Where Were We?

 In celebration of the twentieth year of this blog, I have a few tales to tell. This post is one of them. This series will occur off and on throughout this anniversary year, I hope to illuminate some behind-the-scenes stories and highlights from the blog during this time. Enjoy! 

Again with the Trans Iowa stuff. I know, but April was essentially "Trans Iowa Month" here, and I suppose you could add in the first week of May with my reporting on the just completed event for the year. This time I wanted to shine a light on cue sheet navigation. It was something I took great pains to explain in detail here on the blog, so many of you long-time readers will probably recall this being a big deal.

A typical Trans Iowa cue sheet

I was chatting with Cedar Valley Bicycle Collective board member Nick Arendt at our most recent board meeting and he brought up cue sheet navigation while we were discussing Iowa Wind And Rock, (happening today and tomorrow, actually!). 

Nick said something which I've heard before, but is something I do not consider often, and is probably something most folks who have never used a cue sheet in an event would think about. Now, this probably is somewhat unique in terms of how I implemented cue sheet navigation, so others may have a different viewpoint, but if you had ridden in Trans Iowa, or as Nick, in the only C.O.G.100 event, you know first hand what Nick meant when he told me he didn't really ever know exactly where he was during the event.

I suppose it may seem very odd as to why I would have made the cues so precise, yet so vague at the same time so that riders knew exactly where to turn, but had no idea in a macro sense where the points were on a map. No sense of space beyond the immediate was portrayed on the cues. I went as far as not identifying towns and villages on the cues. Unless a rider saw a water tower emblazoned with the village's name, or a Post Office, business, or official government office of some sort, they would never know where they were in relation to ....well, anything!

Finishers of Trans Iowa knew where the start and end points were. But where did they go? Image by A. Andonopoulous

It was not uncommon for Trans Iowa finishers to ask me at the end of the event, "Where did we go this year?" Some of them would understand in a general sense given some knowledge of highways in the state and where they had crossed them, but most had no idea where they had been, especially in the earlier versions before GPS was widely available to cyclists. Of course, later into TI's run cyclists could have used a track of where they had been on their GPS enabled computer afterward to gauge where the route had gone, but many riders did not have this available to them during those days.

So, it was imperative not only for the riders to pay attention to every detail on the cues, but for me and those who reviewed my cue sheets to get every detail critical to navigation right. It was also a difficult task to edit this information down to a clear and concise reading with no confusion induced by the information I did give riders. This was facilitated by those I had volunteer to check my cues out. People like Jeremy Fry, Wally Kilburg, George Keslin, Tony McGrane, and others who would either look over my cues or use them to navigate the route in the field.

Every year these people suggested edits and helped me make Trans Iowa cues the best possible. It was a hard task with a new course every year all 14 years I put this event on. While processes were refined and things were eased by the end of the run, it was by no means an "easy task". Giving explanations every year on the blog was also a bit tedious, however, I felt it could never be pointed out enough how the cues worked.

And I am glad I took the space here to do that. It made for an experience you cannot get anywhere else in cycling. Well......there is Iowa Wind and Rock! And the Ragnarok 105 uses cues yet, I think... So you still can get this experience as long as they keep those events going.