Firstly, wow am I glad that is over! Christopher and I (with a few bits and pieces of help from a few other people and some fantastic design work from Kurt) have been in turbo-mode for the last few months getting ready for this years FM24: FM.24.09. It's really been a year in the making from the moment FM.24.08 ended, when we debated doing FM24 a 5th time at all.

Crazy Logistics

This thing always starts to get cobbled together later than I would like which causes me more stress than is probably reasonable and likely does some harm to some of my relationships with some of my friends, but somehow it always works out in the end as all the details finally come together sometime around 11:30am on the Sunday of the event as riders finish their laps. Here's a few of the big things this year:

• Insurance! We actually got insured this year, just in case something went wrong. I worked with an Insurance company to tweak our waiver and put together an extremely detailed "Risk Management Document", and we were covered for several million dollars of possible oopses. This was the biggest line-item in our budget and thankfully we didn't need to make any claims.
• Christopher got a phone call from the City after several people called them asking for a copy of the "permit for our race". This led to e-mails back and forth with the city of Atlanta and to Christopher meeting with some people downtown to go over what we "should have done" and what we should do next year to make this event more legitimate. A copy of this email correspondence actually prevented ~20 cars from being towed on Sunday so that's a good thing. Assuming FM24 happens next year, we now know how to get all of the necessary permits.
• To avoid possibile problems during the event relating to the prior point, we switched our primary venue at the last minute from Jack's Pizza to Elliott St Deli and Pub. Thousands of printed postcards, hundreds of posters, and several websites all had the wrong information on them. Mike and Pete of Elliott St were a great help getting details ironed out for their location and we somehow got everyone to show up at the right place. Elliott St ended up being the perfect location for FM24 with ample parking and camping space, tons of great food, tons of beer, and no neighbors to complain about noise all night long!
• We wanted to encourage people other than serious racers to participate, so we put considerable effort into coming up with scavenger hunt style "missions" that got teams points. This also led to several other major things happening throughout FM24 that would usually be considered events by themselves (Sprint competitions, Trick competitions, Goldsprints, Bike Polo, Hill Sprints, etc) which all had to be scheduled and operated. Thankfully we had people to run most of these that did an excellent job, but the schedule wasn't complete until the day of FM24.
• Lastly, pre-registration was pretty quiet until the last day at which point ~150 people pre-registered bringing the grand total of people pre-registered to ~250. We were only planning on having 200 people participate, and this was a bit of a shock 3 days before FM24

The list could go on and on, but those are the big ones (that I know about). I don't know anything about finding checkpoints, prize sponsors, figuring out prizes, or any of that madness!

The Event

Early Saturday morning, I headed to Eliott St to set up the start/finish checkpoint and open up onsite registration. The spoke cards hadn't arrived, nor had the event packets with details about missions among other things, but people lined up to pay regardless. By 11:30am we had an additional 100+ people registered, bringing our total up over 350. Um, wow? Almost twice the size as last year. We no longer had to worry about breaking even if enough people bought t-shirts (they ended up completely selling out) and were able to do things like free breakfast for everyone. And most importantly, somehow everything worked out! Riders looped around the city for 24 hours completing laps and missions, and several fierce competitions developed. Eddie Odea fought to catch a team of two riders from South Carolina including David Hall; Jüggernaüt and DREADNOK were no longer battling with each other and instead were fighting against several teams from out of town and a team of local ringers that ended up getting first; Several teams fought very hard for points doing crazy things like bringing back a "photo of you with Jimmy Carter", bringing back a dead rat, and making it to an I-285 sign; and a lot of people simply tried to have the most fun. I was too busy dealing with some racetracker things (that I will explain below) and general organization to even take any photos this year, but here are some photos and videos to show a little view of what some of the festivities were like:

FM.24.09 Lap 1 from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

Faster Mustache 24 Hour Urban Bike Relay from Franco Roberts on Vimeo.

More photos, links, news stories, videos, etc, will all be linked from http://fastermustache.org/fm24/2009/ as we collect them. Now that it's over, it's pretty obvious that this was the best FM24 that there has ever been with a huge number of people having a good time. Several people have used the term "epic" and I think thats accurate. We had a few minor issues with the 2 portapoties overflowing (we were supposed to have 4) and people having to move cars to make space for tailgaters to park in paid lots Sunday morning, but those are the only two issues I know about which is not bad for an event of this scale. Volunteers showed up to direct (bike) traffic and man registration (Thanks Eric B!) and the tracking table, and the overall experience was smoother than expected. And oh yeah, there was the live metal show with two bands in the basement at Elliott St, multiple kegs of beer at multiple locations, and tons of sweet prizes given out. Over 1787 laps were ridden which is over 21444 miles. Crazy.

