I have been approached by many of you over the past several months inquiring about the inner workings of Bandit Racing - how things work, who does what, training oversight, support staff, etc., and well as more general questions regarding how we deal with such diversity (finance and legal professionals on the same team), and what our hopes and dreams for the upcoming season are. I’d like to thank you all for your interest and patience, and while I can’t speak for the rest of the Bandits, I’ll do my best to cover the really important stuff to do with the gears and levers of this, our team.

For starters we are less a cohesive unit than we are a collection of self-serving individuals with our own game plan. Each of us is “in it to win it” and at the expense of the other Bandit racers. This may sound peculiar to some of you and that I’ve spoken out loud what should be kept to myself. But it’s actually contractual. When I signed on to race for Bandit, I had to promise to think only of myself and of ways to screw my teammates over. ADM drafted the documents (though he did give himself a side letter giving him the right to help Justin out on occasion if he didn’t make it out to train until April) and they were signed by all. I should next turn your attention to the duties and responsibilities of the individual team members. When setting out a route for the day, we all put our suggestions into a hat and then Jeff picks one of them and reads it aloud. Its strange, but out of the 30+ team rides we’ve been on, mine hasn’t come up once. I asked ADM and Matt and Justin (the one time he came out to train) if the route that came up was theirs and they all said no. There’s a reason I’m the designated “big ideas” guy, but the odds I calculated of Jeff’s preferred ride coming up 30 times in a row were (1/5)^30 - which is about as likely as Jeff going vegan, Matt having a porterhouse at Peter Lugers, ADM dressing down into jeans, or Justin making it to a training ride - not very. But then again, there’s probably a reason Jeff deals with probabilities for a living. Homeslice has “Bend it Like Beckham” math skills.

As for training, the pace is generally dictated by ADM. He rides with one of these power measuring gadgets and we determined that if we get 20 yards ahead of him on climbs, and 20 yards behind him on downhills, we were probably going about the right pace. Further to my mention about our self-serving mandate, if ever we find ourselves feeling particularly good, it is our obligation to inflict pain on the other Bandits by dialing up the pace. Jeff has been the most self-serving in this regard so far this year, followed closely by me. A couple weeks ago, I torched the 9W climb out of Nyack and the other Bandits were like, “Wicked ripper, guy. You’re awesome.” In truth, I was awesome. I could tell they were hurting and I laughed about it all week. To be honest, this was my only goal for the second chapter of my cycling career, so I guess I have to think pretty seriously about retiring (read: quitting) again and finding something else to not do.

As for support staff and oversight, we’re currently looking for an intern with 5+ years experience to help us out. Since he doesn’t come on the rides, Justin has volunteered to handle the interviewing, so send any resumes to him. Best of luck to all applicants - though only 1 of you will be hired (unless there are 2 applicants).

Thanks for reading,

Ryan

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Ryan's Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.