Originally Posted by
The Octopus
2. My take on PBP in '07 and '11 was that they simply were not enforcing the intermediary control times, period, at least for the 90-hour riders.
I missed the time at the next to last controle at PBP because I stopped and slept rather than fall off my bike. They just signed my card like nothing happened. I went back and looked at the official materials, and somewhere in there they say that there would be no analysis of your time at the controles because it's just too complicated. I had heard that they would forgive one missed controle, looking at the times I'm guessing it's more than that if you finish on time. The way they placed the second secret controle right after Loudiac, I hope they didn't pay any attention to the times there because they would catch a lot of people that slept late.
That experience really made me question how seriously we (seem to?) take intermediate controle times here in the U.S. I went on a 200k where there were constant 30mph headwinds with frequent 50mph gusts for the first half of the course. There were a couple of hours where I was lucky to go more than 5mph at nearly max effort. I missed a controle by 15 minutes. If that happened to me nowadays, I would just keep riding without even thinking twice about it.