Racetracker

My primary contribution to FM.24 each year is the racetracker which lives at racetracker.fastermustache.org. This system serves to both record all the laps (via RFID card swipes by each team at each checkpoint) and to provide these results on a live updating website for participants and spectators. Each year it gets a healthy round of improvements that lead to more accurate reporting with less involvement from participants and people managing the tracking table. This year brought some big changes:

• flickr and twiter streams on the live tracking page - we had the racetracker up on a 50" TV at Elliott St for most of the event and the live results combined with the social network feeds were very well received
• the new bonus points system including admin and tracking for participants/visitors
• a rewritten admin UI using jQuery to replace the 2 year old and somewhat cumbersome YUI based one. While a lot better than years past (like in-page reloading of data for individual teams and laps without requiring reloading the entire page), there is still definitely room for improvement)
• a brand new lap-detection algorithm to prevent many of the manual adjustments required in the past and fix some severe performance issues as the number of RFID swipes climbed into the 10,000s
• New lap approval workflow - instead of requiring each team to come by the tracking table after each lap to "verify" it, an "accept" button shows up next to team names each time a lap is completed. If the time looks like a reasonable time, the person at the table just clicks "accept" and teams could come by at the end of the event and associate names with riders. Solo riders names are automatically associated with their laps.
• Vastly improved ways for teams to see where they stand up against other teams.

Seth was again responsible for the RFID hardware side of things and this year we went with laptops with wifi cards to simplify checkpoint installation, survive brief power outages, and simplify troubleshooting (no need to carry around a monitor and keyboard). The laptops worked great, but wifi ended up being an issue and the 3 wifi checkpoints dropped in and out during the race. Thankfully the new lap detection algorithm was alright with this, but it didn't work properly until each team had 2 laps in the system so the first few laps for each team required manual adjustment. More RFID cards died this year than last, but that might have simply been because there were twice as many in circulation.

While the new lap approval workflow saved a lot of people a lot of time, it also meant that some problems (like two laps being combined into one due to funky ordering of swipes that didn't make it over wifi, and dead RFID cards) weren't noticed immediately and required manual correction that only I was able to do, which meant that once again I only got about 4 hours of sleep and was constantly tinkering with the database. Only a few people got worked up about incorrect results in the racetracker, and with all the flaws, I still think it was a much smoother experience for everyone (including me) than years past.

Next Year

Are we going to do FM.24.10? Who is we? Will registration be capped at some number around 200, 400, higher, or open? It's really pretty tough to say at this point. Everyone talks about the things they're going to do next year at FM24 to do better, have more fun, etc, but the only people that have said anything about helping out next year are the few people that ran the show this year, and we've all talked about how there isn't really a reason to keep doing this. Thanks to the huge turnout this year, we'll each have a few hundred dollars in our pockets, but we're obviously not doing this for the money. I enjoy hacking on the racetracker each year (it's how I learned YUI and this year was the biggest jQuery project I've done) but there is a lot of pressure for things to work 100% and the budget (both time and money) for 100% correct software is a lot bigger than what I can squeeze in between work and riding bikes! Most weeks I get close to 200 miles of riding in and thanks to this bike event, the total for the last 6 day is right at 3 miles. Each year a few more people drop off the FM24 organization team, and at this point if one more person drops off, it's just not going to happen. Christopher and I are going to meet up on Thursday to close out finances for this year's event, and perhaps decisions will be made about next year.

If you want to see FM24 continue, now might be the time to consider what you're willing to put in to make it happen.

FM.24.09 is this weekend. 24 hours of bike related madness on the streets of atlanta. 24.fastermustache.org for the details.

It's that time of year again: In a few weeks, we at Faster Mustache are putting on our 4th annual 24 hour urban relay! Head on over to 24.fastermustache.org to pre-register to guarantee your spot, as this is the cycling event of the year in the south east, and the only event of it's kind in the world.

September 6th and 7th at Johnny's Pizza on North Highland. Take it easy on a 6 person team and just have a good time doing at least one lap a person (~10 miles or so), or go for the solo win which will take 300+ miles of riding! Trust me, the prizes are worth it!

