Tuesday, June 21, 2011

short cue sheets for anchor house ride

Edit 6/23: These sheets have been updated. If you downloaded before 9:00 pm (21:00) EDT June 23 2011, please download the new ones.

I'm directionally-challenged when I'm on my bicycle. I don't lead rides for the Princeton Freewheelers, with whom I do most of my group riding, and I've spread around the slogan that "it's always safe to presume that Jim doesn't know where he is." I've done four rides with cue sheets this spring, and on all of them, I got off the route (once when it was my second time doing the same route in two weeks). I got back on quickly enough, but I know that I need extra help other than just being able to read a cue sheet. When I'm tired, I get my rights and lefts mixed up, and if there are too many lines on the sheet, I get confused about that, too.

With that in mind, I asked for, and got, an early release of the route sheet for this year's Anchor House ride. From that, I've made special cue sheets for myself. The key points:
  • Each sheet only shows the directions for one day, from one stop to the next - e.g., from the hotel to the first SAG is on one sheet, the first SAG to the second is on another sheet, and so on;
  • The text is bigger than the regular cue sheets, and bold;
  • Next to the directional markers (R, L, S) are arrows pointing in the correct direction;
  • Information extraneous to the directions is not included. Since all riders will also have the official cue sheets, these do not have, e.g., the phone numbers to the hotels.
If any riders have the least interest in them, I'm hosting/posting then for download. Each sheet is a separate .pdf file, and they are in zipfiles which should be readable on any Windows, Mac, or Linux/Unix computer (I made the files on a Linux box). The first is a 1.1MB file with all of the sheets; the others are separated by day of the ride, and are less than 200KB each:

shorts-all.zip

shorts-1.zip

shorts-2.zip

shorts-3.zip

shorts-4.zip

shorts-5.zip

shorts-6.zip

shorts-7.zip


Feel free to look at them, and to download them if you would like. I will make every effort to keep them current, but, of course, the only official sheets are the ones distributed directly by Anchor House.

3 comments:

  1. Hey Jim, Brian the route designer here. The long forms have been changed to reflect last minute hotel tweaking on days 1 and 4. Also point to point mileages have been tweaked on all days to try and eliminate the odometer induced inaccuracies that always crop up as you near the finish hotel. You may wish to wait for the official quadrants to be distributed. While the type is smaller, each quadrant breaks on a SAG which keeps the "flip cue" events limited to when a rider is at a support stop as much as possible.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Continued....Nice job, though. I truly appreciate the amount of work you put into this.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'll download the sheets again and update them; I'll note when I post the changes. It takes about a day to do the updates. This is my first ride, and I didn't know when the final sheets would be up or how long it would take me to make these sheets (I ALWAYS overestimate the time such a job will take), and I wanted to be sure I had these, even if I had to edit them on the bus. I'll start going through the changes, and post updates as I do them (it took about a day to do all the sheets the first time; it will probably take less now that I've done it once).

    ReplyDelete