Monday, January 4, 2010

Designing a Race Schedule

With the new-year upon us and a new mountain bike season rapidly approaching, searching for certain races to design a Race Schedule can sometimes be challenging.

Taking into consideration the location, benefit to sponsors, cost of event, fun-factor, and timing all play a role in designing the schedule. It's always difficult to have that "perfect schedule" because usually there are two or three races that fall on the same weekend or only one week apart. Unfortunately, we cannot peak for all races.

In order to be able to compete at your best at certain races you have to choose which ones will best suit your riding abilities and strengths while trying to "peak" your training. We all have our "to do" races/rides that we try to do each season and every year it seems like two of them fall on the same weekend or around a time when we have other commitments already planned.

Another factor that affects how the final version of the schedule will look is that some races tend to change dates or cancel all together after initially setting a date. What's up with that? Lots of times it's due to lack of entrants prior to the event that lead to the organizer canceling his/her event. With our poor economy lately that has happened more that once unfortunately.

So with all of this taken into consideration, good luck designing your race schedule...who knows maybe I'll see you out on the same trails.