Merry Christmas MIVA! A few short things to note:
Enjoy your time with family and friends everyone, thanks for making 2015 so awesome.
Thank you to many of you who have already renewed (or signed up fresh) as MIVA members for 2016. This enables MIVA some early season cash to purchase insurance, get signs made, permit fees, etc. As a freebie this year, everyone who signs up before Feb.1st gets a free pair of MIVA name decals for your bike! This can be your last name, your bikes name, whatever you want (one word). On the webscorer sign up page there is a drop down menu where you can choose one of three colour schemes.
Remember, the order goes in Feb 1st, so if you're going to sign up anyways stop procrastinating!
******2016 MEMBERSHIP NOW OPEN****** To fill out the form AND pay online via Paypal, please use this Webscorer link: http://www.webscorer.com/register?raceid=15138
To enroll the old fashioned (but totally ok) way, please click here --> 2016 MIVA Membership Form <-- to download the 2016 MIVA membership form and waiver. Submit them to Corey Friesen via email ( Miva.President at gmail.com ) or drop off with any MIVA board member.
MIVA's mailing address is: Box 731 STN A Nanaimo BC V9R 5M2
A mini survey! LINK
Thank you!
Thank you to everyone for making 2015 a record breaking year. It was a challenging year for MIVA as we transitioned and changed some things up a bit, but a strong board and dedicated membership made it a success. We ended the year with 120 members, our highest ever. We held fewer events overall (to combat volunteer burnout) but brought in greater overall racer numbers. MIVA hosted 14 time trials, 12 crits, 5 hill climbs, the 50/100k Challenge Ride, the Mount Washington Hill Climb, and the Pony Cross with COTR. I can't thank the board of directors enough for all of the hard work they did in 2015. We met once a month more or less, and well over a thousand emails tossing ideas in the air, voting on decisions, and all the behind the scenes work that keeps the machine running smoothly. Thank you.
The highlight of the year was the Pony Cross race where we shattered our attendance record with 284 racers and hosted a very successful event. The months leading up to it were full of planning, and the night before was a busy one as MIVA came out in full force to set up the race course in headlamps and gumboots.
Other highlights MIVA accomplished or set into motion in 2015:
TIME TRIALS We dropped from 20 down to 14 events this year to help accommodate shuffling the hill climbs sooner amongst other things. Race numbers were through the roof as we averaged 25 people per race, up from 19/race last year, and 13 the year before that. In 2 years we've almost doubled. Over the past 5 years MIVA has hosted 86 TTs, with almost 1300. For TT#100 this year, we will party.
CRITERIUMS Numbers were up and a few hardy souls did every single crit. This year we ran 12 crits, 9 at Boxwood and 3 at Arbutus Meadows.
HILL CLIMBS We hosted 5 hill climbs, with an average of 23 racers out each night. Last year we averaged....7. The biggest jump was in the female competitors, going from 7 TOTAL female entries in all of 2014 up to 40 this year. Many of these racers were products of the Monday Night Rides
GROUP RIDES It has to be mentioned that there are many people who set up unofficial group rides almost every week and offer to bring along others all on their own volition. Thank you to people like Shep Stewart and Paul Thompson for doing this, and the rest of you as well. The Monday Night Rides were the brainchild of Janna Gillick a few years back to teach people the rules of the road cycling and to gain confidence and experience riding in a group. They were very successful and well attended. Over time the next year they became faster and faster, and eventually it was time for a reboot. Mike McCarney took that on this year and met almost every Monday at 6pm from the Ice Center to head out for a 20-25k ride up Jingle Pot. There were times we had 20 people out to these and had to split into A/B groups.
The Wednesday Night Rides were run by Angelina Landry and had great numbers out week after week, eventually morphing into an intermediate group and an advanced group.
Looking ahead to 2016, we're looking at fine tuning things a bit:
A few of our Board Directors are moving on, thank you to Peter McCaffery, Ron Hewitson, Menno Jongsma, and Matt Evans for all of the hard work. Ron will stay on as our Cross Race Director next fall, and Leonidas Matt is sticking around to be our webmaster as well.
Going into 2016, we'd love to hear from you. Any races/fondos you want in our calendar just let us know. If there are results you can pass on to us please do.
The 2015 AGM Minutes will be made available when they're ready. MIVA welcomes the 2016 MIVA Board of Directors, a good mix of old and new.
Looking ahead to 2016, we need volunteers to help with timing. Peter is transitioning out of timing the Crits, and I'll be elbow deep in diapers so won't be able to time as many TTs. We're putting it out there early in case there are any club members or their teenagers out there who are interested in earning extra credits for volunteering (if applicable). Please get in touch with us if so.
MIVA has its own official Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/midislandvelo/ where all site posts will auto post to. LIKE IT so it gets pushed into the main feed more and more. The MIVA discussion group is still there and a great place to organize group rides etc.
Last, the main email to contact MIVA is now miva.president@gmail.com. We've standardized our boards emails to enable better sharing of documents, and to eliminate the thousands of MIVA emails in my personal inbox! Hit up this quick one question survey on how often you want MIVA emails to hit your inbox please! http://goo.gl/forms/P4ewo2dGvJ
Onward and upward, again.
-Corey
This weekend I had the chance to join in the fun that is the Single Speed World Championship. Without a doubt Parker, Drew and the rest of the many crew and volunteers put on one hell of an amazing event. Getting to Hoyne Brewery at ten am Saturday morning to be greeted by trays of free beer I knew this was going to be a weekend unlike any other.
Broken into groups to keep things "manageable" we were sent on a booze fuelled tour of Victoria to tackle the Feats of Strength. Five challenges designed to separate the winners from the losers and qualify for the championship race. Our first challenge was simple, up the stairs, through the pump track and back. The tone was set quickly as we realized actually riding the pump track was optional and the "rules" were really just suggestions. But as long as fun was had it was all fair game.
The next morning at Western Speedway you could tell fun was had the night before. Many of the volunteers and riders looked like they could have used another two days worth of sleep. But in spite of it they still managed to have an amazing course set up and ready to party. Tents were set up, grills were lit and beer was poured. A look around the site would almost make you think a race was going on. But there wasn't really any organized racing that I could see. Short cuts were offered as reward for taking a drink. Drinks were offered as reward for taking a drink. The course tape in a lot of sections was taken to be a suggestion only. Hand ups were varied and plentiful from waffles peanut butter covered pickles to the healthy Kale wrapped in bacon. If you were thirsty, hungry or not having fun you were definitely doing it wrong.
And that really is the theme of this event. Don't take it seriously and have fun. As we were riding I overheard Sam say that he couldn't remember the last time he rode a bike this slow and casually, and then remarked at how much fun he was having. Its a good thing to remember. We've all heard the joke that if there's more than two people out its a race. We've seen it/done it even on solo rides with strava and pushing ourselves to beat the other guy or get a new PB. Or when we've only got an hour to ride and we have to cram as many miles in as we can to make it count. When all is said and done we need to take time to remember why we started riding bikes in the first place. Because it's fun.