Thanks everyone that came out to race or just to watch! FM.24.07 saw 201 racers on 59 teams do 900 laps which is over 13,000 miles! I didn't ride this year due to a slowly healing stress fracture in my leg, but this year I was responsible for the very cool lap tracking system:

FM Race Tracker

If you're running a race and need a tracking system, get in touch with me and we can work something out! It worked very well for us.

Look for the full race writeup on fastermustache.org soon, or just Google around for "FM.24.07".

Another year, another Faster Mustache 24 hour urban relay race. Check out 24.fastermustache.org for more information on the cycling event of the year! I took a bunch of pictures in 2006 and 2005, and will likely do so again this year. Ride bikes!

Last weekend was crazy and great except for being sick. Regardless, the Faster Mustache 24 hour relay worked out and everyone had a blast. I put up a summary of the event here and got all of my pictures uploaded to the FM.24.06 Photo Album. Due to my not feeling too hot I only did 3 laps, but they were all right around 38 minutes which was pretty above average (And fine with me for my first race on the track bike). I think every single one of the 175 riders had an awesome time from paul who went to the hospital with a wrist injury after a run in with a car and ended up playing drums at the show that night, to JP who got his bike back that was stolen months ago. Next year should be even better!

That's right kids. It's a relay: FM.24.06. (Kurt Rampton did the graphics and I put the site together.) Faster Mustache is putting on our second annual 24 hour urban relay. If you ride bikes at all (sometime in the last 5 years will do just fine) you should definitely check this out. Teams of 4 to 6 (or solo) compete against one another for completed laps around a ~10 mile course in downtown Atlanta for 24 hours. Each racer only has to complete at least one lap to be part of a team, and its a course that just about anyone can do. There will definitely be competitive teams and non-competitive teams. We're hoping to have at least 100 people on bikes at the event and it's a a Pizza place so theres pizza + beer + bikes and lots of people from noon on Saturday November 11th to noon on Sunday. Last year was big and a lot of fun and this year should be twice as amazing. I'll be on some sort of team riding the Nishiki like a maniac. Who wants in? You know you do. Theres prizes. And t-shirts. And pizza. And beer.

Also, Critical Mass is tomorrow! (Friday Sept. 29th) You should come!

So it's been over a month since the last update.  There's just too much going on, so this update is going to be short and brief and perhaps there will be more next time. So in no particular order:

• Competed in the Faster Mustache 24 Hour Urban Relay Race.  Did 6 laps totaling about 70 miles over a 24 hour period in the streets of Atlanta. Combined mileage for all competitors in the race was 3200 miles. More info at http://24.fastermustache.org/ and scattered around http://fastermustache.org/. I helped plan for the race a bit and was on one of two Faster Mustache teams.
• Competed in 24 Hours of Adrenalin at Conyers.  Did 4 laps totaling about 40 miles of biking on the mountain bike course from the Atlanta olympics.  Race results for our category at http://www.24hoursofadrenalin.com/raceResults/156/5_Person_Co-ed.html (team Faster Mustache)
• So apparently I'm into the 24 hour biking "Extreme Sport" now. Cool.
• the Faster Mustache website now has over 130 members and 5000 comments. I coded up a sweet maps module (http://fastermustache.org/map/destinations) as well as a "threads with unread" bit of code to make it easier for people to find stuff. 
• Got a new mountain bike to race in above mentioned 24 hour mountain bike race, also switched from toe clips to clip in pedals.  Its a 2005 Gary Fisher Cake 4 DLX. It's not on their site any more cause its 2006 now apparently but you can get the jist of it at http://www.jensonusa.com/store/product/BI603B08-Gary+Fisher+Cake+4+Dlx+Bike+05.aspx. I paid a bit less than that because it was end of season and Outback Bikes was clearing out Fishers.
• School continues to get closer to being done, the GRE is on wednesday, and I'm basically down to a big paper, the CS GRE, a piece of music for theory, and grad school application and recomendations.
• Went to Tampa with Laura for fall break and had a good time hiding away from work and school.
• Upgraded the photo gallery on here to Gallery 2, http://ckdake.com/gallery2/  Old urls will continue to work but this should be awesomer than Gallery 1.
• The new gallery website is up at http://gallery.sf.net/ and its super sweet.
• I'm biking to campus every day and loving it
• I'm really tired from all the biking and I'm about to go to sleep. More later.