Perhaps I’m not grateful enough…
… but when I opened my mailbox today and found a Special! Mailing! from RUSA which turned out to be a PBP memory book, my first reaction was not “Oh, that’s nice; it will encourage me to go for a ride with 5000 of my closest friends” but “well, that’s an effing waste of money” as I tossed the thing into the recycling bin.
Yes, yes, I know that a large part of the reason that RUSA exists is so that people can qualify for PBP in the United States instead of having to fly to Europe to ride the qualifiers, but, well, that’s not why I joined. I joined because the structure of the events got me out of bed in the morning to do the rides instead of sleeping in until noon and having to scramble to do even 100 miles before it got dark (I’m better about getting up at the crack of night to go out on a nice 300km ramble now, but it’s still easier to get up when the brevet clock starts at 6am and I can’t just use organizer fiat to roll it back to 7am. I’m going to have to work on that, though, given that there’s no Portland series next year and I’m not going to ride out to distant suburbs for bike camping, even if it’s bike camping that comes with a nice ACP stamp that will let me spent thousands of dollars going for a ride with 5000 of my closest friends.) These days I’m a member because RUSA keeps track of the miles I ride on permanents, so I can chase a megameter of completed rides in a year.
So I rolled my eyes and threw out the stupid memory book. At least PBP only happens every 4 years so I won’t have to toss another one until 2016.