Promoting - Permits and BikeReg

This morning I was up pretty early, even by my standards. I think it was 3:32 AM when I started brewing up a pot of coffee, the cats busy munching away upstairs. I staggered to the laptop to finally put through the permit apps.

I staggered because, frankly, I could barely walk.

See, on Sunday, I went to the Y with the missus and my sister-in-law. The SIL is an avid runner, so we all jumped on treadmills. And since we only had about 30 minutes to run, and I wanted to do a 5k, well, you can kind of guess what happened.

After a nice, calm, mellow warm-up, with all sorts of mental checking of the hip area for signs of injury or damage from the Big Crash, I checked the time.

And quickly set the gizmo to do a 5k run.

I cranked out an 8:30 pace start, an 8:00 middle, and a 7:30 pace last mile or so (well, I tried to dip into the 6:30s but got kind of tired).

The last time I ran a 5k was on a similar, if not identical, treadmill, one in the exact same room as this one. It took me almost 28 minutes to do it then - this time, less than 25 minutes.

Since the last time I ran was in May of 2009, you can understand that my legs were a bit tired after the run.

And, Tuesday, at 3:32 AM, I had to stagger to walk anywhere.

Anyway, I digress.

With freshly brewed coffee at hand (with 2 teaspoons of sugar, a dash of fat free half & half, and way too much peppermint extract), I started finalizing the USAC permits for Bethel.

Before it was all about printing forms, mailing them, and waiting for the paperwork to travel around the country. First Massachusetts, then Colorado. Now it's all electronic.

Problem is, I can't edit certain information. So I have to rely on the staff in Colorado to do that for me.

Now, usually, when you call for help with things like this, I'd expect it take forever. People will ask me questions on what I did, make me feel like I really screwed up, and jeez what kind of a moron would...

You know the saying - it's the nut holding the keyboard that screws things up.

Anyway, USAC is distinctly not like that. In fact, the person that help out with permitting and such, at least for this area, is really helpful. It's hard to believe that the only things I have to pay for is a club application ($150) and daily permit fees ($50). Okay, fine, we pay the $3 insurance per rider, but that's not money we necessarily see. And, at $12 pre-reg per week of racing (which includes that insurance), the riders shouldn't really worry about it either.

If I hear anyone complain about the $12 pre-reg fee...

Anyway, I'm hoping that the magical person in Colorado Springs can edit stuff as necessary to make the permits proper. But in the meantime, they're in the system, even if it needs just a little tweak.

And I can keep drinking my coffee.

The other nice thing in this computer age is BikeReg. It's a site that allows you to register online for pretty much any race you want to do. Okay, fine, they get a fee, like an eBay, but it's worth it.

Just like USAC's helpful person in Colorado Springs, BikeReg's team is also extremely service oriented. They're super friendly, super helpful, super responsive. In fact, if you check out the site link, it's the same one as last year.

How cool is that?

In fact, they're so good they're just a bit too responsive, and, to be honest, that's why I'm scrambling to get the permit apps in place. I won't go into details (I'm pleading the fifth), but suffice it to say that BikeReg rocks. Any scrambling is because of me.

Now that I've handled those things, I can work on other things. Like this post.

And a second mug of coffee.