Newsletter - December 22, 2020
BRAC Zwift Series
Virtual Racing on Zwift for BRAC members (by Glen Winkel, BRAC Board of Directors)

BRAC is preparing a winter virtual racing season for its membership!

For those of you unfamiliar with virtual racing, all you need is a bicycle with a powermeter or a smart trainer and a membership on Zwift (newcomers can join for free for the first month. Monthly fees are $14.99 or 0.50 cents per day)

This next Saturday, Dec 26th, we are opening up our local OSI team race to ALL BRAC members to 1) gauge interest in virtual racing on Zwift with local BRAC racers, and also to 2) familiarize BRAC members with racing on Zwift with local riders.

For those of you who already participate in Zwift races, anyone can join the myriad of events on Zwift. However you are racing against riders from all over the world. We have found that it’s much more fun (and realistic) to race against those who you already race against in local races. With this in mind, we have created a series of events in Zwift that are technically a special version of meetups, that allow us to invite those who are members of a particular team or organization. And at the end of the meetup, it prints out the race results for bragging rights!

For these first two events, it will be one large BRAC racing group. However, in the future, we plan to break the groups down into gender/age/ability categories. We will combine categories and/or divide groups based upon interest in each category as we develop the series. So these two preliminary events will help us decide which groups to create races for.

So if you would like to have your age category represented, please come to these preliminary events! (or at least let Glen Winkel know that you would like to come but can’t make these first two events)

In addition to racing on Zwift, we have created a Voice Channel on Discord, which allows us to talk to everyone in the race at the same time. You don’t have to use Discord to race, but we have found that it’s quite a bit more fun to talk (if you can) while racing!

How to join the races/meetup on Zwift:
In order to be “invited” you have to “friend” the coordinator (Glen Winkel) in Zwift companion. Also, to help Glen determine which group (BRAC), make sure to add (BRACXYZ to your last name, where the X is your gender (M/W), Y is your age group, and Z is your category. For example: I would be WinkelBRACM602. This way only those who have (BRACXYZ) added will be invited to these preliminary races. This will also allow us to know what age categories are being represented in these preliminary events. Later we will use these name “tags” to determine which age category to invite you to.

First preliminary BRAC race:

Saturday Dec 26th at 9am
Course will be R.G.V. in France.

Course details: 
We’ll be racing the R.G.V course in France. RGV stands for “route grande Vitesse” which means very fast road! The course is 24km (15mi) with 107m of altitude change (351 ft). The first 12km is pan-flat, while the back half includes a timed KOM and some rollers along the river.

Second BRAC race:

Saturday Jan 2nd @ 9am
Course will be Tick Tock in Watopia
Details to follow

Future events will be a variety of courses in Watopia, France, London and Richmond.

Deadlines:
I will create the Race Invite for Sat the 26th on Thursday Dec 24th, so be sure to “Friend” Glen Winkel inside Zwift, prior to that date to be invited to the event. Likewise I will create the race invite on the Thursday prior to Jan 2nd, New Years Eve for the 2nd event.

Discord Link for BRAC Zwifters


Accept the invite and then click on the OSIServer and click on the BRAC Zwifters Voice Channel.
Las Vegas Cyclist Memorial Fund
Many of you have heard about the tragedy in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago where five riders were killed by a car. One of our members has ties to the Las Vegas cycling community, and has provided the link below where you can read more about their project to raise $1,000,000 to support the families of the victims. This project has only been going a short time, but they are already 20% to their goal.

https://lasvegascyclistmemorial.com/
BRAC BOD Candidates
On February 4th, BRAC will host the most important meeting of the year -- the Club Council Meeting. The first order of business will be the election of members to the Board of Directors. Every year, five positions become available out of the ten-member board. This year, so far, we have six candidates:

Andy Johnson: Andy is our incumbent President of the BOD

Damn Brandt: Damon is our incumbent Secretary of the BOD

Bill Plock: You know Bill as the man behind 303Cycling

Chris McGee: You know Chris as a past Executive Director of BRAC

Larry Potter: You know Larry as the driving force behind the Karen Hornbostel Memorial Time Trial Series.

Tobin Behling: Tobin moved to the Western slope a few years ago from Texas, where he ran the TX mountain bike association.

In the next emails we will have links to the candidates statements. We are very fortunate to have so many great candidates and incumbents for the 2021 election.

As the CC meeting will be online via Zoom, there will be some different features for the clubs participating. BRAC Clubs -- this would be a good time to start thinking about who is going to represent you at the meeting. We will need to know who that person is, as it will be their email that is used for the voting program that we are developing. We are hoping for a big turnout this year at the meeting, since no traveling to a face to face meeting is required.

More urgently, this will be a hugely important meeting, perhaps one of the biggest ever. We are submitting several bylaw changes, as we move forward with a new direction for BRAC, including a new name for the organization. Other important agenda items will be reviewing the 2020 finances, establishing a 2021 budget and its associated schedule of fees.

BRAC riders -- start talking to your club now. This is how you are represented in the direction of your local association.

"Decisions are made by those who show up."
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