BAFS 2019 General Info Sticky

[Henry]

Update 11/21/18:

****PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS THREAD. **** This is a post to provide a single spot for information regarding Bike Arlington Freezing Saddles (BAFS). I will update this post as needed to keep information current. If you have a question, or think that something needs to be added or changed in this post, PM me please.

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What is Freezing Saddles, (or BAFS “Bike Arlington Freezing Saddles”)?

Freezing Saddles is a winter riding competition for bike riders in the general DC area, organized by random people who talk to each other on the Washington Area/ Bike Arlington Bike Forum. While we organize ourselves on the BikeArlington forum, and Bike Arlington has generously donated some sort of prizes in the past, we are not run by BikeArlington. As described by a forum member, BAFS organization

Originally Posted by Steve O:

probably most closely resembles organizing a game of freeze tag on the grade-school playground.

How it works, keeping in mind things can and do change year-to-year during the planning stage:

Freezing Saddles runs from January 1 through the last full day of winter (1 second before midnight, March 19). We divide people into teams of 10 or so people, striving for competitive parity. Each team is a mix of riders who typically ride enough to qualify as insane, people who ride regularly but like sane people, people who ride occasionally, and people who have never ridden through a winter before. An attempt is made to keep the mix roughly comparable for all the teams so they are approximately evenly matched and everyone has a fair shot at being on a winning team. This is usually botched, but we ask people to fill out a registration form to the best of their ability before each year’s game to create a list of players and your expected or typical mileage. A volunteer for the year then divvies everyone up into teams using combinations of predicted miles, random selection, and sometimes preferences for regional team groupings.

Usually sometime around Halloween, planning threads pop up on the forum (in the Freezing Saddles subforum; if you’re reading this, you’re already here), where we argue about things like e-bikes, and whether 10 points per day is the right number and other rules minutia. Past rules are subject to change in the yearly planning process. Sometime around Thanksgiving someone usually puts up the registration information. Registration typically closes on Christmas Eve, and/or when we have reached the participation limit. In recent years, we capped the number of players at 250 to try to keep the game and the data collection manageable.

We use Strava for data collection and team organization, which means that to play, you will need a Strava account and after teams are created, you will need to join your team’s Strava group. You will also need some sort of GPS device or smartphone to track your rides. We no longer count manually entered rides (not because we don’t trust you, they just tended to cause too much data corrective work for the leaderboard techie gurus).

We use a leaderboard application http://freezingsaddles.com/ developed and maintained by awesome forum member hozn (but being taken on by obscurerichard this year) to report on team and individual points and all kinds of other cool riding metrics with team/individual standings. Plus pictures. Players need to authorize this app to read your Strava data, or Strava rightly will not give us access to it.

People also offer up “Pointless Prizes”, prizes for whatever kind of random things strikes the fancy of the person offering the prize. These are generally announced on postings in the Freezing Saddles subforum of the BikeArlington Forum.

We generally have a happy hour near the start of the game to formally announce teams and after the end of the game to hand out prizes. These are fun, but attendance is not mandatory.

And if you want to promote any of this nonsense on the Twitters or other social mediums, use the hashbrown #BAFS2019.

Some links to get you started:

Registration form, and description of the steps to register here.
Whom to contact for various functions: http://bikearlingtonforum.com/showthread.php?13903-2019-Freezing-Saddles-Volunteers

2019 Rules:

1) Scoring: Some slight changes were made to try to tighten up the Team Competition. These, of course, are again subject to change in future years!!!

• 10 points for each day of 1 mile+ (same as before)
• 1 point per mile (same as before)
• Team contribution per individual capped at 100 miles per week. A week is Monday-Sunday. Partial weeks at beginning and end also have 100 miles cap on team contribution.
• Individual rankings remain the same with no cap on the individual mileage on scoreboard.
So the max someone can contribute to their team is 170 points per week. If they miss a day but still ride 100 miles, they get 160 points.

2) Game runs 00:00:01 January 1 through 23:59:59 March 19 (the last day of winter). All rides starting from January 1 on count, even though teams will not be assigned until the first happy hour (typically, a week or two after that). If you are planning to get a super-early start and be out riding your bike as the year changes, be aware that rides starting *before* midnight will not be counted by the leaderboard. You need to stop your recording device and restart a new ride after midnight for your miles on January 1 to count. Similarly, you will need to end your last ride by 23:59:59 March 19 for it to count.

