Thanks for the indepth description for how your team works. It seems like you guys cover the bases.

What about the role for a godfather type? ...Someone who is just around the periphery observing the overall tone -- and the particulars -- at races. Checking in on the various teammates, as you say, who are into that. Seems handy. Like the one coach has a metabolic monitoring focus. Seems like he might still be part of a bigger picture that a godfather type could keep the pulse of.

Then, at the risk of bursting it all at the seams (what it would feel like anyway) what about development? Recruiting, retainiing, building juniors -- whew! Organizational strength needs a guiding hand, too. Like, I remember getting awfully self-centered in my prime. Now, I tried to be a good teammate, but even a winning group focus can be myopic in terms of overall team health (and longevity). Basically, and maybe this is another topic, making sure teammates rotate through in organizational support roles seems good -- volunteering at events -- not trying to race everything the club puts on. Non-race task delegation. I suppose the club/team president might do this more than the coach.

Basically, it seems like a team of all/only racers is at risk in these ways. Although I suppose people can deal with infrastructure AND race.

***

Cool idea that our local team is doing: It seems like everyone bought two sets of the current outfits, with opposite color schemes. Either could be raced in, I suppose. But they did it for tactical training rides -- so half the riders would show up in whites and the other in "skins," making it easier to train for team action.

Another nifty tip that an old coach mentioned was the "gap calculator" for bridging or holding gaps. I've never heard of it before or since. I found one online reference to the idea, and it's a pretty good one, it's here in the archives at: http://www.bikeforums.net/archive/in.../t-562478.html. There has to be a simple method you can use while racing in that thread somewhere. It kinda looks like a rough estimating could be done using 1 foot per second per mph difference. However, that's conservative, in reality it's more like 1.5 feet per second. Using this you can figure that it takes 3.5 minutes to close a 100 yard gap going 26mph when those ahead are going 25mph. (The 1 second method gives you 5 minutes, so if you used it you'd only be pleasantly surprised! But maybe it's good to be conservative?) This method can be used to strategically sort out whether you can do what you'd like to with any particular gap if you have a sense of their speed / your speed and the approx gap distance. Fun! Now did everyone here already know this?