Let me preface this rant by saying that I love CycleU. They perform a really great service for local riders and racers and provide invaluable coaching, training and skills classes. But... sometimes their customer service falls far short of what I think is reasonable to expect.

For about three years now they have had this indoor TT series. It's fantastic! The event is a 10 km CompuTrainer race and they have seven of these things lined up so when it's fully booked it's quite competitive to say the least. In the past when you finished a TT they would simply email you a spreadsheet of the results from the evening. This was super as you could compile your results as the year went on and also compare yourself to your friends, etc.

Then someone make a stink about privacy... I guess they thought someone else would get a competitive advantage or something if they saw all the results. When I heard this I was laughing. I mean I suppose it's feasible that this is true but c'mon; 99 percent of us here are just po-dunk local racers and I'll wager that there is not a thing anyone could do with this precious TT results knowledge that would affect the outcome of any local race. I guess I made a bit of a scene last year trying to argue FOR sending everyone's results to everyone but was shut down. Hard. "We take the privacy of our clients seriously" I was told.

So anyway, CycleU kowtowed to this user and started only sending me results for ME and not for anyone else. Now I had to email all my friends and share results the good old-fashioned way - by sending attachments. :(

After my first indoor TT this fall I was surprised that I got no results at all... When I inquired about this I was pointed to the CycleU blog and that results would be posted there. And guess what? everyone is listed!

Hello CycleU! Remember last year when you were all concerned about posting results from other people? Well now you are not only posting everyone's times but you are doing so in a format that is not very valuable to results geeks like me who want to track this kind of data and don't want to suffer through the manual data entry.

So my beef is:

1. I got no results.
2. I had to follow up to get my results.
3. The results are exactly what I wanted last year and could not get. Why the huge stink last year...?!
4. The format bites. You make me download an image? Argh...

Lastly - is there a link on the CycleU home page to their blog...? Only as of about today.

Why do people make stuff complicated? It's just an indoor TT and people want results. Sheesh. Why is it that so many bicycle industries are run by enthusiasts and not business people? I mean all the things CycleU does is great and these indoor TTs are great, where is that little bit of extra?