3) Trainer rides don’t count. Mark your rides as such or include #NOBAFS in the title to exclude them. Take your bike outside and ride it some distance across the surface of the earth in order to earn points. Manual entries will also not be accepted. This is a change from previous years.

4) Rides made while travelling out of the area do count. On vacation somewhere warm? Lucky you! Find a bike and ride it for some points. Somewhere extra cold? So, so sorry. Find a bike and ride it for some points!

5) Rides made on E-assist (but not solely electric/motor powered) bikes do count, except that rides on an Elf do not. See here: Inane E-bike Debate.

6) Anyone can award a Pointless Prize for anything. Go check out the thread for what people are offering, and feel free to join in and award something yourself. These are typically small fun or cute or symbolic things, not high dollar prizes or anything. But whatever you want! No one will probably argue about you throwing money or new bikes at them if you so desire.)

Topic

[wheelswings]

I’m just catching up with this thread. Just a couple of clarifications. Some of the prior entries suggest that this year’s “active volunteers” made the rule change. As one of the FS volunteers, I want to make clear that that was not the case… like y’all, I heard about the change on this thread.

I haven’t yet considered the full ramifications of the rule change. Certainly it will mean a lot more pressure on less active team members, whose non-participation under the new system may readily sink a team’s standing. In the past, the rest of the team could make up for those who chose not to ride.

The idea that “a few high-mileage riders” can determine the outcome of the Freezing Saddles competition is in some ways a misconception. As captain of the winning Titanium Geraniums last year, I will note that it was absolutely a team effort. All through January, we were rock bottom for ride days and mileage. When a teammate said in our chatroom that he hoped we could finish in the top ten, I bit my lip and said nothing ‘cause I honestly did not think it possible.

But over the weeks we bonded and grew to love each other’s quirks, kindness and humor. The Titanium-G’s became a family and together we caught the FS-virus. It was by far the most egalitarian and democratic team I have ever experienced…. and the results were an amazing testament to what can happen when people work together.

[Steve O]

@AlanA 183575 wrote:

And one final note, I think the 1 mile sleaze ride is quite bogus. I’ve certainly done it in the past, but what does it really accomplish? A person riding one mile around their neighborhood in awful weather (or while they are sick) is not promoting anything of value.

From the very beginning, sleaze rides have been one of the most beloved aspects of Freezing Saddles. They are tracked specially on the web site and served as inspiration for perhaps the BEST POINTLESS PRIZE EVER, awarded in 2015 to kwarkentien.

[sjclaeys]

Watching people who don’t participate in Freezing Saddles complain about the rules of Freezing Saddles is one of the most DC things on this forum.

[Subby]

@sjclaeys 183617 wrote:

Watching people who don’t participate in Freezing Saddles complain about the rules of Freezing Saddles is one of the most DC things on this forum.

As is watching a small group of people re-write rules

[ShawnoftheDread]

@sjclaeys 183617 wrote:

Watching people who don’t participate in Freezing Saddles complain about the rules of Freezing Saddles is one of the most DC things on this forum.

Are you referring to me? I’ve been a FS participant four times, and came to the forum to sign up this year when I saw this thread, as noted above.

Perhaps even more DC is a bike riding challenge in which a couple of people who don’t ride much change the rules to tamp down the efforts of those who ride a lot.

[TwoWheelsDC]

@Subby 183619 wrote:

As is watching a small group of people re-write rules

Also known as a “Senate.”

[musclys]

@ShawnoftheDread 183620 wrote:

Perhaps even more DC is a bike riding challenge in which a couple of people who don’t ride much change the rules to tamp down the efforts of those who ride a lot.

+10000000000

If this move really is about encouraging low-mile riders to participate, why not add two more rules:

1. Any rider who does not log at least two sleazes in two consecutive weeks will be booted from BAFS
2. Team scoring will be calculated not by total points but (total points/team members)

That way low-mileage and low-volume riders will be encouraged to participate, but if they don’t their teammates — who, as W&W mentioned, can no longer hope for a few 200-miles-a-week riders to lift their team numbers — won’t be punished.

