David Roderick - 3/3/2019

Welcome to the
2019 ACP Certified, Paris-Brest-Paris Qualifying, Ohio Randonneur Brevet Series

I agree, that is too wordy, but completion of this series will help qualify you for what I believe is the greatest amateur bicycling event that exists. Remember that PBP precedes Le Tour de France in history, and it only comes around every four years. You know, kind of what the Olympics used to be.

There are “arcane” rules as Ted Meisky has referred to them, but they try to level the playing field. There will always be faster and slower riders, fancy, high priced machines and run of the mill weekend ride bikes. Riders can use GPS, but PBP limits the length of any aerobars. There is a brevet card that must be presented at the end so your results can be certified. Riders will ride some of the same roads that the other big cycling event covers with the same scenery.

A rider contacted me through our website the other day and asked what he had to do to go to PBP this year. I informed him that he would have to complete an ACP brevet series this year, that registration was open already, that there would be a cut off of riders, and that one of the tools that PBP would use to whittle down the numbers would be the distance of the longest ACP brevet that a rider completed last year. It would be possible, but not likely that he would qualify this year.

In 2003 when I went to PBP, I rode with a rider who had simply ridden the ACP series and got accepted. He was a securities trader from New York. After he parked his bike on the soccer field and headed for the clubhouse to officially register, he slipped on a damp wooden ramp, fell and fractured his wrist, and then went on to complete the ride.

In 2001 when I went to Boston-Montreal-Boston, there was a rider who lost his brevet card. The officials still checked him in to each control but warned him if he did not find his card, he would be disqualified, even if he completed the full distance. A local bike path rider saw something on the side of the road, picked it up, and thought it might be important. She called the number on the card, and informed whomever she talked to that she found a card that might be important. The rider got credit for BMB when the card was turned in after the ride.

My point is that one must really prepare and train for PBP. Over the past couple of seasons we have worked on your mental and physical abilities with headwinds, all sorts of weather, and flat courses where there was little opportunity to coast. We want you to have success at PBP, so we are going to work your legs in the hills this series. Hopefully you have been around randonneuring enough that you chose to go south to warmer weather to qualify, and all you have to do now is train. If not, you still have time, but managing your time is paramount. As I said, it doesn’t matter if you are fast or slow. The key to PBP is best managing your time.

It’s time to crank it up. Let’s train.