Putting on a quality bike race requires several key elements, and if you're missing only one, you no longer have a quality bike race. For Reloaded this year, that element was proper organizational support. Frankly, the race was inaugurated under rather disorganized circumstances. Howard County Rec and Parks has fallen in love with bike races, so they approached The Promoter (the author's third-person reference to himself) in the Fall of '08 to put on another race in the early Spring. After some hemming and hawing over the second edition of Rockburn Cross in November, Rockburn Reloaded was born in March after about 4 months work. By contrast, each edition of the cross races was prepped over the course of about 11-13 months, meaning the prep cycles actually overlapped on occasion. Regardless, we spent 4 months working on a race we thought would be all low-key and attract maybe 150 riders. But then we got 250 riders, some of whom were national- and world-calibre, and Cyclingdirt.org came down from Boston, and people were like "Oh, hey, wow, that was more fun than we anticipated!" None of that was planned, we just got lucky.
Fast forward to Fall '09, and we put on the namesake of this blog, which was awesome but brutal on the promoter. I suspect that every promoter has a moment at least once in their promoting career after one of their races where they think to themselves, "NEVER AGAIN!" That thought usually wanes after about a week and a lot of self-medicating, and we get all excited about planning next year. The problem for us though is that it is not a year away, its 4 months away, and we haven't been able to do any serious planning, and the cycle that started behind the 8-ball in '08 is still behind the 8-ball in '10.
In the timeless words of The Stranger, "Sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes...well he eats you."
So, from here the goal is to fix the cycle or leave it at a one-hit-wonder. Right now, we have the 12-14 months necessary to figure out how to put on the quality race you all want (or find somebody else who can. The County has serious ants in their pants for more races, if anyone is interested, even beyond the existing three races). Perhaps we will see you all again in 2011.
And don't worry about HoCo2xCx. The double will be more awesome than ever because we're already doing extensive planning. November is going to be the new October.
