Month: May 2020

Schrödinger’s Packet – 5/23/20

I’ll admit it, there are very few things I remember from High School Physics. And I changed majors to avoid it in College, so… But what I do remember is Schrodinger’s cat. The below is from Wikipedia (credit to Wikipedia).

“Schrödinger’s cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor (e.g. Geiger counter) detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.” – Wikipedia article on Schrödinger’s cat

Now you may be wondering what the heck a quantum physics principle has to do with racing. The simple answer is that right now, I have a Schrödinger’s Packet.

As I mentioned in a prior blog post, a Race Organizer (‘ROX’) decided to change the race from a physical one to a virtual without any other options. This is the ONLY Race Organizer (RO) or Race Director (RD) that I’ve seen do this. Yes, I have lost about 10 races for 2020. However, every single other one was immediately refunded/deferred or transfer options were provided.

When they materially changed the race contract, I was disappointed. But I said ‘I’ll make the best of improvising with the race gear’ (as they had promised delivery prior to the original race date). That didn’t happen — the packet wasn’t shipped until the Monday afterwards. I did try to resolve this with ROX, but eventually had to file a dispute.

They do have 30 days to dispute the dispute. And I do have another couple of weeks before the virtual race ‘ends’. Given that the dispute could be undone, I’m viewing this as a Schrödinger’s Packet.

And for the record, I am not opening the packet until everything is finalized. Once the credit is final, I will reach out to ROX and ask how they want to receive it back.

It’s disappointing that I had to go through all of this. HOPEFULLY ROX will learn from this and offter better options in the future. But in the immortal words of Burgess Meredith , “You can wish in one hand and crap in the other and see which fills up first.”

The COVID Effect – 5/2/20

“I give honesty without regret.” – Unknown senior (from Voices of Old People by Simon & Garfunkel)

And to be honest, the COVID pandemic has created a tremendous amount of frustration for me. This has included cancellations of multiple racees and has impacted my training. I just haven’t had the focus most of the last 6 weeks to get in everything I need to. I know it could be much worse, which is why it’s just temporary frustration instead of anger or just plain giving up on the 2020 season.

While I have lost multiple events, I was fortunate to get a 2nd Indoor Tri in in March before the shutdowns occurred. I truly love doing Coach Joe’s (Experience Triathlon) events, and had hoped to do the April one as well.

As a brief summary of the Feb/March ones, the swims went OK (with March’s going better), the bikes were both solid, and the March run was much better than Feb’s. Thankfully, there are still multiple ET outdoor races for this summer to look at doing. For those of you making schedule readjustments, I would strongly recommend looking at these as options:

6/14 – ET Batavia
7/12 – ET Lake Zurich
8/2 – ET Naperville
9/5 – ET Pleasant Prairie

Once the shut downs had occurred, I expected to see RDs do the right things. Whether this meant cancellations with refunds, rescheduling to the fall or deferring to 2021. And for the overwhelming majority, that’s what has occurred.

As just one example, the Shamrock Shuffle did full refunds in addition to still sending out the swag. Yes, that has and will cost them a lot of money to do. But IMO they’ll make it up in 2021 and beyond. Simply because anyone looking at it from the outside should say ‘that’s a RO that I want to give my money to’ , along with ‘I had X on my 2021 schedule for that same weekend, but I’ll look at doing the Shamrock Shuffle’. If it wasn’t already a permanent fixture on my race schedule, their actions this year would make it so.

So when the order was extended to May 31st, I expected something similar from my May RDs/ROs. One of them (Race Director X (‘RDX’) / Race Organizer X (‘ROX’)) made a 4th decision — turning a physical race into a virtual one without any of the other options mentioned before. I am using RDX/ROX going forward from here, and would ask those who know the real name NOT to Dox them. Frustrating, but that was the choice they made.

Their March e-mail mentioned ‘you will have everything by race day’. So in the spirit of making lemonade out of lemons, I thought ‘Okay, we’ll make the best of it… and simulate things with the race items.’ A few days prior to the event, I still hadn’t received the items, so I reached out. The response that I received was ‘we’ll send things soon… COVID has impacted our ability to do this.’

I have two issues with this: (1) there was a gap of at least 3 weeks between the two e-mails where they could have shipped items out and (2) from the way the e-mail reads, it sounds like they’re using COVID as a crutch. Yes, social distancing needs to be followed. And yes, COVID may be creating some minor delays. However, I don’t believe these delays can be contributed to it given how long of a lead time there was.

Given all of this, IMO what was supposed to be a physical race has now turned into one of those ‘$x for a charity’ races. You’ve probably seen them — $10-$15 for a medal/bib so you can do a virtual race. Because of this, I have asked ROX for a credit to be used for one of their future races. I know that they couldn’t control the initial change. But IMO, what it’s turned into is NOT what I bought — or what they advertised after it had to become a virtual race.

Hopefully things will reopen at the beginning of June so that I can salvage a big chunk of my 2020 season. Regardless, after 6 weeks of frustration, I am working on getting things in line so that I am ready for whenever it does start…