Trans Am Bike Race / TransAm / TABR

Aw yeah, my kind of weather. Great region you're in too - Montana, Wyoming.

It’s not being kind to us at the moment.

Would be nice to be able to do similar on the 'Race Flow' page and see riders lines separately or compare one against the other...?

Getting the hang of this.. should be updated soon-ish.
Also some bugfixes and now supports km/kph eg for the TransAtlantic Way.

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I wrote something before and lost it

Now climbing out of Virginia city. Stopped, lots. I raised saddle remainder of missing height and knee got better but Achilles flared immediately. Just lowered again. Very slow even with lower gears. Idiot. Pack a tape measure when you travel.

Going to miss my favourite view too..

Yellowstone "soon". Watch out for Elk .

Ha, it wasn’t a comment on your efforts. Funnily enough i watched your Instagram video saying you were feeling good and wanted to check out your sleep pattern is all. Keep it up champ!

Shift saddle closer to bars? Even minuscule changes help, which I’m sure you know. Anyway keep going!!

Always underestimate time to hotel. Doh

Perfect, thanks @Yemble!

Previously third-place Donncha has been struggling for a while and is now caught by Graber and Schulz, the three are holed up in Dubois. Both the velomobile riders (MG in joint 3rd) & (DL in 10th) are making good progress and this is before they hit the real flat sections where apparently they will go like rockets, some predicting 400+ mile stints. Graber will be leading soon if this keeps up. Schulz looks to be sleeping in the Dubois Post Office overnight. We know the PO sleep is a method employed by.... Hippy (when he can't find a 'dunny' to kip in?): he and Simone Bailey (SB) have been neck and neck for what feels like the whole race. They are now ahead of Tanja who has fallen back to catch up on rest by the looks of it. DarrenFranks just started riding again, getting an early start perhaps?

I’m a tough critic. However I am consistent. I lost 10hours in tcr. Then another 2 backtracking once I’d sorted my wheels.

If you’ve come so far, why not finish properly. Does not matter if it’s a day or week late, the honour is the same.

I think I only say that to keep the better half happy. I know I won’t. I’m an addict.

I’m only on my phone so don’t have it. But there’s a photo of geof and I sharing a beer during tcr.

Bloody good I won after that, because otherwise some sponsors might have thought I was taking the piss.

I’ll find it later and tweet it. I love Geoffory.

A race where you can have a beer en route and still win?

That's it - I'm definitely signing up for next year. This compulsive dot watching has given me an itch that I have to scratch. I have until November to work out how I can persuade the missus.

You can have lots of beers and lose too. But like I said, lots of beers.

Shhh! Keeping pedalling, man.

You should. I’d love to see you do well. Email me if so and I’ll help. I believe you could podium for sure.

However using terminology that is perhaps emotive like purism, is a little absurd. All rules are applied subjectively by referees trying to be as objective as possible. I’ve said before that a lot of the rules that I’ve read seem slightly ill thought out. This will undoubtedly change as they evolve.

Fair enough, maybe a bit too emotive, but I think that allowing any small detours and mistakes, and not being absolute about riding the ENTIRE route, has opened doors for leniency that other races like Tour Divide have not opened. That's entirely up to the admin of TABR, I get that.

Obviously if there's a road closed or bridge out, then detours are allowed, as all racers or at least all racers around that time period, would have the same route, but individual deviance is breaking the rules in my books.

Also

Rule #1: No complaining about the rules.

I can see your point. It’s a difficult balance. DNF’ing someone who took a slight wrong turn for no gain over 4000km seems a bit harsh to me.
Also logistically hard to adjudicate once you get in to the minutiae; ie someone cycling back to a junction should they turn the wrong way initially to then recover the full route by looping back to cross the junction fully? Then you have issues with how it’s judge from a technical perspective that the trackers aren’t always that accurate etc.

Trackers aren't that accurate. Some races require full gps recording on completing to verify route completion (like the Highland Trail 550). This means there is no question. But that also assumes the organisers are happy for scan over thousands of miles of gpx files.

I know it's very different to a DIY route type race like TCR, and therefore I don't think they should be compared. It's pretty simple, if you miss a turn, go back to that turn and ride the entire route. If you ride a long way before noticing, you should pay attention more!

Ultimately there will always need to be discretion though.

erm.

and contrastingly the Trans Atlantic Way goes straight though:

Yeah, of course. Gentleman's agreement etc etc.

If you're read the rules, then don't do the whole route, you've broken that agreement.

Trackers aren't that accurate.

Exactly.

A tracker updating every 5 minutes might show someone taking a slightly different route for 200m or so, but they might have realised part way through (when the tracker did its ping), backtracked and then followed the correct route. But this may not be visible from the coarse tracker points. Cue the Internet pitchfork army. Sure they are plenty of true positives of deviations, but you can't rule out a few false positives just from tracker data.

People with large update intervals (i.e. 30 minutes) will have a much greater chance of 'getting away' with small deviations as the window of opportunity for a ping whilst off route is much smaller.

Much better to have the ability to apply discretion then ruthlessly enforce DQing anyone for even the most minor deviation. The latter will just lead to people gaming the system and accidentally turning off their tracker before taking a short cut, etc.

Rhino back in the game after getting some help from his bike fitting guy.