In Part 1 I told you all about naming a Sportive. Which, when you open up the discussion beyond one person (and to be fair I don’t think it was the intention of the committee member who gave me the go ahead on this project to have a discussion (he has what psychologists might describe as a transactional leadership style (no bad thing one must stress). He had a name in mind, ‘Kinross Sportive’ which he stated it should be and still maintains it is a better name; which in his view the event in time will become known as. The direction on the name was especially pertinent as we as a club had had, laboured discussions about names for a possible event previously. However, in generously appointing me as Event Director he did open up the discussion. As I have a transformational approach to leadership rather than a transactional approach when in leadership roles, this meant the name came up for a discussion, although my intention was it should be Sportive Kinross rather than Kinross sportive.
Now you you’ll be wondering what all this stuff about transactional and transformational leadership has to do with a cycle sportive! Well actually nothing to do with the cycling as such (the probable exception would be a big pro Team) but as organising anything involves a diverse range of personalities with one or more people in leadership roles it comes into play. Which is exactly what happened with Sportive Kinross, by allowing a different style of leader it lead to the whole process which was subject to preconceptions on what it should be called, the fact there should be one flattish route and there would be no charity involvement. There were fears too ‘how many entries would it attract? Will it attract any entries!?’ “... are we a big enough club to organise such an event?” So the leadership approach is important as that determines the level of engagement you have with the contributory parties. But clearly the next part for that discussion was the route and this required engagement, as designing a good cycle route requires all parties with experience and interest to contribute to the discussion. The route design started with the preconception and in some respects I felt as Moses might have done when he received the Ten Commandments or Charlton Heston if you have seen the movie although Charlton Heston did voice God in the movie too, so technically he was ordering himself to do something. I digress, the commandments came down to me via email rather than through a burning bush and at a club meeting in a local pub. As I recall they went ‘And thou shalt have but one route’, ‘...it shall be around 80 miles, it shall be mainly flat, it shall take us out somewhere and back to whence you came from’ All this seemed pretty reasonable to me as I am, (as I explained previously) a cycling philistine. So against that set of requirements I devised a couple of options for consideration. The first attempt at having them ‘considered’ proved abortive as ‘The Lord’ did not show at the pub on the planned evening to talk them though! So I went sideways to a member of the sportive sub-committee, so not on the actual ‘club committee’ and we sorted out a version that we felt worked well. However, in opening up the debate, the hardcore ‘sportivers’ in the club made their move with the observation that the route was not tough enough, which induced a comment from a club member who is more into speed than hill climbing “However, it seems you still want to put hills in:- ... Lomond hills!, Climb from Auchtermuchty to Newburgh!, Dunning Glen!, Stronachie!, wow!! my knees hurt just listing them....we are not all Contadors or Wiggins..” The debate raged on with the compromise developing that we have two routes of a similar distance. One route would be a flattish, the other was to be hilly. Finally our club President came to the rescue with a piece of wisdom “Two routes seem unnecessarily complex (flat and hilly) though you could do long and short on the same roads,” Which did not fully resolve whether it was hilly or flat but it did open up the window to bring in the fact that I had written to Scottish Cycling about permissions for sportives and I had received a handy reply from British Cycling (note, not Scottish Cycling). This included the guidance notes for amateur events that expressly stated Sportives generally have a choice of routes. Key point of course is they were guidance notes and not prescriptive. So I decided to throw them into the now highly charged mix (bearing in mind we were still debating how hard the primary route should be) the idea of a shorter route i.e. A route of 50 odd miles to encourage novice entrants; or the post winter unfit cyclists who want something challenging but achievable whilst they break out from their winter hibernation. This opened up a whole new line of discussion on why we should have two routes, with comments like “The shorter distances attract very few riders eg tour of Exmoor 56 mile route only 11 took part......!!!!” which of course meant as the argument or discussion had entered a statistical mode and as we all know there are “lies, damned lies and statistics” In the end we came up the following conclusion below is the minute of the meeting:
“Wide ranging discussion on routes, reference made to British Cycling guidance experiences of various members. Conclusion, three routes one c.50 miles two 70 -90 miles, keep common where practical.”
So we set about working one out for the proposal to the protagonists for a tough route, to be advised that the first draft of the route was probably a little too tough!
Although to be fair I have since discovered the digital OS Mapping I was using (something to do with Memory ... is the brand) gave us rather distorted height gains. The software was suggesting over 7000 feet of height gain, the physical survey told us a something in excess of 5000 feet My colleagues from the tough route camp came in with their thoughts and finally the Black route was born, the Red route was confirmed and the Blue route accepted.
Of course having established three distinct route options we now had to sort out names for the routes. A whole new debate opened up. I fired the first shot with a modestly controversial suggestion we should use Italian as, road cycling is historically a distinctly continental activity and arguably more Italian than French. Planning on the use of names like Severo, Medio, Entrica, the use of Italian was not well received by the golf club committee, simplification of names was the key, hence, Black, Red, Blue.
