Endurance News/Newbies and Oldies

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From: Barb Peck 
Email: bpeck@us.ibm.com

All:
    First let me say this this lurker finds time to read EN, ride and lurk on RideCamp, as I suspect many do.
    Between the seasoned Oldies in Endurance and the Newbies are people like me, who rode LD on the un-organized rides in the 1970s (I've been on rides with Steve Rojek back then... not that he'd remember my name) but for what ever reason life-long competition just wasn't in the cards, even though the true "endurance addiction" always remained. (Wow, that's a run-on sentence).
     IMHO, I think what's happening is that the "icons" of the sport (namely the high milers) are looked upon as extremely knowledgable and experienced and full of wisdom.  I'm sure this is true, but I can tell you they came up thru the school of endurance hard knocks.  In the 70's we just didn't know (or have the equipment) that we have now. It was thru trial & error things were learned and bonds were made between a fairly small group of pioneers.
      Now there's a group of younger, enthusiastic, endurance riders that are "wired" into RideCamp. This is not a bad thing. Communication is a GREAT thing. And if good communication helps some younger riders avoid the mistakes
 an older rider made , then that's good.  Just because you're younger, or new to the sport, there's no reason you all have to come up the learning curve the way the pioneers did (and I don't mean that in any way to diminish their accomplishments).
       There's definately alot of high-tech stuff now, and 20 years ago there was no-tech. 

   Long Distance riding has been going on for a very long time.  Organized/sanctioned endurance riding is fairly young and growing, and hopefully will evolve with the times and be around for another 20 years (or more).
    
 Barb
PS. I hope this post isn't strung out in one long sentence-type thing.  I can't quite figure out how that's happening.