Timing, It is a Changing.

Time's are a Changin'!

Come gather 'round Rollers Because with us you roam We’re ditching chip timing For segments alone You’ll ride at your pace Then race when it’s shown If your time to you is worth savin' We’ll tally your efforts And crown you at home For the timing it is a-changin'

Hey Rollers!

We're having some fun with this! Many of you help us understand your wants and needs better by filling out those post ride surveys, and we do listen!

Consistently, over 70% of you respond that you like the timed-segment format and that is a reason you participate in a Gravel Roll. Interestingly enough however, more than 60% of you consistently respond that it doesn't matter whether we have chip timing or not. That has had us thinking.

This email is a little long, but that's primarily because I can geek out a little explaining our thought processes. But the TL;DR is that we are changing up our timing process and trying something new. If you are signed up for The Holler in Walhalla, these instructions for riders will be in the guidebook. If you care for geekery, read on.

For a long time we used the timing system that we have, because, well, gravel cycling can be very remote. We researched a lot of methods and an active chip system where the chip carried the time seemed to be the only way to go. Every other system required some compromises or wouldn't work in an area without cell service.

We still had limitations with the chip timing system and timing boxes. It was still physical hardware that needed to be put out, and the limitations that go along with that. How many do we have, where can we place them, how can we overlap, what can we do so that we can monitor them? Many of you asked us to have more timing sections or place them in different areas.

But many times we were limited in what we could do based on the number of boxes we had and other considerations like safety. Usually once a year (sometimes more) we'd have a failure with a box, or in the case of the Okey Dokey this year, actual sabotage and vandalism on a timing box which caused us massive headaches. We would go into strava or rwgps and manually fish out the data or we'd just drop that timing segment, which sucked.

Many of you in our surveys suggested Strava timing on leaderboards. Or RWGPS leaderboards. We talked to a lot of web developers and we've had multiple conversations over the last few years on how to best time this and can we do it virtually.

We never settled on anything other than what we were doing. Unfortunately, Strava has cut off access to most of their API data over the last five years. Including the leaderboard data. Any other method of harvesting this data would get us in trouble.

RWGPS similarly has leaderboards, but in our conversations directly with them, they declined to give us access to an API of that data because "leaderboards aren't their core product" (which begs the question, why even have them then, am I right?).

Meanwhile, many of you were also asking if we could track riders and have that show up on a website. So, we thought if we could find a solution for tracking, we could find a solution for timing as well. So we think we did.

So, to cut this long story short, we are working with the fine folks at Webscorer on a solution that we hope can fill multiple needs. It will be an app you download on your phone and we'll all have to hold hands at the start line and sing Kumbaya....err, start tracking on our phones.

It doesn't require cell service the entire time you are riding and we can set the refresh rate on your location to be as battery friendly as you can imagine. This way family and friends can follow along on your journey and we also have an even better handle on our course resources that we usually do.

As we said above, we will have more info about this in the rider guidebook, but The Holler in Walhalla will be our first time rolling this out and utilizing it on race day. Will it go perfectly our first time on a mass scale?

We hope so!

But we also know we might come up short.

We are always trying to find ways to be better and improve and sometimes that means taking an unknown leap! Sometimes it means taking a lot of leaps!