[TwoWheelsDC]

I frankly don’t give a shit about the competition. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a team that was even remotely competitive…I just sign up to promote the idea. So I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but I will say:

-the new rule changes seems a bit sudden and opaque for the impact that it will have
-I think the rule may make the scoring more even, but I don’t think it will affect anyone’s riding habits, which really is the objective (maybe the top riders will ride less, but I’m not so sure of that)
-The new rule may shift things to a more individual-focused competition, which I think is not in the spirit of how we originally conceived FS

I think some interesting things could be done to help incentivize the less ambitious riders, while maybe helping to even out the scores (with the disclaimer that these are not necessarily easy to implement from a technical standpoint):

-commute rides are worth 2x per mile (or whatever multiplier)
-CaBi rides are worth 3x per mile (or whatever multiplier)
-points available for non-riding tasks like volunteering/organizing bike-related activities (yeah this is tough, but I’m just spitballing)
-calculate team points based on some combination of standard points and “team total days ridden” (or something?)
-incorporate “jersey” points into team standings, maybe as a multiplier of some sort (fastest rider=green jersey, most climbing=polka dot jersey, etc…)

[CBGanimal]

@jrenaut 183584 wrote:

As a volunteer-run game, the people who consistently volunteer for the hard jobs get to make the rules. If the cap sucks this year, we can change it next year.

I completely agree and looking forward to seeing how this affects the game! Kind of a bummer so many aren’t playing this year!

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[bentbike33]

Maybe, like with travel teams and house leagues in youth soccer, we need two levels of team competition. “Freezing Saddles Sleaze League” teams are open to all participants and follow the rules as established with the weekly points cap, and “Freezing Saddles Elite League” teams are limited to previous participants who were everyday riders in at least one FS competition and averaged at least 100 miles per week (i.e., likely to be capped out on Sleaze League team points).

[dbehrend]

@TwoWheelsDC 183630 wrote:

-the new rule changes seems a bit sudden and opaque for the impact that it will have

I totally agree with this. I think many were caught off guard.

@TwoWheelsDC 183630 wrote:

-I think the rule may make the scoring more even, but I don’t think it will affect anyone’s riding habits, which really is the objective (maybe the top riders will ride less, but I’m not so sure of that)

As someone in the middle of the pack (I think I averaged about 150 miles a week during the competition last year), I’m not sure how motivated by the individual competition I’ll be to ride beyond the cap. Last year, it was about stepping it up to support my team.

@TwoWheelsDC 183630 wrote:

-The new rule may shift things to a more individual-focused competition, which I think is not in the spirit of how we originally conceived FS

This is a good point and definitely relates to my comment above.

[dbehrend]

@TwoWheelsDC 183630 wrote:

I think some interesting things could be done to help incentivize the less ambitious riders, while maybe helping to even out the scores (with the disclaimer that these are not necessarily easy to implement from a technical standpoint):

-commute rides are worth 2x per mile (or whatever multiplier)
-CaBi rides are worth 3x per mile (or whatever multiplier)
-points available for non-riding tasks like volunteering/organizing bike-related activities (yeah this is tough, but I’m just spitballing)
-calculate team points based on some combination of standard points and “team total days ridden” (or something?)
-incorporate “jersey” points into team standings, maybe as a multiplier of some sort (fastest rider=green jersey, most climbing=polka dot jersey, etc…)

Or, what about some level of diminishing returns above the cap (e.g., 1/2 point for miles 101-200, 1/4 point for miles above 200/week)?

[dcv]

@hozn 183573 wrote:

Sure, yes,daily sleaze rides. Emphasis shifts to riding every day as opposed to riding for any duration or distance. I assume the number was chosen due to being a median distance for the competitors, but I have no idea.

But are any of us discussing this even playing this game? . I’m certainly not, and would be surprised if Subby were to come back to this again.

Subby is playing BAFS this year, got sucked in by the mileage cap.

[hozn]

@dcv 183697 wrote:

Subby is playing BAFS this year, got sucked in by the mileage cap.

Yeah, he just told me this AM. I am shocked! He must have misread that as a daily-mileage minimum.

[jrenaut]

@hozn 183701 wrote:

Yeah, he just told me this AM. I am shocked! He must have misread that as a daily-mileage minimum.

Bring me a 6 pack of good beer and I’ll consider hacking the back end to exempt you from the mileage cap.

[Author]

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