakes you expect when dealing with a novel, high-stakes situation. The controls held up surprisingly well and that is a huge positive. There were also some fundamental mistakes in our organisation, around our choice of comms and focus on Facebook. Again, these are all entirely my responsibility.

We are having a wash up day in November. The LEL team is quite tight and we are good at self-reflection (I think). We also plan a wash up day with AUK (date TBC) to discuss strengthening further a relationship that has improved dramatically in the last 12 months.
 

LondonEdinburghLondon

Active Member
Location
Thorne
Thanks Stu.

For context, someone else on that thread had argued for allowing rider discretion and said that the organisers had trashed the event's reputation by cancelling.


That was covered by the regular drum beat of announcements. Number 1: pause, update at time X. Number 2, at time X: we all want you to be on your way but it needs to be safe. More at time Y. Number 3, at time Y: sorry, it's unsafe and we can't continue.

I don't know how much was preplanned and how much was done on the hoof, but it was well done. In emergency situations the job of the leaders is to make difficult decisions, consulting privately. Danial, a volunteer, (a) owned the decisions, and (b) made sure the Comms came when he said they would. That's considerably better than many people who are paid vast amounts to do this sort of thing.

It was done on the hoof, albeit we worked through the messaging as a team before publishing it.

One big mistake here was my capacity to make decisions. Once again, by Sunday night, I was too exhausted to plan tactics on the fly. On Monday morning I arranged a 06:30 with the comms director, who correctly started the discussion by giving me a rollocking for allowing myself to be distracted to exhaustion by other work in advance of the event.

However by then we had a grip on the situation and a clear sense of what we would do. The failure to make a decision the night before didn't affect the safe handling of the event, as we had decided to wait and see until the morning.

Once we decided to pause, we decided on a tactic that would buy us another 90 minutes of event time, while allowing us to clear as many people out of Malton as possible, which at that time was a peak flow with riders still pouring in. That is why we filled Mickleton too - that also served the purpose of getting the whole event as close to Yad Moss, just in case the wind dropped.

On balance I think we made the right calls, at the right time. However there are lessons to be learned about how we got there.
 
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